Collage vs. Inlay
Helen Marten
...ongoing
Flaps, sticks, hairs and bruises
collage vs. inlay
Helen Marten, 2012-ongoing
part I.
Smoke
How many architects does it take to dismantle an
apple?
That was the cream-ruf�led question.
But it was only the worm
mouthing a lousy elegy from
its axial centre
giving voice to small rain and speckled anxiety.
He had made announcement
of a late style
of some modern crayon-shaped
emotion only hours before those notional legs
and rather jellied midsection
would feel a bite.
We defend structure and
on cue everyone had
dreamt bilingually of smoke.
The faces of the sun�lowers fell
out of their frames as they dried
and more rain hit cyclical
and heavy with syntax.
It rained and then some.
And then again.
The wedding had been announced
between losing-a-tail
and surrendering-a-neck,
a calligraphic and vanilla scented
slip sent on good heavy stock.
Most took it with a pinch of salt,
others with milk or sugar and candles.
All the hungry redevelopers
and their low pile carpets
rejoiced at the union,
the fruit still intact in their fruit bowls.
[everything is wrecked. then: red clouds, green trees]
(Collage vs. Inlay)
What does it mean to be convinced of the physicality of one’s hairline? Well here’s
a thing: the hairline is a place of discernible bodily seams. What we know of hair,
of hairy matter is quite distinct from what we recognize as skin. In naming hair
there is wondrous acknowledgement of many dozens of particulate pieces, of
atoms, of the many singular hairs that make up our whole heads. In the same way
a wig behaves, we can of course plot the geographic outlines of a head-of-hair. A
haircut extinguishes need for divination: we know there are too many parts to
count, but we can describe one single shape. Skin too has hairs (less dense and not
as long, perhaps) but more constitutive, skin is a �latness of patterns and pores.
Pen marks on hands, stains on teeth, scratches or tattoos on skin embrace the
edge that can be felt. Skin is one surface and of one plane. It is dimensionally
of drawing attention to the head; a collar on a dog speaks of necks, but also plots a
And forehead does not bristle, so we can grope with �ingertips and navigate the
point of transition between hair and skin: there is a literal line, a border, and so an
intelligent, wraps around us and stops blood from leaking out – like enamel or
glaze on a bathtub, it is an encasement, an enclosing, a layer. We sweat, of course,
but the moisture is of skin – as though it is wrung out – so the liquid is not alien,
but from within. As bodies, we are raggedy sacks, a collection of small holes, a
string of borders or a stretch of borderlands. We are mad particles! And hair, of
course, grows, so we are creatures with sorcery.
multidimensionality of bodies. These are graf�itied moments of unmarking terri-
tory in a way that shakes up coordinates. A mask realigns a face for the very action
circumference that partitions ears from legs; known things are separated into
temporary pieces. With the help of drugs, we can lose our heads or displace our
minds in an act of chemical transplant. The psychological is untouchable matter,
so when it is lost we must invent new vanishing points for structures to scoop it
back up.
We have entered a space of making where the fabric of known things has changed,
precisely because the fabric of reality has changed. We have trepidation of easily
nameable parts, because they are pre-loaded with communication; they serve as
short hand emblems for ideas that we know have form, so assume to have content.
Outlines speak of certainty, but also the �lurry of partial destruction. Hand drawn
or digital, the line that seeks to enclose or de�ine can also waver. Every �igure in
space is de�ined precisely through intersection by a plane of material, by outline
or by some corresponding �igure of another dimension: we can cut a square from a
cube, or a circle from a sphere. But the digital fracture collides with the ethical
problem of showing a face and pronouncing a hierarchy. What happens when
objects are violated by virtue of replication, when a double is more virus than
twin? There has been a schematic shift of ideas, where the images of those ideas
themselves lollop behind words; there is a delay of reference – like trying to match
images of bacon to the idea of tasting meat.
chemically better living. be my winter coat, my sobriety.
We are in a ramshackle pursuit of homologies: in
collage and through inlay, there are problems of the
congruous and the not-so-sure-of-one’s-edges. There
are shapes that �it, and those that spew, ooze and
vomit to hide the seams. Square pegs and round holes
are husked down to geometric memories of them-
selves and anything could �it, anything goes: precisely
because things go
The u
ersal white screen of the digital interface has
entered us into a state of generality that assumes
surface to communicate reference, or form to commu-
nicate content – so from here, we have everything and
nothing; it is impossible to discern edges. Soft and
hard are dissolved binaries, material dissipation of a
thousand feedbacks, a continual logjam of rhythms
and densities, where optical zigzagging means that
objects could sit on their own shadows and reasonably
be named as one thing. Periphery has always played
slippery bedfellow to outline, but when the virtual
approximates the real and vice versa, shadows and
edges become ever more treacherous.
the tattoo looked like an alphabet.
the medic spat. you turn all my emergencies into cotton.
What happens when the shining digitality of the screen gets processed to print?
In this era of retinal impatience, simulacrum squeaks through our eyeballs and
opposing materialities. Volume can be full or scienti�ic, but emptied out all at
information. Things have been contaminated by images (by pictures of them-
When what luminescence the light of a screen gives our images, logos or text, is
rendered out onto crappy, grainy, �ibrous paper? This is a meeting of two
the same time, so how we might behave as hot physical creatures between or
within these two spaces is an empirical problem not only of signs, but of
substance too. Optical intelligence should equip us to distinguish between the
real and the digitally constructed, but we are impatient to laminate between the
layers. The digital has given us image synchronicity, which in turn has played a
reductive game with our experience of surface, of levels, and the speed at which
pictures can be built. Rocks and cities are similarly subjects of strati�ication.
There are layers, of course, and the debris here too has ungovernable momen-
tum: loose stones can tumble, and in falling, there is a peeling away. And when
laundry is hung out (put on show), we expect it to blow in the wind. Of course:
images �lutter. The difference is that the force of a falling stone would knock us
out (we might die in a city, hot blood might be spilt, but not online). There is
physical, volatile weight. A picture of a stone, of many boulders, conveys a sense
of this sublime density, but we can digitally refresh, repaint, disperse or com-
press the quality ‘rock’, and instil it with eternal lightness. The tactile pleasure
is registered as the real thing. Online textures quote the in�initely real – even
the wetness of sex is there – so there is obscenity in the sheer accuracy of
selves), but it is not a muddying like dirt or crumbs, more a disabling of imper-
fection. We could quite plausibly murder out substance and still assume that we
were handling real, �lesh-heavy objects. So inevitably, tactile pleasure is an
attitude of touch that has been sanitized by demands for the instantaneously
and digitally real.
But substance is not really substance when we observe it through the screen. Of
course photographic imagery shows us real life, but if we kissed this screen or
smeared �ingertips against it we would be reminded that our �lesh is the
external �lesh of a hot-blooded voyeur. And we can wipe these marks away. As
much as we desire or enjoy the negation, we are not yet able to enter ourselves
into a state of pure data. We could lie across a keyboard, but never climb inside
the intangible and in�inite space it reveals to us.
of ‘rock’ can be relocated, or stripped out completely. We have become masters
of generating skins to rename objects, to falsely instil volume on emptiness and
to reactivate substance with a glib performativity. A cough on the beach; a dry
cough echoing on the fucking beach.
Cezanne spent a lifetime trying to paint around the edge of an apple, but in
applause from. applause from th void.
doing so, also cataloged meticulous interest in weight, form and density. His
images are unashamedly and knottily visceral. The digital is mechanized
instinct, so the physicality or surface frictions of images are confused: we must
apply our own emotions, assert temperatures and navigate speed. And online,
accident is often mediated. Navigation from page to page – this insatiable
skitter between subject matters – is steered through external clicking, from our
�ingers via a keyboard. Information is delivered at breakneck speed (we should
wear a helmet) but it is always contained within the same plane of focus. So
there is something spooky about the idea of a dislocated, real-life hand tracing
around untouchable matter in order to generate content. Perhaps desperation
lies in continually trying to claw around the edges, to peep behind the screen
and see the entrails. Focus is unleashed from responsibility to time, and can be
lost without progress being made.
So approximation in the real world, in the world we actually move about in, is
able to achieve new levels of violence or appeal. This is where there is real
pleasure, where interest, excitement and haptic sensation meet with more force
than could ever be achieved in the simulations of the digital or online. There is
active physical �lurry and things can be sticky here: we are lumpen forms, we
get cold, sweat, have cravings. A fascination with fullness has the same seductive tug as total saturation and because we exist so �luently in online land-
scapes, saturation both here and in real life environments can equate to empti-
ness. And seduction of course triggers a coagulation of relationships, something
close to the exhaustive permeation of a pathogen.
We are tracing increasingly close to motifs of anxiety or territory: through curiosity, paths
are desperately sought to make known, validate or reinvent the pace of images. As tribal
humans, we have always been substance abusers: bread might be a tissue, a comedian or
some toast. But things don’t become frightening until we name them enough to totalize, and
therefore abstract them from locatable origins. There is kinetic excitement in casting a box
of cereal in an operatic role, making it sing as a picture and then stripping all language or
harmony bare. The layering and side-to-side trajectories are important. A master hybridizer
of the tulip is deliberately seeking new species, but the cross can only be made between
existing stock, existing genes – there is no mysterious matter. What is triggered is an
avalanche of overlaps, but the edges are things that can be named. These borderlands of
things are erotic seams in which information is held, but continually dissolved, retraced or
overlapped. When we conceal error under fresh layers, we are moving towards violence –
there is sickness, giddiness, concealment and all resound with dangerous frequencies.
Collage, manoeuvres through the same impulses for vandalism as tagging or graf�iti. The
action of the composition has posture: it is brave, stylish, an appendix gesture of and within
fashion. It is to some degree, a styling of layers. But the �lurry is always partial, never a total
eclipsing moment of obfuscation. So the power, the aggression in the idea of it is that it
defaces, disrupts, yet always leaves traces of the dis�igured original: To rule out is not the
catalyzing force. Collage is a spit in the face of image with something that smells of the
signatory, but often collapses possibility of a single legible meaning into loops and feed-
backs. In collage, diagram can be wilted because it is lodged at a level of coagulated abstraction that has layers, but also laminates itself into one level image. So the enigma is that the
process is inherently multi-patched, but digital conditioning allows for fractures in the way
information is revealed or concealed. To make traditional analogies, the cut-and-paste
freneticism of collage is bursting with language, with gesture, and so with punctuation. In
sampling and recombining imagery, collage is a forcing of pictorial rhymes to behave with
new stutters: it is impediment, refocus or negotiation, a catalyzing slap in the mouth of
discernible outlines. Collage, in whatever realm, is superposition, so there is of course
�latness, but it is a �latness that bristles with an implied sense of growth... of the thickness
of multiple speedy laminations.
In collage, perhaps images are more bruised. Asked to be more vocal about the verbs of
squashing and sitting, the fundamental action of placing one thing atop of another is a
measuring difference in volts. ~÷˚
problem of weight. Collage is dealing with physicality in a way that is blatant – what we see
are things on top of things on top of other things. Like thick makeup, a ceramic glaze or
stickers on fruit, we can read the layers, or at least understand there is a between-ness, and
so we can name parts. There is dishonesty in concealment, but this is more a case of knowing that things are being hidden or deliberating castrating elements, rather than masquer-
ading in disguise. Collage is not performing undercover! The treachery, in all its sandwiching, is laid bare. But collage also leaves ends untied. In the actions of putting one thing on
top of another, there is ultimately hierarchy, so there is a route of reduction or multiplication that moves up or down.
The inlay speaks less vocally about direction: there is little upwards or backwards, it is a
sideward splay – a place of lateral edges, of borders meeting, mapping and adjoining – so
there is something of seepage. And seepage is sewage; it is ungodly and dangerous –
foulness in form. So in this foulness there is violence – the inlay is violent, possessed of
violence for its silent and exacting material tensions. In inlay, everything is contained within
the same place, so the surface is, if not �lat (protrusions are possible) then entirely of one
�latness. Each section of the inlay is part of a concrete assemblage: it is a multiplicity, a
segment and so a vibration – there is gross friction. The inlay is sexy ... it is a shameless
airing of edges, but edges that combine with the intent of singular communication. Material
is laid open for inspection and there is no coyness, but instead an erotic self-con�idence in
surface. Imagine two graphic shapes cut from Formica and sunk side to side into an unnamable substrate; or shapes and their negatives nestled to �it perfectly within one another –
inlaid. The effect is cartographic, a meeting of distinct shapes: perhaps where collages offers
blockage, the inlay composes itself into a series of distinct packets or pockets of informa-
tion. But what is de�iantly, unnervingly distinct about inlay is its devastating �latness, and
with this �latness there is a confusion of speeds.
The inlay has decorative legacies and there is an inevitable mercantile investment in touch.
So the production of the inlay, by necessity of its relationship with precision – to the importance of ‘the �it’ – is slow. A slow toy is made with the idea of years of enjoyment instilled in
its materiality. It is not produced in plastic, has no need for batteries, noise or chaos. The
very fabric of it is worn before it is even used: woods, rubber or cloth, the material is born
from an organic sense of history that makes it aloof, but somehow honest. A slow toy is a
Quaker object, more formal perhaps, buttoned down, chaste. A slow toy is not fashionable,
but there is longevity in its parts.
But a similar slowness implied in the making of inlaid material is in turn impeded by the
singularity of the �inal presented surface; all the parts �it and so the seams of technology
and control overlap. An inlaid surface – as a unique type �latness – is hard, so there is less of
the potential for �loppiness as in collage. There is synchronicity and exchange, but any idea
of touch is removed to sit slightly below the surface on show – process is evidently there but
any sense of the articulations of hand or tool or glue that went into the making are made
tertiary. The surface navigation is more con�idently mechanical, and so perhaps less immediately emotional.
I suppose I couldn’t say whether this diagram of stuff is generative or corrupting
But to confuse matters, think of the microbes, the dust, the residual hair or nails contained
within that barely visible seam of the inlay. Fingernails, �ingertips could discern a gap,
might feel a slight uncomfortable twinge on the teeth running hands along it. A �ingernail
next to a spider. In the same way a scar leaves a raised and paled gap on the surface of the
skin there is a momentary �luctuation in the fullness of surface information, but the mate-
rial is not displaced, just somehow staggered. There might be a glitch here. Technology and
control again bite into and against one another. It is a gorgeously erotic moment of overlap
and we enjoy spotting the treachery, quite literally �inding the tricks or deliberately stepping on the cracks.
The inlay offers an external surface that is level, but if the initial thicknesses of these
materials are not the same before they are bought into this single plane, the implication is
that there must be background space involved as a receiver for excess material. So perhaps
data is backlogged – there are fatnesses, backsides or middles we cannot see – and in this
suspension of knowing, there is again concealment, or matter that makes itself secretive. To
think of the wodge of cork under a laminate table surface or the wood-chipped substrate
between the Formica faces of a bookshelf is to invent material that we know must be there
but is ghost-like because we can’t be exactly sure what might be found.
measuring difference in volts. ~÷˚
But the inlay is also convinced of its own grammatical possibilities. The surface
has delays, but they are calculated. Where collage (in particular the digital
collage) is lamination in the most oppressive sense, inlay presents sections of
rhythm that can be traversed with lightness. Even when foreign matter – a walnut
for instance – is inlaid into a surface, the section of nut that might poke clear from
the substrate is not read as invasive. The hierarchy of parts is made blatant, so
information is laid naked for inspection and there is speed. We know that this part
is sunk into that piece, but unlike collage, we are not snagged by desperation for
dimensional clari�ication. The inlay is akin to the fold, because there is the immediate understanding that there are lurking shadows, that there are levels that we
cannot see, and do not need to understand in order to translate surface. In the
same way a parasite clings to its host, there is a sense of commensal symbiosis
and although the presence is intangible, this invisibility can be accounted for. So in
the inlay, there is something dangerous that speaks of compression.
Cut and paste has poverty. It is poor. Cut and paste approximates the image of
ancient hands shredding through paper, drawing lines, measuring up and removing information. As an analogue suggestion of activity, the idea is one of thumbs,
of �ingers and so of touch. It speaks of care – deliberately saving to preserve – but
also of necessity, of the impulse to chop out either to edify or abandon. But within
computer space what is actually happening is a negation of the hand, of all things
potentially touched or �ilthy.
A couplet of verbs linked predominantly to the terminologies of human-computer
interaction, the words are also negotiated by the idea of a user interface. What we
can dream with cut and paste is that there might be, hidden somewhere in the
blackness of un-locatable virtual space, some form of disembodied editor plowing
through an index of commands. That there might exist an atomized, yet pixilated
pair of thumb and fore�ingers wielding scissors and glue is a gloriously magic set
of propositions. Hands in a process of fragmentation. But this is a magic not
governed by the illusionism of a puff of smoke – it does not have the weightlessthe hour swells, bursts.
ness of pulling a rabbit out of a hat – this is a magic borne from informational
suspense. There is data, so we expect rationality and thus something concrete. But
of course this is not the case.