This group exhibition examined the continuing resonance of collage for a variety of contemporary artists.

The appearance of collage in early twentieth-century art marked an immense alteration in visual experience. In collage, space and time could be
sliced and spliced in ways previously unavailable to photography or painting; collage could be additive (placement, juxta-position,com-position) or subtractive (cut, removal).
Although mainstream visual technologies have today normalized methods that originated in collage, and although the becoming-orthodox of appropriation
and post-production have homogenised the terrain it traverses, collage nonetheless still empowers tactics that play at de-skilling while invoking intimacy, interrupted passivity and subtractive force. A reliance on dramatic juxtaposition was characteristic of classic modernist collage, as in Hannah Höch’s virtuoso works of the 1920s and 30s. Whatever their variety, contemporary applications of collage increasingly tend to forego the method of explosive juxtaposition, often favouring instead an intricate and implosive thinking. Catherine Malabou's writings propose a concept of plasticity that is intimately linked to explosiveness and emphatically separated from elasticity: an elastic form can return to its earlier state after suffering deformations, whereas a plastic form cannot; instead it retains the signs of alteration when stretched, gouged, scarred, re-moulded or cut. Collage in this exhibition is understood as a transferable and mutable apparatus of subtractive plasticity.
'Use & Mention' offers a broad selection of current collage-related activity. Most of the works shown are on paper but also included are texts and video works.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/2929