KIF2022 - COLLAGE / MONTAGE

is the subject of this year's openAIR exhibition "KUNST im FLUSS" on the banks of the rivers Urft and Olef, whose sudden swelling into a monstrous mass of water caused unimaginable devastation in Schleiden and Gemünd a year ago on the night of 14/15 July 2021 and also swept away our exhibition at the time. To this day, the sad consequences of the destructive flood are still visible in large parts of the Eifel and other regions of western Germany. Our "KunstForumEifel" in the centre of Gemuend was affected and remains so. It will probably not be able to reopen until the end of the year. Many wounds are still raw and far from healed. Many people lost their homes in the great catastrophe, and quite a few even their lives.

More than two years of Corona, the great flood of 2021 in western Germany, already four months of war in Ukraine - Europe needs to reinvent itself. To do so, the component parts of globalist madness must be disassembled and reassembled in the painful awareness of a growing Western neglect of prosperity. In the "Frenzied Standstill" (Paul Virilio) of global communication space, in the boundless flood of images and information, the human being in-between must become tangible, visible again - in a newly created reality outside the fourth dimension of the speed of light in the digitally networked world, where even the machinery of war has become disembodied and invisible, disappearing as "Cyber War" in the interstellar fog of sci-fi comics.

In this context, the questions raised by Kurt Schwitters concerning "Sense and Nonsense" in art must be reexamined. Against the madness of World War I, he celebrated the triumph of art over the (war) machine with the Berlin DADA circle in the early 1920s. "We laughed at everything. We laughed at ourselves, as we laughed at Kaiser, King and Fatherland, beer-belly and dummy ... only laughter guaranteed the seriousness with which we pursued our anti-art on the way to discovering ourselves." (Hans Richter) The Berlin DADA Fair of 1920 held up its distorted mirror to the questionable post-war society, Hannah Höch collaged, mounted and pasted her "Cut with a kitchen knife through the last Weimar beer-belly culture epoch" in 1919. But DADA disappeared from the public eye only a short time later. The tragic end of that period is well known.

As early as 1912, collage from the hands of the cubists of the time, Picasso and Braque, led to a radical change in the artistic understanding of the image. In contrast to the traditional panel painting and the created reality of an artistic genius, the focus was now on the visible process as a new principle of the artistic appropriation of reality - similar to the later statement of the American Robert Rauschenberg in the 1960s: "I don't want a picture to look like something it isn't, and I am of the opinion that a picture is more real if it is made of parts of the real world." For the artists of the early 20th century, this process of gluing and assembling everyday found objects, collaging and assembling images of reality set the tone and continues to this day. "You can also scream with rubbish scraps, and that's what I did by gluing and nailing together. I called it MERZ ... Everything was broken anyway, and it was a matter of building something new out of the broken pieces." (Kurt Schwitters)

Max Ernst's artistic revelation "Ce n'est pas la colle qui fait le collage" was retroactively confirmed in the 19th century in the naïve paintings of the "painting cleaning woman" Séraphine Louis, whose works in turn refer back to a 17th century glue works and the silhouettes of the then highly esteemed Johanna Koerten from Amsterdam. And glued paper collages with the "waka" verses of the poet Ise can already be found in 12th century Japan. Numerous other precursors existed in past centuries, but it was not until the beginning of the 20th century that these gluing and montage practices found their way into art in the cubist works of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso and remain an important component and means of expression of an artist’s creative view of reality to this day. On top of this, we now have the digital world and virtual reality of today. Space and time have been virtually abolished, just as central perspective was taken out of the modern artistic creative process at the beginning of the 20th century. Three-dimensional distance no longer plays a role in global interaction – except maybe for the super-rich who have themselves shot into orbit in order to celebrate and feel the buzz in their empty weightlessness.

Yet today you can be almost anywhere in the world in a fraction of a second, you can participate in world events in real time. And the exhibition is to be understood in this sense. I found the works shown here via the so-called social-media platform INSTAGRAM, where I got to know various collage artists in Europe and America and asked them to participate. With a small amount of time and work invested in this exhibition, we hope to have succeeded, if not in putting the genie of the flood disaster back in its bottle, at least in calming it with the artistic reality emanating from the many works gathered here on the riverbanks of Urft and Olef.

Jürgen A. Roder