Why

News, paper, scissors

Around 1920, the artistic principles of collage and montage animated literature, painting photography, and film equally. Whereas “collage” means “to glue” and implies handiwork, “montage” has a much more industrial background; since the Encyclopedié, it has been defined as a process by which one assembles the parts of a mechanism. A montage needs a mechanic; it involves fitting together ready-made parts to form a machine or product. It was during the First World War that the term “montage” came to be used with arts. To understand the use of newspaper clippings and its meaning, to understand why and when the cutting-and-pasting practices of scissors, paper, and scrapbooks became so important, one has to take into account the principle of montage. This principle has in turn to be understood against the background of the conveyor belt and the division of labour: the first conveyor belt was installed in 1913 in Henry Ford’s factory, at approximately the same time as film and its cutting techniques were developed. The common principle here is the creation of a product out of ready-made parts.

The newspaper was a medium in which montage techniques had always been used (cross-reading), but now, in addition, parts of newspapers were being inserted into the papier colleges of the Cubists, the collages of the Futurists, and the montages of the Dadaists. Newspapers were used in these contexts because of their material capacities and their typography. For Dadaists, newspaper fragments became irreplaceable. In 1916, Tristian Tzara wrote the following instructions for making a Dadaist poem.

Take a newspaper.
Take scissors.
Select from this newspaper an article of the same length as you plan to give your poem.
Cut out the article.
Cut out carefully every word of this article and put them into a bag.
Shake lightly.
Take out one snippet after another.
Copy down conscientiously in the order in which they came out of the bag.
This poem will be similar to you.
And therewith you will be an infinitely original author with a charming sensibility not however comprehensible to the people.

Because the newspaper represented even in its uncut form a kind of bound together fragment of reality, Tzara took this as his method and produced out of ready-mades parts new poems

Like Dada poets, their colleagues, visual artists, worked in that manner. For George Grosz (1893 -1959) clipping newspapers and magazines provided a realistic picture of social and political conditions at the time. Like Tzara in his instructions for making a Dada poem, they were convinced that everyone could take a newspaper and scissors and make a collage. Everyone could be an artist because reality and its material fragments are available everywhere and can be reassembled as in a factory. The purpose of the imperative ‘Take a newspaper, take scissors” is to inspire a certain automatism that would lead to a portrayal or even a copy of reality opposed to typical bourgeois moral and aesthetic ideas. Art and reality were not two distinct spheres but mechanically, and thus intrinsically, combined in the works of the artists.

Anke te Heesen
Extract from the chapter ‘News, Paper, Scissors: Clipping in the Sciences and Arts Around 1920.’
Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science
Published by Zone Books