On Collage — Exhibition Guide
Collage was used by the radical architects of the 1960s and 70s both as a tool for proposition and critique. Groups like Superstudio and Archigram cut up magazines and reassembled dislocated things and figures into drawings. In part, their ideas needed collage in order to work; print culture provided them with material, and collage enabled them to physically engage with the very substance of mass media. Choosing, cutting-up, and reassembling images allowed these architects, just as Pop Artists had shown, to work in dialogue with popular culture in variously groovy surrealist, or provocative ways.
For us, marinated in digital images, this notion of mass media might seem quaint. So too the laborious process of scouring magazines for the right image, and the scalpel and Cow Gum skills required. We swim in a world of images, most of them coming to us already out of context. With tools like Google Images and Photoshop, we can find things and process them instantly. We have AI images, which are, in some ways, a form of collage—all of visual history is sliced-up into pixel-sized pieces and reassembled in new forms. It’s both all too much and all too easy. – Sam Jacob
This informal, one-day exhibition concludes a series of events organised by Drawing Matter with the architect Sam Jacob. On Friday, Sam gave a talk on his personal interests in collage, weaving a narrative from Richard Hamilton’s ‘Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?’ (1956) and Linder’s cover for the Buzzcocks’ single ‘Orgasm Addict’ (1977) through to his projects with FAT (Fashion, Architecture, Taste) and his uses of collage as a tool for Sam Jacob Studio’s research and design. A selection of slides from the talk are pinned up on the wall panels; a recording will be published on Drawing Matter’s website in the coming weeks.
On Saturday, Sam led a workshop using reproductions of newspaper and magazine cuttings from Superstudio’s collage chest, which was used by the radical architects from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s and is now part of Drawing Matter’s collection. During the workshop, participants were invited to cut-up and compose their own collages, in the process inhabiting the media landscape that Superstudio were co-opting and contesting, and bringing their own narratives and creative interpretations to the material. The collages made during the workshop are presented on the four tables in the middle of the archive along with works by Sam lent for the exhibition.
On the wall panels and plan chest tops are a selection of collages from the Drawing Matter collection, which show the manifold ways that collage has been used by architects, designers and artists as a tool to express and generate ideas. Spanning from the 1920s to the 2010s, the selection brings together fantastical and rhetorical propositions—both unbuilt and unbuildable—with more realisable projects.
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Captions for objects from the Drawing Matter Collection (identifiable from the white labels on the sleeves)
Copper plan chest
1077
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, competition project for Alexanderplatz, 1928.
1088
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, German Building Exposition, 1931.
1295
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Glass Skyscraper model, 1922.
Drawing Matter Collection Guide: Mies Van der Rohe
2365
This is Tomorrow, Whitechapel Gallery of Art exhibition catalogue, 1956.
2848
Hans Hollein, Monument for Ettore Bugatti, 1969.
2966.3
Roger Katan, Francoise Choay, Anton Beeke, Planning With The People – People’s Planning Advocacy in East Harlem for Forum Vol. 23, number 4, 1972–6.
3109
Asger Jorn, The Naked City, in Pour La Forme, 1958.
Read more
3316
Hans Hollein, Work and Behaviour—Life and Death—Daily Situations, 1972. Catalogue for the Austrian exhibition at the XXXVI Venice Biennale.
3316.1
Hans Hollein, Everything is Architecture: An Exhibition on the Theme of Death, 1970. (Catalogue)
Poster by Sam Jacob: AN I oA Chronoscape.
Orange plan chest
2141
Pages from Adolfo Natalini’s sketchbook no.12, 1969–70.
2350.1–2
Superstudio, Continuous Monument Tiananmen Square, 1969/2015.
2351
Superstudio, Continuous Monument Sul Lago, 1969/2015.
2930
Superstudio, The Continuous Monument (Venice as a field of maize), 1971.
3151.5
OMA, Exdous or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, 1972.
3108
Superstudio, New Sacred Kaaba, Mecca, 1969.
Zinc plan chest
1082
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, Neue Stadt (buildings by Walter Gropius, Walter Meyer and Mies), 1923.
Read more
1489
Jiří Kolář, Crumplage (Royal Courts of Justice, London), 1971.
Illustrated London News.
2367
Walter Pichler, Underground City with moving core, 1963.
2781.1
James Gowan, Trafalgar Road, Greenwich, Reimagined, after 1968.
3189
Archigram, Amazing Archigram 4: ‘Zoom’, 1964.
3916
Mark West, Haunted Venice, 1981.
Read more
Sam Jacob, Disappear Here
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Wall panels (from left to right)
3559.3
Zaha Hadid, Irish Prime Minister’s Residence sketchbook study, 1979.
Interpretation of the Babylonian Map of the World by Sam Jacob Studio.
2085
Ugo La Pietra, Holy and Domestic Landscape (design for contribution to Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, MoMA NY), 1972.
2172
Richard Hamilton, A Postal Card for Mother, 1968.
1978, 1982, 1983
Haus Rucker, ‘Cover’ installation project, Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany, 1971.
3072 (3 collages)
Traumnovelle, Ode to Joy, 2016.
Ian Hamilton Finlay & George Oliver, Arcadia, 1973
3858.2
Lars Lerup and Antonio Lao, ‘Iron duck’, 1987
Read more
3477
Mário Ramos and Fernando Barroso, Insurrectional Organization of Space, 1975.
Read more
3407.1 & 3407.2
Eva Jiricna, Designs for Asprey’s Jewellers, Old Bond Street, London, c.1970.
2126.7 & 2126.5
Zünd Up, Erotic Architecture, 1969.
Read more
2907
Rex Savidge, Entrance vestibule to civic building, Newcastle, 1957.
2156
Superstudio, Flooding the city of Graz with dry ice, 1971.
2903
Superstudio, The Continuous Monument: Niagara Falls, 1970.
2166
Superstudio, La Spezia School competition entry, 1968.
2937
Superstudio, The Continuous Monument: New New York, 1969.
2141
Pages from Adolfo Natalini’s sketchbook no.12, 1969–70.
Brick walls
2302
Guy Debord, Guide Psychogeographique de Paris: Discours sur les Passions de l’Amour, 1957.
Read more
2975
Robert Smithson, My House is a Decayed House, 1962.
Read more
3371
Alison and Peter Smithson, Urban Re-identification Project, Golden Lane Housing Competition, 1951-2.
Links for objects by Sam Jacob Studio (on centre tables)
