Bricolage? Accidental Collage?

Two exhibitions: Paulina Olowska at the Tramway, 2010 and Toby Patterson at the Fruitmarket, 2010; the chance pairing of images to make new worlds, the Chance pairing of two artists, totally unrelated, united by the medium of disparity. Is this chance? A subconscious reaction?

“It was not until the early 1960s, with the formation of the Italian movement Arte Povera, that bricolage took on a political aspect and it was used by artists to bypass the commercialism of the art world. Arte Povera artists constructed sculptures out of rubbish in an attempt to devalue the art object and assert the value of the ordinary and everyday.”

www.tate.org.uk

Now the word has a new significance, having been brought into information technological terminology since the 1995 book Life on Screen by Sherrie Turkle. Bricolage (or accidental collage) is having a renaissance! Olowska’s collages seemed visually a stark contrast to the accompanying Tramway exhibition – Make it New John by Duncan Campbell. This film, half artsy video-essay, half docudrama perhaps had more in common with Olowska’s accidental collages than I initially thought (or saw).

Toby Patterson’s exhibition too, Consensus and Collapse, layered itself around its audience, a web that you slowly and laboriously work your way round trying to separate one image from another. Standing in his Perspex maze gave the uncanny experience of being ejected into some kind of early nineties videogame. Perhaps the collage, the bricolage, the pairing of the seemingly disparate is the result of an information overload. It is now impossibly to trace a history, a vertical lineage. Links emerge through a communal incongruity instead.