The 20th Century has been a volatile and vastly variable epoch. It's myriad social, political and cultural currents and countercurrents - it's ever increasing expansion of the 19th Century dialectic into manifold polylectics - seem almost to cancel out one and another, leaving entropy as the net result.
Nevertheless, if one seeks not to summarize such an array of concepts and manifestations, the real nature of the century comes forward. The aggregate character of the last 80-odd years is not just unhomogenizable, it is anti-homogeneous.
The 20th Century is marked above all by variety, dissonance and the coexistence of what are in fact mutually insupportable factors. Embodying this as an overriding aesthetic for our century is the method of composition and communication variously called collage, montage, and nonsequitur. No matter the form or medium of communication, this mode relies on disjuncture, rhythmic displacement, and the confounding of expectation. Rules of verbal structure and narrative context are undermined and broken outright in modern literature; the sequencing of events in drama and dance are reconsidered & reconstituted; tonal harmonic relationships in music are destabilized and realigned; images in visual art are formulated discontinuously & assume coherency in no previously logical way.
Basic perceptions and societal presumptions have thus been challenged constantly since the century began. This collage aesthetic predominated in the most remarkable and influential art of the early 20th Century expressly to challenge (and even pre-empt) the linear, progressive certainties on which earlier social concepts were predicated.
Since the last world war the collage aesthetic has come to shape not just art, but most aspects of communication, as montage-intensive media like cinema and radio have established themselves and as montage-intensive formats like television have emerged to supersede even those.
Given this virtual redefinition of our society (most especially if "society" can be defined as a civilization's common, or even communal self-perceptions) according to a grammar of fracture and disjuncture, the importance of a collage aesthetic is self evident. Indeed, it would not be unfair to regard the work of any modern, particularly postwar, artist as either confirming or denying, celebrating or contradicting, the collage aesthetic. It would be wrong to fault those artist whose homogeneity of image and method argues against the prevailing collage mode; in emphasizing internal contradiction the collage aesthetic even incorporates the supposedly contradictory idea of purity - overriding, however, any universal implication to which that idea might pretend proposing instead a kind of "purity for awhile," as if the function of the purity concept were to propose a (periodic cleansing). As such those artists who preach or practice coherence, uniformity, and singularity of form, subject, or concept, play an important role - almost a religious one - in the function of today's collage aesthetic.
Even so, those artists who consciously practice embodiments of the collage aesthetic are the ones who speak directly to the current condition of Western civilization. Whether they reify, criticize or parody this condition they concern themselves with actualities and probabilities drawn from there given environment.
It is ironic to describe someone's thinking as "in tune" with an essentially dissonance-ridden world view, but dissonance can be a form of consonance when its inherent patterns are grasped. Charles Mingus III has grasped some of these patterns; having perceived what is inherent to the collage aesthetic, he has developed modes of expression coherent to it. I emphasize the plural, modes of address; Mingus works
in at least two manners, manners which are related but are still quite distinct. This in itself indicates Mingus' responsivity to the collage world view: his oeuvre displays a considered and controlled inconsistency. On the one hand Mingus proposes a delicate world of beautiful abstract images,
satisfyingly geometric figures set in harmony with renditions of natural spaces (e.g. sea, sky, inscapes). More frequently, however, Mingus sets aside this implosive formalism - which harks back to Rosenquist & Rauschenberg, and even farther to the Jazzy figural tropes of Montparnasse Cubists like Gleizes & Marcoussis and Cubo Futurists like Severini & Malevich - in favor of a more pictorially coherent depiction. This coherency, is the coherency of the collage aesthetic; it may suggest the
veristic rendition of earlier aesthetics, but in fact subverts that rendition with its jumps in context and superposition of contexts. The jocular "Junior bird man" gesture which Pope John Pall II flashes at photographers not long after his ascendance makes no "sense" ironic or otherwise, juxtaposed with a picture of a chimpanzee, playing "ring toss" and feeding a porpoise against a noon time desert landscape
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