I never thought much about how collages might operate in a book context other than in a catalogue. The closest I can think of would be Jindřich Štyrský‘s Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream (I have a copy of this most recent reprint; you can access a pdf of the 1997 reprint here). But even there, while it is an artist’s book, it still does not stray very far from what a catalogue might do (except, perhaps, omit the inevitable curator essays).
There also is Hannah Höch’s Life Portrait. But that’s also not quite it, because the book presents a single large collage in smaller sections.
So what might a collage monograph look like? A possible answer has arrived in the form of James Gallagher‘s Wild Flowers: a large-scale collage itself. The book combined the collages from Gallagher’s series Desire with illustrations from the 1919 book Wild Flowers Worth Knowing.
In very broad terms, Wild Flowers covers some of the same territory Štyrský operated in. Both artists use photographs from pornographic source (Gallagher adds in some other material that, given the juxtapositions, comes across as such). Whereas the Czech surrealist used contemporary imagery, though, the American collage artist relies on older material.
We can’t fully comprehend how Štyrský’s somewhat surrealist collages might have impacted viewers around the time they were made. In retrospect, they do come across as a bit too on the nose in a somewhat vulgar Freudian sense (which, perhaps, is an unfair assessment).
In any case, Gallagher’s work with the human figures in his source material differs from Štyrský’s in that the contemporary collage artist introduces a very different type of surrealism. His bodies end up being cut strategically in places that manage to interrupt their pornographic aspects, to leave behind merely the underlying idea: effectively, he pulls the plug on any eroticism that might be had (or most of it anyway).
After all, ours is a very different world than the one Štyrský inhabited. Photographic depictions of nude bodies have become a lot more easy to come by (these days, in rather perverted ways: Elon Musk’s “AI” will turn any image you feed it into pornography).
In addition, the female body has become an essential item in our hypercapitalist world. Capitalism relies on equating the naked female body with sex (or rather the promise of it). It currently is simply impossible to think of advertizing without partly clothed or fully unclothed female bodies.
(It’s not difficult to imagine that Štyrský, were he to return from the dead, would view today’s advertizing as a surrealist’s fever dream.)
For an artist the challenge of working with erotic imagery is the fact that for a viewer there is always that one, big outcome, namely that they become at least somewhat aroused. Of course, there is nothing particularly wrong with that per se. But good art lives not only from not offering easy outcomes so easily but also from offering a variety of possibilities.
As an aside, this is the same challenge faced by photographers who for whatever reason want to take pictures of the nude figure: unless you are actually a pornographer, you don’t necessarily want to enter that territory. At the same time, if you try too hard to avoid it, things become awkward themselves (there’s nothing worse than art where a viewer can see how the artist tried too hard).
With Desire, Gallagher mostly avoids hitting one of the extremes through the distortions introduced by strategic cutting of the human figures. You would imagine that mixing in images of flowers would be too obvious. But much to my surprise, Wild Flowers works very well. There are a few collages that seem too one-dimensional, but the majority of them is not.
The book pulls a few production tricks, such as using different paper stocks for the different imagery; and there is the occasional gatefold as well. In addition, the paper choices (according to the colophon there are five different ones) evoke some of the raw imagery used for the backgrounds of many of the collages: pages from old books.
All of this combines into a lovely little production that might demonstrate how far an artist working with photographic imagery around nudity can go.
The reality might simply be that given its very nature, photography simply doesn’t contain enough artifice for nudes to reach the artistic value of other types of photography.
Through the interventions with scissors and glue, Gallagher creates just enough additional visual artifice for things to become interesting. In addition, Départ Pour l’Image (the publisher) have added the right amount of supplementary material to transcend the format of the catalogue.
Wild Flowers; collages by James Gallagher; 108 pages; Départ Pour l’Image; 2025
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