Collage has a powerful feminist history. From its earliest Dada moments through the formulation of “femmage” in Melissa Meyer and Miriam Schapiro’s groundbreaking text Waste Not Want Not: An Inquiry into What Women Saved and Assembled - FEMMAGE  (1977-78) to contemporary mash-ups, its use has enabled forceful reappraisals and critiques of artistic traditions and hierarchies, as well as a hidden history of feminist production. There have always been plural feminisms. How might this plurality, which mobilizes an open-ended set of questions rather than a set of answers, inform contemporary practice? Contemporary collage-based practice extends from purely material works to artists’ use of collage strategies for creative self-fashioning, to inhabit different personae and to assemble identities. This radicalized and strategic collage performance literalizes the concept of gender construction; artists use the constructed form that is collage to question the fixity not just of the image but of identity. This panel will explore the feminist arc of such contemporary collage practice.

The ICC has invited three artists who have made and continue to make significant contributions to this area: Colette, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and K8-Hardy, each of whom has developed a complex practice interrogating the traditional understanding of gender in multiple collage-based mediums, including the development of artistic personae. This panel invites these three trailblazers of the contemporary vanguard to consider collage’s impact on gender theory, and how this informed their own unique artistic responses. They will also be asked to consider the evolution in the understanding of gender and identity in the global, hybrid, technology-driven twenty-first century. The panel will be moderated by art historian and critic Judith Rodenbeck, whose work on questions of performance in visual and time-based arts approaches scholarship itself as a mode of cultural collage.

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