Residues of Our Present
Collage emerged as a design practice during the late twentieth century as a vehicle for dissent, as a response to unstable disciplinary and political agendas within an emerging landscape of photomechanical reproduction. At the time, the appropriation of elements from heterogeneous domains relied on access to printed matter like magazines and found objects, combined with access to machinery that could reproduce and extract them from their original contexts. In place of these processes and with the putative passing of the age of mechanical production, we now copy and paste, clone, liquify, save as.
The focus of this essay is not to distinguish these digital collagists from their predecessors in design, for the gulf between digital and analogue collages has often been overstated. Instead, what I want to suggest, and as the exhibition’s title aims to show, is that the transference of collage from the rotogravure to Photoshop did not act to remove the most fundamental quality of the medium: its ability to unify diverse and decontextualised fragments, and in rearranging them to reinstate new meanings onto them. Moreso, the designers in question specifically reject the seamless and reality-bending potentials of new digital rendering software. Instead, they leave open the seams and hark back to the quality of analogue collages whereby differences in textures and perspectives are made explicit. By continuing this lineage of collage, Amanda Gayle, No-to-scale*, and Studio Karya’s works stake out a position of radical exceptionality in design and therefrom assure us of the potential to experience our present in other and ultimately more redeeming ways.
In Amanda Gayle’s work we see collage’s autobiographical impulse and its feeling towards experiment and invention. Collage, according to Daniel Kane, is ‘both the exterior experience one has of the world and an interior choice one makes to determine and shape one’s relationship to that world’.¹ This is true also for the manner in which Gayle puts collage to use: the premise is not to represent anything specifically, but to suggest that when faced with a situation whereby one is overloaded with the endless chance encounters of the modern experience that a productive response is to lean into it, destroy it, and make it anew.
Her works in this exhibition are like visual residues of her digital experiments on these variegations of the everyday. Take for example the layering of photographs of rockets and empty terrains in Stills 05/12 (2019) distorted with the marks of her wiping gestures. Clarity, precision, and communication - the hallmarks of graphic design - are replaced by the designer’s preference towards the serendipitous results of letting go to software and device. Likewise, she revels in the pure state of experimentation in Pyro (2019), layering the same image over a hundred times on Photoshop and seeing the pixels ‘get messed up’ to reveal new textures. In an interview with the designer, she offers a charming anecdote of her once having carefully organised several sheets of images and printouts on her floor, all of which were subsequently scrambled and left to the whims of her Roomba. The works displayed in this exhibition encapsulate these beautiful accidents of modern life, and our response can be to experience the impression of living in them and the spaces created between them.
No-to-scale*’s collages demonstrate an archivist’s impulse too, retrieving a hodgepodge of overt and covert political imagery such as the Statue of Liberty and Mies Van der Rohe’s collage for the Chicago Convention Hall to populate their compositions. Yet, the distinction between No-to-scale* and Gayle’s work lies in the tone with which they present their findings to us: while Gayle’s works deliberately leave us with irresolvable oppositions, No-to-scale* recombines these fragmented images in order to generate a message that is boldly visible and politically charged.
Architecture, to the studio’s founders Shamin Sahrum and Nur Nadhrah, can serve as a measure for this imagination. In particular, it is the practice of retrofitting models that inspired such an approach. Sahrum conjures a retrofitted model of a cyborg taxidermy animal he made during his student years as his basis. Here, a hand-size taxidermy kiwi is happily disfigured with wings from a drone which are punctured into its sides, as a schematic yet effective representation of a speculative taxidermy zoo in which extinct animals are reanimated to hover and zoom across visitors. The model is a brilliant encapsulation of two aspects of collage which are intrinsic to their practice: 1) the agile, journalistic sensibility it offers to respond quickly to its brief, and 2) its poking at and dismembering of history in the name of imagining an entirely new species of both being and thought.
This iconoclasm is productive; it aims to tackle contemporary issues of race and corruption, at times humourously and at others to evoke the blinding force of absence and loss, as in works like The Sun, the Room, the Sky (2021). In this abstract landscape consisting of two conjoining circles, images of workers carting bodies away in PPE equipment recede into their individual compartments. The transposed fragments and the haunting abyss of their imposed cells do more than just represent loss; they embody it, emphasising their existence somewhere else and our distance from it. Place this against works like Rights to the Table (2020) where the viewer is inundated with references across time and geographies from the historic Civil Rights movement to the toppling of Robert the Bruce’s statue in Stirling, as a statement of the enduring violences of anti-black racism and the shared yearning for equality coursing between historical movements. In these two works the versatility of the collage is brought to the forefront: through absence and profusion, the medium offers these designers the prospect of reconstructing a fractured society, and in some way to contribute towards a more inclusive, informed, and equal one.
If No-to-scale*’s collages are, in their extreme forms, reactionary comments on contemporary society, in the works of Studio Karya collage becomes an instrument for a learned and deep engagement with the theoretical foundations of the architectural discipline, and a tool for naming and reclaiming things. Here, ‘Architecture’ is treated primarily by the studio’s founders, Hazazi Hamzah and Ashran Bahari, as a site of critique, from which the architects aim to question the motivations behind the construction of form and, working backwards, how to remedy existing structures which have failed their inhabitants.
Working backwards is also a symptom of collage’s archaism, its suspicion of the value of novelty and innovation and in turn its approach to rework the readymade into message, or as Rosalind Krauss once suggested, the ‘setting up [of] discourse in place of presence’.² Along these lines, in an essay written in 2019 polemically titled Crafting Critical Intellectuals: The Great Discourse That Never Happened?, Studio Karya calls for a deeper and more critical engagement with architecture, stating that for the past 20 years Malaysian architectural discourse has suffered from a disproportionate focus on building and not thinking. Their accompanying series of workshops, lectures, and conferences, entitled Non School, which aims to ‘cultivate diversities in the discipline of architecture’, is another crucial aspect of their practice which opens up a wider understanding of their collages as a pedagogical medium. In that sense, their collages are not about aimless pluralism but are motivated by the goal to trigger a process of dialogue and research-driven reevaluation.
The architects demonstrate this investigative lens in their speculative project, Right to the Padang (2017), where they diagnose the various bureaucratic and political pitfalls which historically contributed towards Dataran Merdeka’s failed potential as a public space.³ In a bid to reclaim it, the architects envision a speculative insurgent space whereby trees are communally planted in rows across the field, thus symbolising a space of possibilities where the spirit of urban life can be cultivated. In the accompanying collages, the nostalgic quality of their black-and-white clippings of palm trees cloned underneath a red sky boldly assert a new frontier: ‘the Padang by the people for the people’. In Screen (2017), the architects employ the stylised spatial logic of Islamic illuminated manuscripts to represent the regeneration of an underused area in a private religious school in KL. The choice to reference an art form interested in the description of built structures through texture and striking design elements, rather than logical spatial relations, is deliberately evocative. What they draw out instead are the linear rhythms of their screens, the individual activities and functions of each demarcated space, and the movements of figures in and out of the flattened structure. The latter is perhaps most crucial to the success of this series: one can enjoy the experience of inhabiting the structure indoors and outdoors at the same time. In this way, the flattened collage offers a holistic consideration of the ways all aspects of the space can be used, and in turn the central role that architectural interventions play to delineate as well as open up passageways between human activity.
All this is to distill the essence of their practice, which is to demonstrate that the work of the architect is ideologically loaded and to think about architecture critically is also to understand the social and political consequences of making and occupying space. Towards this purpose, collage is seen here as the most effective tool in an architect’s arsenal to speculate alternatives to the discipline’s service to capital and to reclaim it for the public.
As for us, Copy / Paste / Displace is an open invitation to consider alternative ways of seeing and practicing, this time with the mandate to make it our own. In a world of excessive accumulation and diminishing attention, these designers break it down into parts and organise its residues into their most eloquent forms in our service. And within the spaces that they leave for us to fill, these collages are deliberately posed as the catalyst from which a wider process of understanding and reconciling the present is encouraged. These designs of our time are a welcome moment for reflection.
By Denise Lai
Denise Lai is an art and design historian based in Kuala Lumpur. Her research explores all forms of culture from the mid- twentieth century to the contemporary, with a particular interest in themes surrounding mythologies, alternative modernities, and history as a public practice. Denise has a BA in History of Art from the University of Oxford and recently completed her MA in History of Design at the V&A/Royal College of Art in London. When she’s not writing, she also explores body-based practices as a dancer and jewellery maker under her label Object Vitamin.
Works Cited
1 Daniel Kane, What is Poetry: Conversations with the American Avant-Garde (New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2003), p. 12.
2 Rosalind Krauss, ‘In the Name of Picasso’, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), pp. 23-41 (p. 38).
3 Studio Karya, The Padang: Right to the Padang, essay, 2017, http://www.studiokarya.com/#/padang/ (accessed 27 May 2021).
About the Artists
Amanda Gayle is a graphic designer who enjoys both analogue and digital image making processes, and engages in projects which reframe pre-existing ideas about the world. There is often an unplanned approach to her work which is heavily inspired by the human experience and her surroundings, providing new aesthetic freedom whilst celebrating complexity and imperfection in the process. Having completed her BA in Graphic Communication Design at Central Saint Martins, she is currently based back home in Kuala Lumpur where she runs a publishing house with two of her friends while pursuing her passion for designing posters.
No-to-scale*, led by Shamin Sahrum and Nur Nadhrah, acts as a design research platform for the exploration of forms of resistance through narratives. Both designers obtained a MArch RIBA Pt. 2 from the University of Greenwich, London, with interests in curating, object-art, and analog/digital fabrication. Works by NTS acts as a socio-political commentary to various issues addressed through works widely published in both electronic and print format. NTS is currently based in Kuala Lumpur & operates globally.
Studio Karya believes in architecture and design as a means of problem solving extending beyond style and trends in line with their notion of ‘Building Non-Buildings’. The studio’s projects range between ideological, typological and craft, where the essence and values of architecture can be captured the most without necessarily leading to a building as the end product. Studio Karya is led by Ashran Bahari & Hazazi Hamzah.