Introduction

Summary

The idea of montage and that of technological construction, which is inseparable from it, becomes irreconcilable with the idea of the radical, fully formed artwork with which it was once recognized as being identical. The principle of montage was conceived as an act against a surreptitiously achieved organic unity; it was meant to shock.

—Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

The avant-gardiste work … proclaims itself an artificial construct, an artifact. To this extent, montage may be considered the fundamental principle of avant-gardiste art. The “fitted” work calls attention to the fact that it is made up of reality fragments; it breaks through the appearance of totality.

—Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde

IT IS DIFFICULT TO OVERESTIMATE the influence that Theodor Adorno's 1970 Ästhetische Theorie (Aesthetic Theory, 2002) and Peter Bürger's 1974 Theorie der Avantgarde (Theory of the Avant-Garde, 1984) exercised on the understanding of montage and its relation to modern and avantgarde art. Working in the tradition that construes montage as an intermedial phenomenon and goes back to at least the 1930s and the writings of Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and Sergei M. Eisenstein, Adorno and Bürger enshrined montage as the principle of modern art and the avantgarde, respectively. Such an account of montage has proved extremely productive. Montage became the model for explaining not only the formal features of numerous artworks but also for outlining intermedial relations between the arts, describing the relationship between art and larger cultural formations, and even theorizing the genealogy of modern art.

Montage came to be seen as the artist's response to the new rapidly modernizing and industrializing world, in the face of which traditional means of representation no longer served their purpose. Next to constituting its historical cause, the advent of urbanization ushered in a novel mode of perceptual experience that, according to this paradigm, is precisely the effect that montage sought to emulate. It did so in the arts as diverse as visual art, plastic art, performance, music, theater, film, and literature, and in practices as varied as painting, collage, photomontage, assemblage, construction, sculpture, environment, happening, agitprop, epic theater, music theater, commercial film, avant-garde film, poetry, drama, and prose, among others.