quote from the Tate

Re: Pin-Up: Contemporary Collage and Drawing,
Tate Modern, London, 4 December 2004 – 30 January 2005


"While organized on principles of technique, there is a clear contemporary aesthetic shared by the works. Most
of them are glossy and shiny; the works are simply beautiful, attractive, and self-enclosed. They are resolved
without being elusive, critical without being disorienting. The subversive nature of collage has inevitably
softened since the 1910s, when the cubists were radically challenging the conventions of painting, and since
the 1960s, when the commercialized appropriation of the technique became mainstream in advertising and
media. Greenberg’s claim that ‘after classical Cubism the development of collage was largely oriented to
shock value’4 could not predict post-modern economies of circulation and consumption. The work in Pin-Up
can only be but subtle in its approach and yet is active in its refusal to include three-dimensional objects as a
part of the pastiche. If these artists return to the seemingly ‘evacuated, obsolescent’ material of paper at this
particular historical moment, they do so in order to establish a relational position opposite to that of installation
and sculpture in the expanded field."

© Clifford Lauson, 2005
Papers of Surrealism Issue 3 Spring 2005