Collage.
This was one of my grandmother’s favorite words.
Out of the blue, she’d say, “Linnie, there’s a word I’ve come across and I’m not sure what it means. Collage. Do you know this word?”
I’d go on to say that it was a collection of seemingly unrelated objects.
Sometimes, she’d tell me that she’d looked the word up in her dictionary. We’d ponder the word together, I always wondering (but never asking her) just where she had come across what to her was an unusual word.
With that word lodged somewhere in my consciousness, I was beyond delighted when I heard John Edgar Wideman give a talk on collage at Iowa State University’s NonfictioNow conference in November. Throughout the talk, Wideman projected an image of a Romare Bearden painting, Farewell Eugene, a collage based on Bearden’s boyhood experiences in Pittsburgh. Farewell, Eugene pays homage to Bearden’s friend, Eugene, who introduced him to the drawings he’d made of his mother’s brothel.
As Wideman indicated in his talk and as he has made clear in numerous publications and interviews, Bearden is one of his “aesthetic heroes” – particularly because of his interest in collage. Indeed, one of Bearden’s collages graces the cover of Wideman’s 1981 collection of short stories, Damballah.
In a 2008 interview with Open Source at Brown University (where he teaches), Wideman describes his debt to Bearden this way:
His main mode or form was collage. And certainly collage is a very suggestive art form, because it means you take bits and pieces from every damn thing and start throwing them together, and if you do it in the right way, maybe something new is created. Maybe the parts become greater than the whole, and whole greater than the parts, and suddenly you’re in the presence of something new.
Wideman’s NonfictioNow talk was in the form of collage – bits and pieces of Bearden’s life mixed with Wideman’s own reflections about his mother and with excerpts from his 2008 novel Fanon. He quoted from Fanon:
Romare Bearden’s collages remind me of how my mother, another one of my idols – a life-saver like Fanon – talks. Her stories fatten and flatten perspective. She crams everything, everyone, everywhere into the present, into words that flow, intimate and immediate as the images of a Bearden painting.
While Wideman talked, I scribbled – words and images that make up the Hodiamont collage I am creating. When I returned home from the conference, I looked up my grandmother’s favorite word in my favorite dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary. Here’s what I found:
col·lage (k -läzh , k -)
n.
1.
a. An artistic composition of materials and objects pasted over a surface, often with unifying lines and color.
b. A work, such as a literary piece, composed of both borrowed and original material.
2. The art of creating such compositions.
3. An assemblage of diverse elements: a collage of conflicting memories.
v. col·laged, col·lag·ing, col·lages
v.tr.
To paste (diverse materials) over a surface, thereby creating an artistic product.
v.intr.
To create such an artistic product.
So this is what I’m doing, Grandma: I’m creating a collage of all things Wellston, all things Hodiamont. My blog is such a collage – an assemblage of diverse elements, a work featuring both original and borrowed material (always with attribution, of course!). And let’s hope there are “unifying lines and color” – something that holds it all together. I hope that you, like me, look forward to seeing the picture that emerges!
Tags: Collage, John Edgar Wideman, Romare Bearden