Transcending the Collage Narrative

Subsequently, Donald Kuspit’s writing on collage is heavily cited in discussing how Parada fits within already established rhetoric on the medium. The “relativity of collage” is invoked, where “existences” are only indicated by partial versions and are never actually present. In this, there is a “defiance of completeness;” an aversion to the complete historical narratives that Parada so intentionally questions in her work (Sampson 144). By using these comparisons, Sampson positions Parada as the next logical step in a lineage of monteurs that have used collage technique to challenge the status quo both aesthetically and politically, yet as also moving into exciting and uncharted digital territory. Parada’s work is characterized as “a form of subversive humanism” in which the artist is able to “allay the fear that digitized pictures will inevitably further the construction of false consciousness” by using digital image to tell human stories and subvert certain transcendent narratives (Sampson 146). As Sampson writes in 2000 on the cusp of digital image technology, Parada is a beacon of hope from an impeding crisis of banality in digital image. Her work functions as proof of a human approach to digital imaging technology and has infinite potential for revising aesthetic and historic norms.

Although this kind of praise is easy to agree with after interacting with Parada’s work, there is a sense of naivete that runs through Sampson’s writing for those encountering A Thousand Centuries in the 2020s. There is no question of the subversive humanist nature of Parada’s work, but as declared by Charlie White in a 2009 summary of the history of collage, the collage has now become “a natural impulse for all media” as we exist in an atmosphere of “remixes, mash-ups, and shuffles” (122). Likewise, Virginia McBride describes everyday use of a smartphone as a series of endless algorithmically-curated montages, the term now defined by a corporate banality rather than political affect. A familiar example of this idea is the “explore” function of Instagram, where the user encounters a mash-up of algorithmically-selected images and videos from an amalgamation of creators (fig. 6). McBride’s analysis of present-day visual cultures imagines the role of monteur expanded to anybody with access to platforms such as Snapchat or Instagram, drawing parallels from Sergei Epstein’s concept of “montage thinking” to how people move through the world by imagining how it might be represented on their feeds (215). A central point for McBride is the corporate aspect of these apps, and the appropriation of avant-garde montage as a default mode of representation by corporate marketing campaigns. Sampson imagines Parada as the next chapter in the history of collage, furthering the practice of challenging visual and political norms that fueled avant-garde monteurs but doing so through radical new technology. McBride’s analysis traces the way that instead of collage strategies fulfilling Sampson’s vision, they have become “so smoothly integrated into mainstream commercial aesthetics as to defy detection” (220). These juxtapositional strategies do continue to shape our perception, but now fail to challenge it (McBride 220). In line with this argument, White’s overview of contemporary artists working with photomontage arrives at the conclusion that they are reckoning with “the normalization of collage as an everyday experience” rather than with the issues of grandiose political narratives addressed by interwar monteurs (129). If we follow these scholars, montage has become universalized to the state of corporate banality; it is an aesthetic strategy that has become inescapable. With the contemporary viewer fully engrossed in montage, how does an encounter with A Thousand Centuries fit into this new visual culture?

My encounter with Parada’s A Thousand Centuries amidst the now montage-saturated visual culture observed by White and McBride resulted in an initial reading of the image as outdated; the text may be seen as haphazardly overlaid on the images, which seem to replicate a buffering video transition rather than an intentionally organized collage that criticizes imperial narratives. Indeed, there is an aesthetic element of this image that can be interpreted as too busy for a viewer that has been over-exposed to montage. However, there is something entrancing about the gaze of the young man and the children. The text which floats above these people reads as profound and yet without obvious meaning. There is a push-and-pull element that I experienced between my own over-exposure to montage techniques and Parada’s work; I was tempted to write it off as an early experiment with Photoshop while also wanting to read the text and learn more about the people pictured and their relationship with Columbus. This type of dualistic encounter can be seen as extending a quality of the work itself; Parada’s ability to create a transient, a-historical space through the collage techniques of combining historic text and image. A Thousand Centuries is not situated in a definite temporal space. It “defies completeness,” and yet is constructed out of images that do reference a very complete colonial narrative. Parada is able to address the very particular history of Cuba’s colonial past and yet create an image that is not situated in any particular place or time through a use of digital photomontage. This being and not-being can be extended to Parada’s space in the grand Art Historical narrative, where she is simultaneously following avant-garde collage strategies of political intervention while existing in the future context of the banal montage in our fully realized digital age. A Thousand Centuries is transcendent both of colonial narratives through Parada’s tactful use of collage techniques and the history of photomontage, where the image finds itself on the cusp of political power and banality. It is this precise “floating” quality that compels a contemporary viewer towards the piece; its intrigue lying in the way it occupies all these arenas at once.

Parada writes that her ultimate aim is to “emphasize the mutability of the historical narrative, whether it is carved in monuments or fixed on the printed page, recorded in a family album or a national archive” (450). By understanding A Thousand Centuries as both reimagining imperial narratives and occupying a transient space in the Art Historical narrative of collage, it can be said with certainty that Parada’s work achieves this mutability of narrative. As described by Sampson, Parada has successfully extended the avant-garde collage practice into the early digital era. Encountering A Thousand Centuries as a contemporary viewer results in an additional dialectic layer in the collage––the context of a visual environment that has been saturated by collage aesthetics. This context gives the image an initial sense of aesthetic irrelevance, and yet it warrants interest because of Parada’s effective use of collage techniques to represent a very specific challenge to colonial narratives by creating a non-specific and vague a-historical space. By reading A Thousand Centuries in a contemporary context, this piece can be seen as cutting through the noise of a montage-saturated visual culture by utilizing avant-garde techniques to create meaning out of disparate images and experiences. Parada’s work is able to continue its affective quality precisely because it refuses to be confined by a single narrative.