Resolution and conclusion are inherent in a plot-driven narrative.
Conventional fiction teaches the reader that life is a coherent, fathomable whole that concludes in neatly wrapped-up revelation. Life, though—standing on a street corner, channel surfing, trying to navigate the web or a declining relationship, hearing that a close friend died last night at us—flies at us in bright splinters.
Life does not have a “plot”. It is a collage.
Story/narrative seems to say that everything happens for a reason, and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.
I’m not interested in collage as the refuge of the compositionally disabled. I’m interested in collage as an evolution beyond narrative.
I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors-and-paste man.
If you grow up not with toys bought in the shop but things that are found around the farm, you do a sort of bricolage. Bits of string and wood. Making all sorts of things, like webs across the legs of a chair. And then you sit there, like the spider.
The main question collage artists face: you’ve found some interesting material—how do you go about arranging it?
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