The territorial role of the cut, fold and tear: the territorial in collage
Vivian, Paul (2013) The territorial role of the cut, fold and tear: the territorial in collage. In: Space and Place: 4th Global Conference, 9-12 September 2013, University of Oxford.
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Vilém Flusser describes a printed image as a "significant surface," a plane to be scanned and navigated, and enabling disclosure of meaning. This paper concerns the process of re-mapping the image via a haptic relationship of folding, cutting and tearing. The reading of a significant surface with territorial, divisive spatial actions.
Activating this haptic relationship we create interventions that provide a reconnection with the real as opposed to the space simulated within the image. Such simple gestures championed by Josef Albers during his Bauhaus teaching are in a sense representative of our basic need to impose upon the authority of an image, to dismantle its space and create a physical mark by which we can assume territorial presence and responsibility.
A cut, fold or tear creates a material border, intimating what Barthes, in Pleasure of the Text calls a site representative of a surface's obedience and simultaneously the scar of an actions aesthetic agitation.
These are spaces colonised by the hand. As Hito Steyerl points out 'discipline is the index of conflict' an epistemological and/or aesthetic innovation through the cut, the fold or tear is a means to destabilise an image’s imposed hierarchical authority.
For the perpetrator or coloniser this has become a newly acquired territory, for the receiver this requires new navigatory methods, unsettling the innate perceptual search for meaning and therefore disrupting signs. Like John Heartfield's 'dialectical problems of form', actions against the surface of an image are instigated to deliberately depose its order and to strategically breach the language of photographic reading, imposing a complex territorial dialogue between the real and representational.
Paper also online at: http://www.paulvivianstudio.com/aboutpaulvivian/
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