How Does It Work?

Jonathan Lethem's "Always Crashing in the Same Car" really intrigued me. I got to the end and looked at the "-Bowie, Hawkes, Evenson, Calvino..." etc., and was like… um? The whole time I was trying to find where it was all cut up and mashed together, but it seemed to be rather seamless. I won’t say that it takes more creativity to do the whole collage thing, but I won’t say that it doesn't, either. But that’s just my unpopular opinion, I’m sure. It takes a serious amount of skill to be able to stitch so many authors, stories, whatever, together the way Lethem did and make it all make sense. He wove it all so naturally, even though they didn't necessarily belong, and now that I have seen what that looks like it is even more of a daunting task, particularly since I liked the story so much.

I also found “Cut and Paste” to be an interesting little article because it traced the evolution of the idea of collage, in a way. The question of whether collage is the new “visual language of the adolescent” is interesting. I think, in a lot of ways, it has. Websites like Picnik, for instance, lets people ALL OVER Myspace, Facebook, etc., go crazy editing their pictures and throwing them in albums. I see it all the time. Some of it, (most of it), is horrid and tacky. But, hey, they can do it. And that is their form of collage, I guess. On another note, I found Ross-Ho’s project, “Untitled Proximity Collages” to be particularly interesting because it takes images that would otherwise be unrelated and mashes them together to create a work that would, I assume, be beautiful. I would like to further investigate, of course. When I go to Google images and random things pop up for a word, I am always curious as to how some things are related, so the fact that someone took that on as a project is fascinating to me.