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| John Ashbery made a few collages in the 1940s while he was a student
at Harvard. He made several more in the 1970s. Some of those were lost
and then, years later, found in a shoebox. Others were thrown out. In 2008
he returned to collage work—making many of the pieces featured here,
most of which are no bigger than a three-by-five card, although the largest,
Chutes and Ladders II, is the size of a game board. Collage is an art of time, like
poetry. Ashbery’s collages are both demonstrations of this fact and analyses of
it. The background elements often depict possible pasts: people on go-carts,
a scene in Rotterdam of men in bowlers, and the teetering, top-heavy trucks
of the twenties. The foreground elements seem to express Ashbery’s elation
or relief at having escaped those pasts to make the art he has made and keeps
making. Some of these collages were assembled from elements given to Ashbery on his birthdays by his friend, the artist and writer Joe Brainard. Brainard
died in 1994. These collages are a collaboration across decades: like Ashbery’s
poems, they are a way of keeping time an open question.
—Dan Chiasson
Summer Dream
Rotterdam
Northern Lights
To see the rest of John Ashbery's collages, click the link below: |
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