VS 590SEM - Theories of Montage

“Since the early twentieth century, montage ¿ the practice of creating new images by cutting and pasting images from photographs, postcards, magazines and newspapers ¿ has been promulgated as a privileged medium of representation in the context of modernity. This has been the case not only in avant-garde art but also in advertising, film, and even, as best exemplified by the work of Walter Benjamin, in the writing of history and philosophy. Crossing borders between mass culture and traditions of the avant-garde, recontextualizing the objects of everyday life and making the familiar strange, montage challenges its viewers to make meaning out of a disjunctive array of visual fragments. Photomontage can be understood as a materialization of trauma and psychic shock related to the experiences of war, or as an ironic tool of political rebellion; in its capacity to create plausible visual fictions, montage has also been the medium of advertisers and propagandists. This course sets out to examine historical approaches to the theorizing of montage and the more recent, broad-based reconsideration of the place of this once marginal form in the history of twentieth-century and contemporary art. The course is structured around a series of key historical periods and art movements in which the iconography of fragmentation came to play a crucial role and for which theories of montage enable a deeper understanding. Seminar meetings will focus on such topics as the rise of Modernism in France, photographic archives and albums, the transnational origin of the cinema, Soviet film and Russian constructivism, Berlin Dada, the Bauhaus, Surrealism and Pop art. We will explore a number of interpretive approaches to montage in the visual arts and film including psychoanalysis, the work of theorists in the circle of Germany¿s so-called Frankfurt School, semiotics, issues in gender and sexuality, and interpretations of the relationships between war trauma and revolution and visual production. “

Credits: 3