I am trying to recreate the 200 pages that comprise Max Ernst’s 1930s “surrealist novel in collage”, Une Semaine de Bonté using only Google Image Search. Right now Monday is the only finished book in my series, with the others close behind. The original stories were issued in 5 volumes as a series of pamphlets in 1934, the source material for the brilliantly bizzarre scenes being culled mostly from romance novels, textbooks, and illustrated pornography. The result was a punk-ish critique and satire of the ruling class – a zine before zines. With Une Semaine de Bonté (A Week of Kindness), Max Ernst constructed a masterpiece of surrealism and storytelling that paved the way for decades of exploration in collage and photomontage. Today, with the global availability of tools like Google Images, and the limitless platform for sharing online, digital collage has become a routine practice for an entire generation of artists. I am recreating each of the original compositions individually, using only the top image results* from specific keyword searches on Google Images. It’s a language exercise first: translating a visual language into keywords, which go through the Google algorithm to produce a set of images – mostly stock photography and other sponsored media – and parsing through the results to find the pieces that I will use to reconstruct the original plates. What results each time is a new piece and a new artistic statement, based on the use of modern visuals and signifiers. The intrigue for me is letting new levels of meaning develop organically from the process and figuring it out as I go. *Top 200 (first 10 pages), unrefined. Each collage is created using the fewest searches possible.
