Urbanization and urban life have changed our lifestyle. The state of mind created by city life is mainly occupied by fleeting images. It is made of “the rapid telescoping of changing images, pronounced differences within what is grasped at a single glance and the unexpectedness of violent stimuli (Georg Simmel)”.
The lecture will talk about the art of Mark Bradford and the development of collage as a medium of creation in the past century. When it comes to collage, there are two kinds of techniques. The first is to chop up something that is complete and regroup the pieces. We can find its employment in cubist art that emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. The second is to piece together the parts of real objects.
A map of a city is the primitive roaming reference for wanderers and explorers. However, it does not reflect the life of the city. Streets are always alive. Wanderers, daydreamers, collectors of stories, objects and images, theatre artists, performance artists and contemporary artists travel from west Europe to the Middle East and then from Middle East to Shanghai.
"We live in a time of transition", argues Yann Moulier Boutang. But the irony is that this is not a transition to a new type of society called ‘socialism’, as many on the Left had assumed; rather, it is a transition to a new type of capitalism.