THE COLLAGES OF ELENA FATTAKOVA
                by William Benton





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   Writers who make visual art - from Victor 
Hugo to Henry Miller to Elizabeth Bishop - 
invariably think of it as an amateur pursuit,
something to fiddle around with at the leeward
edge of their real work. With Elena Fattakova
this is not the case. She is a poet and a col-
lagist; both things are done with the same 
authority and commitment. Indeed, it is almost
as if the decision to create one or the other
involved little more than just a shift of bod-
ily position.
   The great collagists have all been innova-
tors v artists who at once defined the nature
of collage and stamped it with their own style.
As a result, no form has been so poignantly 
orphaned. Between the peaks of Picasso, Schwit-
ters, Cornell, Motherwell, and Rauschenberg, 
there is almost nothing, an empty, scavenger 
wind.
   Fattakova works within the common vocabulary
of collage, but with one important exception:
she's not an object maker. The process is for
her one of use, in which relations are discover-
ed. In the act of finding them, a look is built
up. Unanticipated symmetries, color and shape,
metaphor and image, rise out of the materials
with the force of immediacy. A photograph of 
a large metal sculpture of a crane (a bird) be-
ing lifted by an industrial crane produces an 
attractive visual rhyme; but by adding to it a 
hasty allusion to origami cranes, is expressed
in a pure collage event. You can almost hear 
the rustle of the paper being creased.
   Collage is a medium in which the irrational, 
the sudden juxtaposition of disparate realities, 
is an essential element of composition. Dissoc-
iation between things is the necessary condition
for the stunning alchemy that connects them.
Fattakova is fluent in this shadow dance at the
edge of the unconscious, where the work of both
poet and artist takes place.



William Benton, The New Yorker



     
 





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