Cut Out

I think it was David Campany who once said that the problem with collage was that it’s too easy to make a decent one, while it’s almost impossible to create something great. Whether or not I am misremembering or paraphrasing I am not sure (obviously, all misconceptions expressed here are mine, no Campany’s). But collage seems easy, and the fact that it lends itself to exercises in graphic design certainly does not help. Over the years, I have seen a few good books about collage — but nothing great, nothing providing deeper insight of any sorts (besides, possibly, here and there very minor art history which often is mixed with some surface-level knowledge of world history). But now there is Cut Out, subtitled A Feminist History of Photo Collage, Montage and Assemblage, by Fiona Rogers (a photography curator at London’s V&A). “Art history,” Rogers writes, “suggests a habitual, inherently gendered separation of collage techniques: the conceptual ‘high’ art for by Picasso and Georges…