Some Collages: Jim Jarmusch

Although Jim Jarmusch is best known for his storied career in independent cinema, over the years he has produced hundreds of pieces of collage art, the majority of which has been rarely seen by the public. Drawing inspiration from the largest medium of cultural documentation―newspapers―Jarmusch delicately crafts each work by layering newsprints on cardstock. These small-scale (notecard-size) pieces are often characterized by their tongue-in-cheek nature: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s faces are affixed to nameless suits, two Andy Warhols are posed in a X-Files-esque tunnel, various musicians perform with ever-so-timely surgical masks. Collected here for the first time, [Untitled] showcases Jarmusch’s profanely assembled vision.

Some Collages rescrambles the kind of information and imagery we have become bombarded with in the nonlinear, digital-first present: a surgeon's head in a Covid mask on a suedehead's body; Oz's brainless scarecrow in a fashion shoot, a Lucha libre fighter lost on a Film Noir set; Salman Rushdie with a nine-iron. In generatively wild times, it's the kind of art you didn't know you needed. For Jarmusch, just like the racket and magnitude of his New York, at least with madness you know where you are. It's sense through a squint. - Dazed, September 2021

...They are in fact highly amusing, in an spookily absurdist manner. They recall "La Boutique Obscure," the impressionistic dream diary the Oulipo writer Georges Perec kept between 1968 and 1972, hallucinatory, slightly terrifying, but also frequently funny. Jarmusch's collages are manipulations of something originally presented as fact -- a détournement of photojournalism serrated and spliced into surrealist scenes that collapse time (a Victorian-era woman in a modern hospital room), or illustrate some psychic fantasy (releasing a primal scream while an audience applauds). - The New York Times, September 2021

A small but substantial book bound in beautiful, thick brown paper is filled with almost miniaturist images composed largely in black and white and occupying the chestnut pages like a turn of the century estate sale photo album. But the clippings and photos in this volume have been interfered with, disambiguated, spliced and diced, and transformed into surrealist collages that are smart, creepy, witty and poetic - not unlike, say, a film by their creator, the director Jim Jarmusch. -LA Weekly, Sept. 2021

Jim Jarmusch is a film director, screenwriter, actor, producer, editor, musician, composer, and artist. A prominent figure in independent cinema, his notable films include Stranger than Paradise (1984), Dead Man (1999), and Broken Flowers (2005). Jarmusch is the recipient of the Josef von Sternberg Award, Filmmaker on the Edge Award, as well as both the Camera d’Or and the Grand Prix from the Cannes Film Festival. This is his first book of collage artwork.