Connections/Collage

My name is Mikel Frank, and I am the stage manager at the Metropolitan Museum in charge of production. As important

to me as my job here at the Museum, is what I do outside the Museum. I'm an artist. I have a master's degree in painting, and I love art history. I've worked here for twenty-five years

and I just was floored by the amount of

Madonna and Childs there are, and different ways of

translating that idea. Collage for me is something

that I started with in undergraduate school. I've always been interested in sort of excavating imagery.

And what I wanted to do was take an old iconic painting, which is the Duccio, and

bring it up to the present day. Collage

goes back you know to 200 A.D. when paper was invented. It was a craft and the word actually came from the French papier collé which means glued paper.

It wasn't until the Cubists came along, and turned it into an art form.

The Dadaists would take nonsensical images, sometimes they'd get up on a ladder or chair and drop the paper and see where it fell.

Collage can tell a story and create an idea that wasn't there before by bringing the past up to the present, putting them together, and taking A and B and creating C.

Romare Bearden made an entire block

of interesting moments in time.

He has people in the windows doing different things.

He does an Ascension.

He has a jazz quartet on the street. Just an amazing conglomeration of life being

this kind of jazzy thing that happens outside in the neighborhood. You're taking

elements from all kinds of different places and transcending the material and making it into something new in a way that sort of redefines

a little bit about what your idea of art may be, a little bit about what my idea of art is, where it's becoming something other than what

it was meant to be. I met Robert Rauschenberg and that was the ultimate experience for me in a way, because he's always been a hero of mine. He invented this idea of taking things from the garbage. Winter Pool has this ladder in it that does exactly what I think great art should do. It transforms it, instead of the ladder being a thing you climb on, all of a sudden it's looking like it's something that maybe holds up the piece.

As an artist using appropriated images, when you take it out of context and you put it into a place that is of your own creation

you're changing the meaning of it. There are collage homages. There are portraits

so instead of doing a traditional portrait, you're taking elements of this person's life. I can use, I can use a picture of Rauschenberg or I can use a painting that he did in a way that changes the meaning of it.

And I may get in trouble someday for using these images, but as of now, I just kind of go for it.

It's caution to the wind.