For “Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments. Collage was like an image of the revolution within me—not as it was, but as it might have been.”
—Kurt Schwitters

“The modern mind is an incredible complex of impressions and transformations; and its product is a fabric of meanings that would make the most elaborate dream of the most ambitious tapersty-weaver look like a mat. The warp of that fabric consists of what we call ‘data,’ the signs [signals] to which experience has conditioned us to attend, and upon which we act often without any conscious ideation. The woof is symbolism. Out of signs and symbols we weave our tissue of ‘reality’.…”

—Susanne Langer Philosophy in a New Key, 1942/71.

“There are a few further points which we ought to note. In the first place, we must remember that we live our childhood as our future. Our childhood determines gestures and roles in the perspective of what is to come. This is not a question of the mechanical reappearance of montages… [The] gestures and roles are inseparable from the project which transforms them… For this reason a life develops in spirals; it passes again and again by the same points but at different levels of integration and complexity.”
—J.-P. Sartre
The Progressive-Regressive Method,
Search for a Method, 1960 /63.

“Croce was not thinking of poetry in particular 
when he said that language is perpetual creation.”
—Wallace Stevens
The Necessary Angel, 1965.

Kurt Schwitters: Colour and Collage

Chaos, Creation & Collage