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Although cultural debates regarding the possibility of a postmodern oppositional art tend to be critical of collage, feminist artists in a variety of media have frequently chosen this mode. Focusing on concrete examples, this essay attempts to provide the historical and theoretical framework needed to understand the oppositional nature of feminist collage.
Throughout the 20th century, a succession of revolutionary art movements have laid claim to collage, assuming special rights to the form and avowing its special powers. In the contemporary arts, collage is so prevalent that it is sometimes considered synonymous with postmodernism. Significantly, during the last three decades, feminist artists have particularly been attracted to this mode; indeed, the art critic Lucy Lippard has gone so far as to claim that collage is a predominant aesthetic in the feminist arts (25). Current debates regarding the possibility of truly oppositional art, however, often involve a critique of collage, questioning assumptions about its revolutionary "edge" and implicating it in concerns about the political limitations of any art embedded in postmodern culture. Allying feminist arts and agendas with collage would thus seem to pose a number of problems: insofar as the feminist arts assume a political stance and are directed toward a critique of contemporary culture, how can the practice of feminist collage be squared with the charge that collage is symptomatic of postmodern cultural fragmentation and that it is incompatible with art as political critique?
As I see it, what is needed to address this issue is an investigation of feminist art in various media, with a view to providing an adequate historicizing and theorizing of the development of feminist collage strategies as oppositional art. In doing so, it is important to refrain from claiming that collage in itself has any unique power as cultural critique, or that women have any essential relationship to collage. There is, in my opinion, no basis for equating a particular aesthetic form or strategy with any particular effect; the relationship between artistic object and audience is too complex to presume a given effect or meaning, and interpretation is in continual process as it is constructed through artistic strategies, critical theories, and cultural institutions. Furthermore, it would be naive to invoke an essentialist basis for a relationship between women...