Collage
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An Absolut bottle to start—the ultimate signal and signifier of cool. Any copy of Rolling Stone or Spin will have one on offer, glossy and perhaps even in multiples, along with a tuxedo-clad Joe Camel and a pair or two of Vans. Wielding scissors carefully around the curves of Joe’s sunglasses, intense concentration is required for the pyramid of cigarettes extending from his pack. You’re only capable of so much attention to detail, and this is how the tuning pegs of Courtney Love’s guitar went missing—though to be fair, it was far more important to get the precise outline of her babydoll dress and shambolic matting of hair, as tucking the head of the guitar beneath, say, a flower or perfectly rendered cloud is always an option. Okay. Things are shaping up.
An expanse of sky, then desert landscape. These are critical background players, places for the eye to land—no, meditate—between adjacent moments of deep and powerful symbolism. And yeah, wow, an eye would be great, actually, like a really big eye, preferably mascara-clad and spiky…there we are. Thank you, Maybelline Great Lash, for your endless '90s advertising budget.. In a landmark moment of execution all lashes will have remained intact, and it should now be placed just off-center, glue applied only to the smallest corner of the two-inch-by-two-inch Fugees album cover upon which its rightmost side overlaps, a swatch of animal print and a small-to-medium-sized Snapple bottle slid beneath the rest.
A squiggle of abstract pattern, a syringe cut from a beauty article, a sexy leg-with-shoe. At age 13, 14, 15 your source material is only as esoteric as the magazines—and older sisters and album collections and bookshelves—to which you have access. What you cut from them now will stay with you forever; a meandering and experimental underlayer for the inches-thick, glue-stick-scribbled compendium you, yourself, are in the process of becoming.
Other people’s vocabulary, and their way around a joke. An entire slew of mannerisms and affects you couldn’t help but find intoxicating. The books, records, films that became, even if just momentarily, your entire personality. To find yourself articulated in your teen years—to lock eyes with what you’re certain was always meant to be yours—was a revelation, and a cue to add, clumsily and wholesale, to your nascent composition.
Taste will eventually take the lead on accumulation (though let's be real, is “taste” not just a tightly wrangled lightning bolt of that same raw, teenage desire? A fluent and paper-thin borrowing of aesthetic and ideas?), but however adept we become at disguising—no, translating—our references, collage is art and art is theft. By age 30, 40, 50 we are walking collections of all that has ever presented itself as shiny, with wide-eyed fascination and eternally burgeoning interests remaining as integral to the process as Elmer’s, Mod-Podge, and a fresh pair of Fiskars. However cultured and mature we consider ourselves, it is vital (if not lifesaving) to maintain the freewheelin’ instincts of assemblage, occasionally allowing our tongues to unfurl like a Looney Tunes red carpet upon spotting a heretofore missing piece.
“Collage” emailed out 8.18.2026 with newsletter-exclusive extras. Subscribe for free here.