The Transfiguration of the Ordinary: From Bus Ticket to Cathedral

In memory of Jannis Kounellis.

In preparing to write this short piece, the thought of a bus ticket kept coming into my mind. I believe that I have now tracked this elusive image down, and it launches a sequence that comes to rest eventually with the work of Jannis Kounellis, who died early in 2018.

I believe that my starting point was a lecture delivered to the Society of Arts at Cambridge in the winter term of 1962/3. We had invited the publisher of the Gaberbocchus Press, Stefan Themerson, to come and lecture on the subject of Kurt Schwitters. I already possessed a precious copy of his book, Kurt Schwitters in England, which had been published by Gaberbocchus in 1958 and ranks as one of the most adventurous examples of book design in the period. The book includes an illustration of the Christmas card that Schwitters sent to Themerson in 1944, with a green scrap of greetings in Schwitters’ hand appropriately pasted in. It also includes a photograph of the “Air and Wire Sculpture,” derived from a scrap picked up on a bomb site, which Schwitters worked up during a lecture at the French Institute and presented to Themerson.

Themerson brought the sculpture and some examples of collage by Schwitters, to enliven his lecture. He spoke of how this artistic practice arose in the aftermath of the First World War, when the German artist George Grosz inserted scraps of everyday refuse into his pictures:

A bus ticket, a bank-note, a bit of newspaper, were stuck to the collage not only because of the formal, aesthetic values they possessed, but, and primarily, in their own right, as perforated bus-tickets, devaluated bank notes, and outdated tatters of small ads…. Kurt Schwitters was called the master of collage. He was the master of collage. The heresy of giving a new value to odd and overlooked, downtrodden bits of reality—be they bits of wire or bits of words—by putting them together in some specific kind of relationship and creating a new entity was … the essence of Schwitters’ art.

A decade after I had tentatively handled the collages of Schwitters, I was confronted with a new form of collage in the work of a young American artist, Stephen Edlich. To understand how collage still presented both a challenge and an opportunity, I distinguished between some contemporary practices of the European avant-garde and an American interpretation signalled specifically by Robert Motherwell:

Certainly the use of collage in what might be seen as an authentically Dadaist tradition has not disappeared completely in the recent decades. It has indeed been renewed to some extent by theatrical gestures like the table-top assemblages of Daniel Spoerri, which fix the various heterogeneous elements of a domestic milieu in a notional imperishability—though unfortunately nothing can preserve the freshness of an aesthetic experience, and these works are perhaps more than usually subject to the contamination of banality. In this connection, the recent collages and collage prints of the artist and chronicler of the Dada movement, Robert Motherwell, serve as an object lesson. When Motherwell uses a cigarette packet, or the label from a wine bottle (almost inevitably of a Premier Grand Cru) he clearly jettisons the delicate subversion of Schwitters without resorting to the melodrama of Spoerri and the Fluxus group. The connotations of the collage element employed in the composition offer the same hints of graciousness, the same intimations of casual evidence, that they are designed to carry out on the plastic level. It is not as an index of waste or consumption that the fragment must be interpreted, but as a hint of the exotic that seems to have arrived as casually and as gracefully as a stray leaf.

The reader may conclude at this stage of my short essay that it is itself an exercise in collage, though such long quotations do not possess the patina of age and would require the bonus of illustration to carry a full forcefulness. But my quotations almost cease here, with the exception of a single quotation that is crucial since it suggests...