Notes
Collage as Praxis
Nigredo, Aerial Archipelago, and Caliber
Allan Graubard
In collaboration with Paul McRandle and Valery Oisteanu
It’s quite clear that collage can take many forms, both on and off the page, canvas, wall, rock, tree or any other framing medium. When the latter becomes a means for collective action, collage engages a broader, lived, social context, with all its complexities. It involves imaging, as collage traditionally does, but also immaterially via participant interactions over time—an added stimulant. In this light, how does Breton’s definition of collage play: that “extra-lucid, insolent, rebellious rapport between one thing and another”; or, by extension, between one person and another? What is it that animates the event as it originates and evolves, what of the sensibility (in an object or objects) created in that evolution, and how do they clarify the variable tensions, vectors, and pleasures revealed through the work?
Figure 1. Collage by Paul McRandle, with art by Joan Hall, S. Higgins, Kathy Fox, and Susana Wald (as published in Nigredo and Aerial Archipelago)
Informing each of these questions—the subject of this essay—is the publication of an annual journal or anthology, as one of its editors refers to it, that is now in preparation for its third issue. But first a bit of history.
During the pandemic when virtual gatherings largely substituted for in-person meetings, a group of us—writers and artists all—some avowed surrealists, others inspired by Surrealism but independent of its contemporary forms—agreed to gather on screen on a weekly basis. At issue was identifying a practical means to sustain this kind of ensemble in a world where alienation had taken new, but definitive, form: the lockdown, sanctioned by government edict, social agreement, and fear of infection. The effort was as much a riposte to the situation we found ourselves in as a way to subvert its most deleterious aspects, including despair.
Virtual arrangements like this have become a convenient way to facilitate conversations, games, sharing of perspectives, images, literature, film, and music in an intimate, two-dimensional space. That much is clear. We humans, however, are not two-dimensional beings manipulated by digital technology and its “clouds” that store or delete content over time; that is, content we create despite the more recent intrusions of AI. That such technology can induce a kind of stupor that replaces the physical with flickering pixels and have us believe that the satisfactions it provides, if not normal are normal enough, was certainly heightened by the pandemic. Entropy, that back door through which progressions vitiate, also enters the mix here. And for those who value physical proximity and exchange, as we do, two dimensions were simply insufficient, and the meetings ended.
Thereafter, as inoculations arrived and the stress induced by the pandemic lessened, three of us—Valery Oisteanu, Paul McRandle, and me—sought to sustain the momentum gained but not completely lost in physical form; the aforementioned journal. With paper and ink we would find our way, with a secondary digital format: the simple PDF.
Sensitive to cultural and political currents at large, particularly where we lived—Manhattan—but also nationally and internationally given our contacts and previous collaborations, many of which involved or derived from surrealist concerns, we agreed on several founding principles:
- Each issue would present up to 20 living, mature creators by invitation, with each issue presenting new creators, along with the editors (should they choose to contribute works); each creator given four consecutive pages as their playing field.
- Poetic evidence would lead all choices through a variety of approaches: visual art (collage, paintings, drawings, photographs etc.), poetry, creative prose and critique.
- The editors reserved the right of refusal of any work, given that the editors collectively agreed that any work was not suitable for publication.
- Each issue would pose a different thematic context for participants to consider and respond to as they wished—directly, indirectly, or in contradistinction to.
- Each issue would present a unique title (the thematic context), responsive to the moment we were living through.
- Practical high production values are paramount in terms of design and print-on-demand technology.
Thus, there appeared Nigredo (2022), Areial Archipelago (2023), and the forthcoming Caliber (2025), with Wayne Kral as editor replacing Paul McRandle who stepped aside to complete another project: the three publications presenting upwards of 60 creators, some of whom you may know while others may be new to you; Will Alexander, Byron Baker, Rik Lina, Susana Wald, Izabella Ortiz, Beatriz Hausner, Joel Gayraud, Michael Richardson, John Welson, Gregg Simpson, Joan Hall, Laura Corsiglia, Sotère Torregian, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Andrei Codrescu, and more. In effect, a cultural mapping of the state of affairs that each participant lived and of how it all resonated in a diverse, human landscape bound by our front and back covers.
Now let’s return for a moment to the questions posed in the first paragraph.
Collage, as defined by Breton, was and remains an implicit sensibility, broadened, yes, to feed the journal, given its linear qualities—one creator presented after another; the majority in alphabetic sequence. The same goes for each contribution published, and as informed, deformed or reformed by a critical sense of beauty beyond cliché and, if as a recognizable type (surrealist included), provocative enough to evade the constraints of type.1
Our animation for launching the journals follows suit. They provide what a community commons does but as a printed cultural medium—as much to protect and enhance the freedom required for sustained creative work and the revelations attached as to heal our battered sense of humanity in this fraught historical moment. There is a kind of desperation here and the umor born from it that we cannot hide, and which the works presented speak to in part—how could they not? The modest reach of our readership as well as the relative critical silence surrounding the effort has not stalled it either.2
Fronting this text—should the editors of the current journal publish it—is a collage composed of the art and fragments of the literature we have presented in Nigredo and Aerial Archipelago. Its synthetic or disparate narrative quality—which the reader will determine—does not foreclose on the poetic value of narrative itself, particularly when used as a metaphor of the creative process, however it infuses any work and, in combination, the works that populate the journals; choreographed as noted in each issue.3
To better chart the themes that the titles to the journals identify, the editors also wrote brief editorial statements, which follow per issue below.
Circa 2025, the poetic sensibility balances on a tightrope stretched over a pitted terrain of human suffering, ecological degradation, and ever gaining economic exploitation. The trio mirror each other with a tenacity that would astonish were it not so easily accepted. Of those private moments enriched by marvelous encounters—be they found in solitude, with others, other beings or places still resonant with portent and promise—we thirst for them and find them, as you do. When taken together as we have done in these journals, they comprise an oasis where the poetic sensibility thrives as it always has—in the sparkling sunlit or moonlit water, the erotic scents that mist from coiled bodies on its banks, the alchemic language of birds who gather to drink and shelter, and in an oneiric wind that rarely fails to blow, fiercely or slowly or in low soft whispers.
Editorial Statements
Nigredo
“Do not be discouraged because of your inexperience,” said Zosimos, “for when you see that the metal has turned to cinder, understand that everything is going well.”
In the subfuse workshops of alchemists in certain seventeenth-century paintings obsessed technicians boll piss and brood over their athanors while children wreak havoc with the bellows, parodying the great work. In less satirical canvases, philosophical alchemists puruse texts amid scenes of quiet application to the study of matter. In all, darkness prevails, a blackness blacker than black that serves as the ground for the scene, as if the images were phosphenes produced within the eye from no light at all.
Paul McRandle
From the base dissolution or putrefaction of matter—here, the Nigredo of language, image and gesture—the first stage of a process of transformation occurs. It begins at ground zero where antagonisms and sympathies root and intensify. It ends with a work offered to others. And it does so without hierarchy, on a common playing field, and without using or being used by genre or type to repletion.
Nigredo also refers to the historical situation we find ourselves in, where conflict is the norm—whether experienced physically, psychologically, culturally, socially, economically, politically, racially, and by gender—and peace a momentary relief. And however we use this interaction—accepting, denying, criticizing or embracing it—its effects remain. We balance on ever shifting, unstable sands, straddling the fault lines if only to keep ourselves and the inspiration that enlightens us a medium we can’t do without.
We have chosen to offer four consecutive pages for each participant without further intervention other than by design.
We also have agreed to make this journal an annual with a different title for each publication responsive to changing circumstance and desires.
Nothing is settled. All is in flux. And time an arabesque that extenuates, circles back, coils, renews and rejuvenates.
Allan Graubard
Alchemists considered the golden flowers found in Genesis to be the source of everything in the universe, namely Nigredo, Albedo, Citrinitas, and Rubedo, which on a human scale translate to Confession/Introspection, Illumination, Education, and Transformation, respectively, according to Alexander Roob (Alchemy & Mysticism, Taschen, 2001). The combination of all four subsequently gave birth to the surrealist galaxy.
I find myself lurking around the phantasophy domain searching for the philosopher’s stone in the phonetic kabbalah and the overlooked spheres of dreams, spirits, echoes of strange beings and the language of birds.
Surrealism is inexhaustible in my opinion, first revealing itself in primitive rituals and magical costumes and later in the coded initiatic language of Aborigines and other indigenous populations of Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
This is my last anti-manifesto doing battle against amnesia and the vulgarization of the subconscious. The signs of cultural putrefaction are everywhere: dissatisfaction, unhappiness, frustration and the restless depression of artists, amplified by the hierarchy of cultural institutions and the obscene art market’s practices and prices, creating lucrative profits for dealers and curators.
The only action feasible now is to go on a perpetual strike in the public sphere of influence. Build a collective creation, out of reach of critics and popular culture. Bring back alchemical thinking into the language, revolutionize your dictionary. Create a noncommercial theater of illogical dreams, forbidden desires, and out-of-body experiences.
Long liver dissident mysteriosophy!
Valery Oisteanu
Aerial Archipelago
The Aerial Archipelago is the Milky Way, the solar system, planetary orbits, the sky above with all its clouds, colors and shadings, and us: feet on the ground, arms extended, head in the air. A chthonic, metaphorical place that we in this issue inhabit.
The archipelago rises from the depths of the sea on waves of lava. It comes by erosion or sediments that build up on coral reefs or waters splicing the land. However it comes, when it comes so do we. Water, fire and air create an Earth where gravity reverses and flight, floating, weight, depth and history commingle.
Shaped by what we encounter in this life, and shaping it by what we do and how we do it, artists, poets, writers and thinkers that we are, each distinct and as compelling as our expressions . . .
War, love, anguish, peace, sorrow, cruelty, joy, hatred, retreat, compassion, revenge, nurturance . . . what feeds us and moves us and inspires us within, against, and because of the cultures and societies and economies we come from and live in . . .
Something now for this, our time . . .
Aerial Archipelago . . .
Allan Graubard
The Sounds of the New Eros
Where can we experience the sounds and images of the New Eros that are unchained from the Oedipus complex? Non-Oedipal thought transforms certainties and fixed frameworks and liberates us from the social and familial prison of fixed identity.
The sounds of New Eros are in the performances of jazzoetry, visual poetry, exquisite corpses, collages, innovative video work, etc.
They are expressions liberated from academic rules, inebriated with the madness of creativity, journeying through the intensity of the unconscious.
Now, almost a half century after poet Gherasim Luca’s escape from the repression of the desire factory of art destined for interaction with financial markets, we are still searching for the sounds/images of New Eros.
Our self-propelled art forms are freed from consumerist and so-called desirable culture in contrast to the libidinal productions of commercial art that are only destined to enslave the consumer.
Imagine a human defined as a body without organs, only a brain, a self-initiator of dreams, displaced in space, part of an unconscious universe so rich with dreams, with no false memories.
The sounds of New Eros are calling us to finally recognize new domains, where art and poetry are liberated from the horizontal vertigo of sexuality. They become inhabitants of the Aerial Archipelago, where avant-garde artists survive unencumbered by the assault of social media, electronic communications, pandemics, climate change, and the continuous cloning of putrefied culture.
New Eros aficionados, prevail against inherited aggression, suicidal and narcissistic instincts, and finally step into the multidimensional anti-cartographic, Aerial Archipelago of the sur imagination.
Valery Oisteanu
“Dugouts are equipped with outriggers—as if dragging a strange shadow behind them as they glide over the sea. In the distance the white breakers smashed against the coral reef. In the west, scarlet spots on the dark clouded sky—strangely gloomy—like flush on a sickly face, marked by death . . .”
A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, Bronislaw Malinowski
The young anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski arrived on Mailu Island in the southern hemisphere unmoored from his life in Poland by the start of the First World War, cut off from the woman he loved, and having broken with his longtime friend Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz en route. There he documented his strange, psychic disintegration catalyzed by isolation, sickness, and violently conflicting attitudes towards the people around him, which the overlush archipelago itself embodied with its rotting trees that smelled like menstruation. It was as if the islands reflected the breaking apart of some pole star of the mind, until eventually they provided the own means or orientation—the polished, tense blue of the sea; the lewd swelling of fertilized vegetation; the strong zodiacal light.
Paul McRandle
We will launch the third issue of the journal, Caliber, in the first quarter 2026, with readings in New York City and elsewhere.
Allan Graubard is a poet, writer, playwright, literary critic and curator of art. Recent titles include: Sun Step Black Lake (Broken Sleep Books, UK, 2024), Language of Birds (Anon Editions, NYC/LA, 2020), Western Terrace (Exstasis Editions, Canada, 2019), and Into the Mylar Chamber: Ira Cohen (Fulgur Press, UK, 2019). Recent curations at the Eugenio F. Granell Foundation Museum, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, include: Homage aux Nabis: The Pont-Aven Suite by Gregg Simpson (2025), Calle Cervantes: The Art of Collage by David Coulter (2023), and Dragons: The Art of Eugenio F. Granell and Rik Lina (2022). Allan’s collaboration with Frances Smokowski, Aetherscapes and Efficacies: Biomorphic Drawings by Frances Smokowski. opens at Cavin Morris Gallery, NYC, September 18, 2025.
Paul McRandle is a writer and editor, whose recent work includes Hieroglyphic Nomad (Phasm Press, 2020), a poetic travelogue in collaboration with the artist Kirstin Chappell. His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Hyperion, Peculiar Mormyrid, The Philosophical Egg, Under/Current, American Book Review, Rain Taxi, New England Review, and elsewhere. He co-edited the anthologies Nigredo and Aerial Archipelago, edits the blog Surrealist NYC, and served as the arts editor for the journal 3rd bed.
Valery Oisteanu is a poet, writer and artist. Born in the USSR (1943) and educated in Romania, he adopted Dada and Surrealism as a philosophy or life and art in the early 1960s and immigrated to New York City in 1972. He has authored 19 books of poetry as well as a forthcoming collection of essays titled “The Avant-Gods.” The recipient of the Kathy Acker Award (2013) for contribution to the American avant-garde in poetry performance, he takes part in theatrical and other poetry-musical collaborations with jazz artist from around the world in seasons he dubs “Jazzoetry.”
Notes
1. Constraints of type refer to known expectations that the type satisfies, and to any other mode or gesture that marginalizes or smothers surprise and similar provocations.
2. One review of Nigredo has appeared in the bulletin INFOSURR: Actualités du surréalisme et ses alentours, No. 161, mai-juin 2022.
3. The three collages and one painting imaged here are (from top to bottom, left to right) Apparition 26, by Joan Hall; Throne of Heaven, by Sherri Higgins; Crocodile Queen, by Kathy Fox; and Crisis (2001), by Susana Wald.