Collage: cut + paste, curated by Thodoris Markoglou of the State Museum of Contemporary Art, sought to map Greek artists’ employment of the medium, reaching back to the roots of collage’s first appearance in the country in the 1950s, while exploring its recurring nature in contemporary production.

As with any historical exhibition where the medium is pretty much the message, one has to realise the dangers of a linear and didactic presentation, especially when adhering to certain geographical limits. However, albeit the architectural division between the more historical works — on the second level — and the clearly contemporary ones — on the first level — the show did not feel as an art history lesson at all. Nonetheless, what could, in fact, have been its standout point, turned out to be the exhibition’s main weakness: rather than devising a survey of the development of the medium in Greece, the works seemed to be put forward as individual products of several artists’ creativity, as purely aesthetic objects offered to the viewer to sample a certain technique. Unfortunately, the result was as fragmented as the nature of the medium itself.

The beginning of the exhibition marked the advent of collage in the country and predominantly included work that falls into the modernist categorisation of the medium. In this part the visitor was meant to have a glimpse into the performative collages of Yiorgos Lazongas and the pop/anti-pop photomontages of Chryssa Romanos. The complete de-contextualisation of the works, however, amplified by the lack of any attempt of interpretation — in the form of wall text — could not but result in the neutralisation of the visual culture of heavily political times, as the 1960s and the 1970s in Greece. For this, Costas Tsoclis’ newspaper collages — produced right in the middle of the military dictatorship — were stripped of their content and displayed as nothing more than personal experimentations.

Moving to the contemporary part, the landscape seemed to be less clear. As a general impression, this section of the exhibition failed to make a coherent statement regarding the selection of artists represented, given that their inclusion did not stem from their consistency towards the use of collage. There were, however, notable exceptions, such as the sculptural-meets-architectural work of Kostis Velonis and the adhesive-tape drawings of Vassili Balatsos. Furthermore, throughout the first floor, one could not help but be aware of the lack of a clear-cut definition of what collage is and what meanings it can bear today. As a result, works like the complex but elegant drawings of Eleni Kamma, as well as Rania Rangou’s reflections on the act of painting, seemed to find their way in the show. In fact, one of the questions brought to the surface by the exhibition was where should the line be drawn to what constitutes a collage, or even, the possibility of defining collage after postmodernism.

Despite its drawbacks, Collage’s most engaging part has to be the exploration of visual work produced by a group of prominent Greek poets, as was the case of Manolis Anagnostakis, Nanos Valaoritis, Kleitos Kyrou, and Odysseas Elytis. Their employment of the image as language, in a process that turns the use of text as image by the Cubists on its back, is challenging at the least, even more so than the work of most of their co-exhibiting (visual) artists.