Collage Culture: Examining the 21st Century’s Identity Crisis
The Brooklyn Rail, Artbooks in Review: Collage Culture: Examining the 21st Century’s Identity Crisis, by Aaron Rose, Mandy Kahn, and Brian Roettinger (JRP|Ringier)
https://brooklynrail.org/2012/03/art_books/collage-culture
The overture of Wim Wenders’s 1989 documentary Notebook on Cities and Clothesis accompanied by the director’s voiceover on the concept of identity:
The word itself gives me shivers. It rings of calm, comfort, contentedness. What is it, identity? To know where you belong? To know your self worth? To know who you are? How do you recognize identity?
The film surveys the ubiquity of the electronic and digital image, and particularly how it has changed how people define themselves. Two decades later, authors Aaron Rose and Mandy Kahn explore the same relationship in their study of the aughts, Collage Culture: Examining the 21st Century’s Identity Crisis.
Comprised of two essays by the authors and a section of computer-generated collages by designer Brian Roettinger, Collage Culture focuses on the prevalence of appropriation in today’s cultural landscape in everything from musical composition to interior decoration, and makes the claim that artistic production is overly, and wrongly, concerned with extracting material from the past. According to the authors, our culture is now a patchwork of the “already extant,” and therefore our era’s identity is at stake since nothing is original. While part of their claim is legitimate, it is hard to accept that such thinking is enough to warrant an “identity crisis.” What Wenders understands about the concept of identity, Rose and Kahn do not: Identity is always a composite. He suggests that such a construct is even false, or at least deceptive, when it comes to reality, since it does not denote the truth of something, but merely what we imagine to be the truth. Such ontological concerns oddly do not come under scrutiny in Collage Culture.
