The future of collage

Pavel Zoubok curates the visual portfolio in the new Paris Review, and is interviewed on the PR blog. Zoubok also curates a gallery devoted near-exclusively to collage, and so it’s unsurprising that the interview circles around the present and future of collage work, in both the visual arts and literature:

There is such a rich tradition of poets making collages: for example, the French poet Jacques Prevert and the Czech collagist Jiri Kolar, who started his career as a poet and actually considered his collage works to be poetry—just visual poetry as opposed to the written word. I think also of somebody like John Ashbery, a longtime collagist, and of course Joe Brainard.

Zoubok hazards to guess that the reason for collage’s resurgence in popularity is the form of the internet itself, which allows us (if not forces us) to read in a collaged way:

I think there are several reasons, but on the whole, culture has become increasingly collagelike, thanks largely to the Internet. The idea of thinking in layers and seeing in layers has become common currency. Some of it also is about a kind of increased appreciation for paper and works on paper in general and drawing; I think collage, at least in the context of the art world, has ridden the works-on-paper wave for the past several years.