Thinking Collage as Method for an Urban Commons: A Conversation with Erin Butler

The Hacking Urban Boundaries project: The Bronx, was lucky enough to have Erin Butler, artist and librarian at the MAS Greenacre Library, come to the teens’ final event and panel discussion earlier this month. I had the opportunity to get Erin’s impressions after the event, which inspired some thoughts for further exploration I will dive into here.

JM: Hi Erin, first, thank you for joining HUB: the Bronx’ final event & panel discussion! Your thoughts afterwards intrigued me, and opened up pathways I’d like to explore a bit together. In particular, I’d like to focus on your remarks around the surprising juxtaposition of the raw kind of environment built by the teens in the green space and the “pristine” digital renderings of this space by an architect (as is seen on the online platform). Collage immediately comes to mind: the uncanny power it holds as a medium to bring together different points of view, styles, subject matter, and creates/ reveals a “whole” without rejecting, but rather embracing, surprising juxtapositions. Can you speak a bit on your artistic work with collage, what attracted you to this medium, and what potentialities it holds as opposed to other mediums for you? What are some of the challenges you’ve faced in collage work, and how have you navigated them?

EB: What draws me to collage is the element of serendipity. The challenge is to avoid the traps of obsession with placement and making the perfect image, color, or shape. The best way to avoid all of that is to regularly admonish yourself, “Don’t think too much!” It also helps to keep some things handy besides the obvious (glue and paper or other support base)— interesting pictures, hand‐painted colored papers, string or other textured material. In collage you can steal other people’s images to make your composition more interesting, and as a shortcut around skillful drawing. In the 1980s we called this “appropriation.” Of course, you are making the work your own through unusual mixings, kind of like a DJ, but the fact remains, there’s a dubious side to this enterprise, especially when it comes to making the finished product public. The process, on the other hand, is highly individual, creative and accessible. The best part is the way you can throw in as much wild variation as the picture can stand. It is a medium particularly suited to reframing elements that look similar but are not, and is especially useful for comment on contemporary life. Sometimes I like to combine abstract shapes and colors with kooky lines and vague references to imagery (as seen through frosted glass, perhaps). Other times I’ll discover a figure in the chaos and bring it out by drawing into it or by paying attention to the shapes and colors around the figure. Occasionally a clear meaning comes in a flash, if I’m lucky and paying attention. Rarely do I have a well‐formed idea before I start working.

JM: This past November, I gave an online lecture to Pescara University’s Cities of the World Series, with New York as my focus. There I reflected on New York as operating with and through a ‘natureculture ontology’, that is to say, embodying the continuum of nature and culture, and suggest it as an archetype for an urban ecosystem precisely because of its constantly evolving diversity ‐ what is, significantly, animated by its close, and often unlikely, proximities. The tensions of these proximities co‐create a sort of stability despite its outward‐seeming chaos. However, I argued that “waking” to the ontology of New York is crucial to ensuring its ecological sustainability, in the same way that waking to the ecosystem of the planet is crucial to ethical participation and effective stewardship. The ways in which the HUB professional architectural renderings stand in relation to the intuitive and gardened experience of the teens seem for me to embody these needed ecological juxtapositions that literally “create” New York. By engaging these tensions with care rather than a desire to absorb them into sameness, illuminates threads, overlaps, new textures, that can be mutually nurturing and maybe inspire empathy too. Awareness of synchronicities is a dimension I consider central to waking, and so I observe (with excitement) your work and life, as an artist at times working in collage, and also as librarian of the Municipal Art Society’s Greenacre Library ‐ where I continued to develop this theory by diffracting it through heaps of marvelous, often obscure, materials on New York that you helped gather together for me. I wonder if you could reflect a little on your experience in New York, how NY may have come to influence your art‐making, your turn to collage and other artforms, and maybe how art‐making has influenced your relationship to the city?

EB: Your theory is fascinating to me and eloquently puts into words thoughts that until now, for me, have remained unexpressed felt experience. My NY experience has so many layers at this point that I don’t often take much time to think about it anymore. The kind of deep reflection that you ask of yourself, your students, and of me in this interview is a request that doesn’t come often in one’s lifetime and I truly appreciate your challenge! Reflective thought and writing were my regular practice long ago, a bit neglected for some years; but changed circumstances have recently given me opportunity to dip my toes back in the water. Art making, my life, and New York City have been intertwined for close to 50 years (yikes!). The primary reason I came to NY was to become an artist, which I’ve done. Even the things that side‐tracked me are part of the picture. Direct expressions about the city have most often come out in poetry, drawings, rough sketches, and mixed media (collage, paint, ink, pencil). The oil paintings are usually more abstract with oblique reference to the city. In recent years they’ve become simpler, more focused on color, referring less to a typically urban “feel” or setting than to water and landscape. It is interesting to study the interaction of us humans with other creatures and to know that we are ruled by nature, even as we exist in an astoundingly artificial world. Lately, ferry trips across the harbor from the Staten Island waterfront allow me to practice looking at things (and I suppose, people, too) in relationship to each other. Distance between things and where they are placed appear wildly different depending on our changing perspective as we move across the water.

JM: I think so often the nonrational, intuitive aspects of design are eliminated from public view when it comes to urban planning and architecture, that this moment of a sort of heightened “collage” effect with the intuitive art‐making of teens can be quite revelatory. It’s interesting to note the effect that may be induced by intergenerational, international, and other less‐commonly‐spotlighted partners across the canvas of urban design. I’m sensing that collage, in practice and theory, may help foster a feeling of agency for those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged ‐ particularly when it comes to the built environment. By re‐assembling feelings of lack and isolation so often accompanying diminished socioeconomic power, with abundance and connectivity to those outside one’s immediate environment, one can co‐create a sort of “total picture”, a new picture, a possible future as yet unthought/untaught. As many of your collage works inspire a feeling of intimacy with diverse cultures and urban phenomena like Flamenco Rose, American Bride, and Street Scene, I’m curious to hear what your intuitive impressions are on thinking urban design with the notion of a collage(d) / total work of art approach.

EB: I completely agree with your assessment but am less equipped to draw conclusions than I am to describe my thought process. Indeed, I am reasonably familiar and comfortable with diverse situations and people. Suffice it to say, I thoroughly enjoyed the setting of your project, beginning with the subway ride and the walk through the busy Bronx streets to arrive at the Andrew Freedman House, a magnificent Beaux Arts building on classical grounds, surrounded by decaying brick walls decorated with graffiti and murals. On the scrubby edge of the grounds near the big trees where the teens had carved out their small world of garden plots and ideas for lovely outbuildings designed for use by neighborhood young people like themselves, we (the audience and workshop participants) walked along paths the teens had built to each designated spot. If, like most people, you have both feet in the world, you would have viewed the virtual designs simultaneously on your phone. I on the other hand, photographed the scene in my mind’s eye and looked up each site later, on the web. This necessary delay sustained the thought process awhile longer, so I noticed rather starkly the contrast between how pristine the web renderings appeared compared to my memory of the relative roughness of that side of the property. Add to this the sweetness of the lovely little plates of flowers and greens that the teens offered to us, their explanation of the project, and one girl’s song performed under the trees to an audience of one at a time through the safe but intimate distance of headphones. This touching scene was followed by a more formal indoor presentation and discussion via a hybrid virtual/live format among all workshop participants, adult and teen. It was interesting to note their sudden shyness. They were steadily encouraged to speak and most of them eventually did. (At about that age, I suffered from similar difficulties, so I understood the painful process behind that hesitance. Still, the many years of living in New York made me want to shout, “Speak up, yell, say your name!”) It was a day and an experience unlike anything else. Combining technology with communal effort, adult involvement on many levels including teaching, and old‐fashioned getting hands dirty in real soil must have made for a very engaging summer project for the kids who participated, including those who didn’t make it through to the end. Hopefully, this will be repeated. Thank you again, Jade, for inviting me and for presenting me with these questions!