Teaching Collage as an Art Form and Social Commentary.

In the 20th Century collage became a powerful force for social commentary and protest. A progression can be seen in the use of collage beginning with the Dada movement, through Puck and into Hip-Hop.

Dada as art is an form of protest, during and after the First World War, the artists of Dada subverted the culture of their societies by adopting the images and recombining them in subversive collages.
Images meant to convey socially approved ideas were removed from their context and recombined with various disparate images in a new context to convey ideas at radical
See the work of John Heartfield, a German artist active in the 1930’s whose use of collage attempted to undermine the propaganda of the Nazis. Heartfield’s work combined images from the First World War, Imperial Germany and the militarist images of the Nazi party in work that critiqued the propaganda then beating the drums for war. So disillusioned was Heartfield that he changed his name from Herzfeld to the English translation as a protest against German nationalism.
Punk continued with themes from Dada with the use of visual collage through mail art, ransom-note typography and rubber stamp art. Much of the art so used was adopted from traditional and folk traditions; much was expropriated directly from Dada and the Surrealist movement. This delight in and affection for traditional and aboriginal art morphed, for Punk, into a passion for tattoos and body piercing. Ultimately this Punk passion for body art went mainstream and today’s college campuses are filled with images from Maori, Japanese and African traditions permanently on display in skin-art.

One of the organizing philosophies of Hip-Hop is to create collages for the same purposes as was done in Punk and Dada, drawing out of popular culture snippets of popular culture and recombining into collages intended to undermine the original ideas conveyed by these pieces. Instead of images, Hip-Hop appropriates auditory segments from advertising jingles and popular songs and integrates these segments into “Rap” music with the intention of subverting the original music. The music a Rap artist appropriates is often seen as hypocritical and commercial, used to sell products or used as a cover of social injustice. Thus this music is seen as fair game and available to the artists to subvert for a contrary and socially critical message as was John Heartfield’s use of the nationalistic and militarists images of Nazi Germany.

While for the visual art teacher, collages in the musically world of Hip-Hop are not appropriate for a visual oriented project, it is important both for the art teacher to understand the philosophical underpinning of Hip-Hop but to communicate this to students who, while listening to Rap music, may not have an understanding of the history of collage as an art form or a means of social commentary and protest. Or of the relationship of the musically collages imbedded in Rap songs with the traditions of Dada and Punk in using visual collages.

I suggest that, for the visual arts instructor, a discussion of collage, beginning with Rap music and tattoo art, can be used as a segue into a discussion of the art of Dada and Surrealism and a bridge to having the students create their own collage projects.

Read our October essay: The Place of the Body in Education
Read our September essay: The Ways Artists Support Themselves
Read our August essay: Why students should copy the great works
Read our July essay: Hidden Clues in Works of Art
Read our June essay: The Mathematics of Art
Read our May essay: The Importance of School Art Competitions
Read our January essay : Art History and the Internet
Read our March essay: Ink Jet Printers and the Color Wheel:
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