soresecest t tthe

Why photo montage?

By MIKE CONSTABLE

The Canadian Tribune asked the
cartoonist, Mike Constable, to inter-
view Richard Slye, an artist working
in Toronto and specializing in photo
montage.

C.T. Why do you do photo mon-
9

Slye: I think it is a more concen-
trated way of saying things than the
other forms ofart I’ ve done. I used to
paint, but I find that with montage
not only are you using familiar im-
ages, but each image has its own par-
ticular meaning to the viewer.

C.T.: Where do you get those im-

°

Slye: From anywhere —
magazines, ads, news pictures. It’s a
new development in the arts. Well, I
should say it’s not new but has fallen
into disuse. That’s why I got in-
volved. It’s part of a search for polit-
ical art. Its importance is not in its
esthetics but in its capacity to carry
meaning in a form the other graphic
arts cannot.

C.T.: You say it’s not a new de-
velopment?

Slye: Its use goes back to 12th Cen-
tury Japan, but its recent European
development dates from Braque and
Picasso prior to the First World War.
It was born of a breakdown in the
tradition of easel painting and the
contradictions of capitalist society,
the coming of war and economic
breakdown.

C.T.: When did photo montage
come onto the scene?

Slye: It came into being in several
places at once. It coincided with the
birth of the Soviet Union. It involves

DER SINN DES
HITLERGRUSSES3

AT-Z

the use of cut-up images to produce
others. If collage in painting was one
of the ways the crisis of art was seen
by European painters, then photo
montage was a more direct political
way of challenging the conventions
of mass art, which was advertising
and political manipulation.

That’s what John Heartfield did in
pre-war Germany. The Soviets were
using it to create a kind of cinema of
static art in their posters and exhibi-
tions, with artists such as Rodchen-
ko, Tatlin and Lizitsky.

C.T.: You mention Heartfield.
What were the conditions he chal-
lenged?

Slye: Nothing exemplifies more
the fact of photo montage having
been born of political necessity. He
saw a Very important thing, the way
political maniuplation was going to
be accomplished in Germany, by a
new direction, visual images rather
than, as in the past, by primarily
written means. In this way, Icansay,
he anticipated the all-pervasive
image factory of television. Take
Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi film,
Triumph of the Will. We can see here
that Hitler was to be created as
‘‘Fuehrer’’ by a film image alone.
Banked flags, massed troops, spot-
lights, etc. were used to create in the
viewer a feeling of awe, of passivity.

But take Hitler’s fascist salute and
turn it into the acceptance of a bribe,
and you have .a fine example of
Heartfield’s photo montage as a de-
bunker of that totalitarian image.

C.T.: That sounds like modern ad-
vertising.

Slye: Exactly modern advertising.
I think artists today have no less a
responsibility toward de-mystifying
the image banks of modern advertis-
ing than Heartfield did. Photo mon-
tage should be taught in primary
schools.

One of the building blocks of con-
sumer society is producing new gen-
erations of kids incapable vf un-
scrambling the images that define
who they are.

Whom would kids rather come
home to? Their parents or Ronald
McDonald? Collage breaks up that
context.

Take a beautiful bedroom ad from
Better Homes and Gardens. The
father is riding an Exerciser. Replace
that machine with a South American
peasant. Place a child in the fore-
ground beside a pile of rifles. Scatter

’ bullets on the floor. Through a win-

dow you can see an explosion.
And so, an ad for a consumer life-

style has been transformed into a

critique of the lifestyle itself.

RICHARD SLYE

—

Despite everything

CANADA ON STAGE: Canadian
Theatre Review Yearbook 1979.
Series editor Don Rubin, senior editor
Mimi Mekler, CTR Publications,
York University, 411 pp., cloth-
bound, $19.95.

There was some concern a year
ago that cutbacks might end the
Canada on Stage annual. Presuma-
bly enough alarm was sounded so
that there is now a sixth edition —
big, bold, handsome, interesting and
substantial, a very useful reference
book as well as one for nostalgia.

It lists the year’s shows, with
playwrights, directors, designers,

choreographers, stage managers and

the casts of 160 professional theatres
(as many as in the 1978 round-up)
who prodiiced 930 shows (80 more
than 1978). There are 300 ‘scene
photos and a 5,800-item index. Pro-
ductions are grouped as winter,
summer, festival and young people’s
theatre.

Canada’s 1979 repertoire included
some of the classics but leaned heav-
ily on modern scripts from U.S. and
U.K., including too many commer-
cial potboilers, with a lesser number
of serious plays and meaty comedies
from France, Italy, Germany, Nor-
way and Sweden. There was modest
use of Brecht but, on cursory check,
only one modern Soviet play, virtu-

**Man today is compelled to fight
against the objective, external hor-
rors accompanying the collapse of
our social system, against fascism,
against. war, unemployment, the
decay of agriculture, against the
domination of the machine, but he
has also to fight against the subjec-
tive reflection of these things in his
own mind. He must fight to change
the world, to rescue civilization, and
he must fight also against the anarchy
of capitalism in the human spirit.”

— from the
recently-reprinted The
Novel and the People, by
Ralph Fox, who died in the
defense of the Spanish
Republic

As a political party, our primary
objective is political. It concerns the
question of social power.

But the struggle for the assump-

This is the preamble of a resolution
approved by the 24th National Con-
vention of the Communist Party of

Canada held in Toronto during
January of this year.

tion of political power by the work-
ing community is not simply political
in character, though always with
political implications.

The struggle involves questions of
economics, of philosophy and of cul-
ture. None of these facets can be neg-
lected.

In respect to the question of cul-
ture in Canada, the mass of people in
our.country are constantly thrown
back on a commercial and
machine-made art, increasingly tri-
vial in content and frequently cor-
rupting.

This ersatz is now the chief diet of
all classes in our society. Great
elements ‘in art, in literature and in

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—OCT. 31, 1980—Page 6

philosophy (utilized by the
bourgeois class in its .progressive
phase) are rarely employed by that
class in our times. The move from
rural to urban conditions has di-
minished the folk traditions of the
common people.

Our task is to help bring to life and
to expand in a living modern content
these great folk and democratic
traditions of the people.

In the face of a deep-going cul-
tural crisis in our country, the
serious artist frequently recoils in
horror and retreats to the esoteric,
the remote or the irrelevant.

We face a relentless drive on the
part of corporate power (massively
U.S. corporate power) to achieve

the cultural Americanization of the
capitalist world. Against this, in the
spirit of true internationalism, we
resolve to nourish what is best in all
national cultures bringing to all
these cultures our appreciation, re-
spect and understanding. ae

Mankind’s achievements in the
cultivation of the arts (including
those in our own country) represent
a mighty triumph of the human
spirit. It is an important task of our
party to appreciate — and to aid in
making known to the people of our
country — the character of these
achievements.

We must take all things pro-
gressive in our cultural heritage and
make them elements in furthering
our struggle to bring into being a
better world, where culture will not
be the property of an elite but a
source. for. the enrichment, to a
maximum degree, of the whole
community.

ally none from other socialist coun-
tries, but a few from Athol Fugard of
South Africa. Tragedy, comedy,
farce, musicals, mime and a wide
range of shows for children are
listed.

Again, as in ‘78, roughly half the
scripts (440) were by Canadian writ-
ers, in both English and French, and
included collectively-devised crea- -
tions. Of the plays (about 145) for
children and young people, almost
all were by Canadians.

Bob Allen reports record box-
office at Victoria’s Bastion and Bel-
fry, a revitalized Western Canada
Theatre at Kamloops, success with
historic and contemporary themes
by Theatre Energy in the
Kootenays, and two new theatre
spaces opening on Grenville Island
in Vancouver, new audiences there,
and the fact that during one period 15
companies were playing in. Van-
couver. But he reminds us that most
of the B.C. shows in the latter half of
°79 were undistinguished, of ‘‘ potato
chip’’ quality, safe run-of-the-mill
stuff. :

Jamie Portman notes Peter Coe’s
Broadway thrust at the Edmonton
Citadel (Coe is now gone. Does the
malady linger on?) but lists four
other Edmonton theatres with other
objectives, and tells of Theatre Cal-
gary and Alberta Theatre Projects,
more oriented to Canadian plays.

Robert Armstrong tells us about
the Regina Globe, which defeated
City Hall eviction efforts and won 4
promise of new quarters. There are
notes on Saskatoon’s Persephone
and 25th Street (Paper Wheat)
theatres, Regina’s Stage West dinner
theatre and feelers for a lunch-time
stage.

Jeniva Berger found 1979 ‘‘the
best of times and the worst of times.
Lack of money ... and a change. of
government did not augur well for
Ontario’s army of unemployed per-
formers ... Programs were chopped
... and experimentation turned into
aluxury ... Theatres began to court

- audiences with a new fervor and

commercialism came out of the
closet.’’ But, she felt, ‘‘the Canadian
play had become a given factor.”’
Michel Vais writes: ‘‘It is becom-
ing more and more difficult to keep-
up with the frenetic activity of
Quebec theatre which — season
after season — has begun to take on
the appearance of a permanent festi-
val ... even the most avid theatre-
goer is left breathless. The main
problem ... is a lack of suitable per-

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