A fews years ago, while preparing an essay on Attila Richard Lukacs and Michael Morris's collaborative Polaroid project, I spoke with Attila about collage and he told me how, in the early 1980s, he, Angela Grossmann and Derek Root would make collages together -- never for the sake of making them, but towards the making of their paintings.
Recently, when asked by someone younger than myself about the early 1980s, and what, exactly, happened in those years, I recalled what Attila told me, and how this idea of collage acting in advance of something other than itself seemed like such an early 1980s thing.
As I related this to my friend, I was reminded of the scene in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), where an exuberant young rock star named Dusty is brought to the studio of the older and more distant Frederick to purchase art for his new East Hampton mansion. When Dusty asks what Frederick might have for sale, Frederick uncomfortably mentions some small drawings, at which point Dusty asks for something bigger, brasher, more colourful, and of course the inevitable meltdown.
The image atop this post is a book I have hung onto for a number of years. I keep thinking I will make from it some collages, like I used to do every Easter when I made cards and sent them to relatives on my father's mother's side of the family for whom Easter was, as my babushka always told me, "bigger than Christmas." But these people are dead now, and I have little room in my life for books I keep meaning to get to.
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