Peter Blake: About collage2000, Tate Gallery Publishing Limited, London

About Collage

Peter Blake in conversation with Natalie Rudd

NR: What is your definition of collage?

…collage can encompass anything where something is attached to something else. It is a very broad definition that includes work in both two and three dimensions: embroidery, appliqué or books, furniture and clothing, even television and music….the dictionary describes collage as ‘any collection of unrelated things’.

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Bacon in his Studio

Madlib in the 'Bomb Shelter'

The vast array of objects and collages which have built up over time are arranged intentionally within your studio. The overall impression is that of a vast collaged environment. Is this an accurate description of your studio: is it a museum, a work-in-progress or a storehouse of material for future collages?

In a way the whole thing is an environment, and even the way I that I place books on a shelf is controlled. Controlled, but very flexible, and certainly not precious….The studio is a living, changing-all-the-time space – essentially a big collage or an amorphous kind of monster, and in many ways, collecting is a shifting collage: things come together, leave and then return.

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What prompts people to make objects is fascinating and a whole idea in itself. I am intrigued by that kind of spontaneous decoration which can also be categorized as collage. It can be found in the folk tradition of a garden full of gnomes or a privet hedge shaped like a battle ship. Maybe as a very old man I will do something like that as a hobby but there isn’t time at the moment.

When did you first use collage?

I first discovered what collage was in 1955-56 when I shared a room with Richard Smith during my last year at the Royal College of Art. We would often come home from college and make collages in the evening, almost as a hobby.

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When I eventually found collage it was a revelation.

Peter Blake in his Studio with his
Collections

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What other directions in collage have you pursued?

Also in progress is the ongoing series In Homage to Collagists where I work in the style of my main influences, Joseph Cornell and Kurt Schwitters.

How does it feel to assume the style of another artist?

I have often worked in this way and I suppose all artists feed on other artists. You have to take a certain direction. However, it is a rarer and more modern phenomena to actually recreate and appropriate. I like doing it because it enables me to enter into the head of, say, Cornell and think like him. There are enormous links: I know that we would have got on very well and he would have loved to have come to my studio and seen some of my collections. For a little while you pretend you are that person and take on their character. While I am doing the Schwitters collage for instance, I will trawl around and if I see something in the gutter that I want to use I will pick it up and bring it back. When I am not working on this series I won’t do that.

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Why do you think musicians respond so readily to collage?

It is very much in the air. In most bands there is someone who went to art school. The other link is the idea of sampling, or the collaging of sounds from various sources.

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