Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse

Elza Adamowicz presents an analysis of surrealist collage, both as a technique of cutting and pasting ready made material, and as a subversive and creative strategy. She considers verbal collage, pictorial collage, and the hybrids they generate, and discusses the works of Max Ernst and Andre Breton, as well as those of Aragon, Brunius, Eluard, Hugnet, Magritte, Peret, Styrsky and others. Focusing on the recycling of art-historical icons, the parodic reworking of narrative cliches, the concept of defamiliarisation of the banal, or the relations between part bodies and totalities, she offers close readings of individual collages, and links specific aspects of collage practice to central issues of surrealist aesthetic and political thought. Throughout this well illustrated study Adamowicz confronts the ‘monstrous’ nature of collage, grounded on excess and composed of irretrievable fragments and hovering signs.