Catalysing encounters: collage in the work of Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, and Frank O'Hara, 1930-1970

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This thesis offers a cross-section of the workings of collage – a key twentieth-century creative mode – across the disciplines, and on both sides of the Atlantic, navigating a path through plastic art, prose, and poetry, and assessing the medium’s viability as both a physical practice and a theoretical principle. It argues that artistic systems of order, upon whose assumed absence the collage aesthetic is founded, are replaced by intuition. The act of decoding required from the viewer or reader constitutes an intellectual and emotional challenge whose rules of engagement necessitate not necessarily the discovery of any particular message but the gradual discernment of the unique regulating system behind each poem, novel, or work of art. Following the expatriation to America of many European avant-garde artists in the early twentieth century, collage took root particularly amongst New York-based artists and writers seeking broader fields of representation. For Joseph Cornell, William Bu

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