"Archives do not carry ethical characteristics; they are in that sense amoral. Moral quality is the input of those who access them; people make sense of the archive; not the other way around." (Dan & Kiraly in subREAL: Politics of Cultural Heritage, 1996, p. 113)
Collage, archives, and memory go hand in hand. Our archive is the memory that allows collage to make sense for us. Take the flower picture created with stamps. Our foreknowledge of stamps and the drawings on them as well as our foreknowledge of flowers and vases are important to understanding the collage. Perloff (1986) suggests (on p.49) that these collages bear both an external reality (what is the image) and a referential reality ( what do the collaged images refer to). For us, then, the collage not only gives us new imagery to see but also reminds us of the imagery from which it was taken.
Does collage then function as an hyponema for that which we knew?
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