Page 14 - Cyberculture and New Media

Francisco J. Ricardo 5
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read through an obliviously formal lens is evident from the resolve with
which the word “flatness”, mentioned twenty-four times, characterizes it.
But by 1959, the year that the essay was last revised, collage’s initial
play with the newspaper cutout had expanded to include photographs, print
matter, and other kinds of graphic material, material whose innate textuality
presented just the opportunity that many artists had been awaiting: the literal
quality of words permuted visually into a new, hybridised message. So,
where Joan Miró had painted or drawn similar suggestively textual works and
otherwise merged text and image by illustrating the stanzas of Tristan Tzara,
René Char and other poets, the collagists had assembled theirs entirely from
pre-existing elements. No longer a form based on original composition,
collage was the first of many composite practices—something gradually less
framed but increasingly encoded. And when the photograph joins the textual
composition, the expressive language of the collage, now as photomontage,
becomes dimensionally expanded such that it becomes impossible to
overlook the sensory impact favoured by John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann,
and Hannah Höch. To evaluate flatness in their own collages, whose message
is transfused with stilted, often anti-propagandistic context, is to favour form
against its content and to ignore the essential utility of structure as
expression, a balance that defines postmodernism’s production of art and
meaning and returns us to the process of encoding as principle of industrial
objects’ translation out of culture and into cyberculture. For the composite
image produced by the collage is an enunciative literalisation, a recoding in a
different scope, of practice of the composite diagnostic profile which the
psychoanalyst merges out of disparate observations on the patient, and of the
evidence for social portraiture which the anthropologist adduces from
fieldnotes on the ethnographic stay, and which the social scientist correlates
from observational data. From the orderly fittings of modular architecture
down to the interlaced patterns of the crossword puzzle, nothing appears
created whole cloth; everything is instead assembled from prefabricated
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elements, programmed into a phrasal, composite whole .
Collage’s entrance into authentic practice, just one of the theoretical
inversions that recodes the previously autonomous state of art into something
indistinguishably embraced with its mechanism, typifies developments
predating but advancing toward the concerns of contemporary art, art in
which what divides medium from content no longer matters. This is the blur
maintaining that the logic of judgment informing the first half of the previous
century can plausibly read in reverse today; Greenberg’s ideas on kitsch, at
the level of content, re-evolve as today’s avant-garde at the level of
technology. Here, encoded technologically, is what could pass for a cursory
account of the typical simulation programmed in virtual game space: