The Four Elements

A “collage essay” in four parts, eventually to be published in a limited edition artist’s book.

Here I returned to an approach I’d used before (“Drunkwort & Phosphorous”) where images and text are presented in loose, choreographed conversation with one another. From its papier collé origins collage has often been a process of overlapping and conjoining unlike materials. But with this series the negative space between components is as important as the images; these are idea clouds more than fragments juxtaposed for ironic or surreal effect. They’re intentionally diagrammatic, even if the diagrams can’t be “read” in any conventional linear manner. They’re more in the tradition of Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas than, say, Ernst. That the source material rarely overlaps might, for some, even beg the question of whether or not these ought to be called collages.

When I began the “Air” section I wasn’t aware it was going to be titled “Air” or that it would be part of a series. When I noticed I’d incorporated in each image a piece from airline safety brochures I’ve collected over the years, the theme of “air” presented itself, which then led me to the organizational trope of the four elements. (I’ve always found those brochures to be fascinating documents, absurdist and anxiety-inducing rebuses on how to pretend not to die when your plane is smashing into the ocean.)

Each image in “Fire” contains a tiny matchbook cover. This to me is the more cryptic of the four sections. With “earth” the rules became more specific, as each composition had to have an old sepia photo, a trilobite, an image of a cave or doorway, a sphere or circle, and a bit of illustration depicting the age of dinosaurs. “Water,” the last of the four, is admittedly didactic: in each piece an image of a lost civilization (here, Pompei), blue acetate invoking rising waters, counterbalanced by netting, flotsam, and bits of safety rope.

I refer to this as an “essay” partly because I do intend the pieces to cohere, more or less, and for some echo of an expository impulse to float in the background. But it’s more essai a la Montaigne than, say, any academic essay with the obligatory topic sentence or research question. (I’ve always pushed back against academic culture where students, year after year after year, are slavishly forced to manufacture formulaic pseudo-arguments in the most unimaginative ways. All those countless hours of labor going into the making of essays that students don’t want to write and professors don’t want to read. Essais all the way, in other words, for me.)