Jim Jarmusch can’t stop collaging. The celebrated independent filmmaker, known for movies such as Cannes Grand Prix winner “Broken Flowers” and “Stranger Than Paradise,” has been dabbling in the art form for decades, amassing hundreds of works.
Creating collages is almost a compulsion, a way for Jarmusch to escape from the world and nestle into self-reflection. He scours newspapers for faces, tears them out with his hands and mounts them to sparse, solid-colored backgrounds. Jarmusch never imagined anyone would see the works, but in 2021, he had his art-world debut with an exhibition, “Some Collages,” at James Fuentes gallery in New York. That show coincided with a book of the same name, published by Anthology.
Since then, Jarmusch has stepped further into the art world. His band Sqürl, a collaboration with his producer and composer Carter Logan, created a new original score for a restored quartet of Man Ray’s experimental short films, releasing “Music for Man Ray” last May. In November, Jarmusch added curator to his multihyphenate list of talents: To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Surrealism, he selected 34 images from the Grand Palais’ collection to highlight at Paris Photo, one of the most renowned photography art fairs in the world.
And, of course, Jarmusch has continued to collage. In the last few years, his collages have taken on a darker tone — figuratively and literally, as he now affixes his delicate compositions to black paper instead of a warm manila — and he has sent them to art fairs in France, Hong Kong and Los Angeles. Now he’s presenting his second formal exhibition, “Some More Collages,” which opens March 29 at the James Fuentes gallery in Los Angeles with a book signing. We caught up with Jarmusch to ask him about his collage process, Surrealism and his future as an artist.
The following Q&A has been edited for clarity.
You’ve curated a show and now you’ve had two art exhibitions. Do you feel like you are now officially in the art world?
I move through different worlds. I grew up in rock ’n’ roll clubs, I went through hip-hop worlds, and I obviously went through the film world. I’ve had a lot of friends who are artists since I was young, so I’m sort of in that world without being part of it.
Untitled newsprint collage by Jim Jarmusch, 2023
(All images courtesy of the artist and James Fuentes, Los Angeles and New York)
What encouraged you to do another collage exhibition?
My first book was “Some Collages,” which I got to design with Arielle de Saint Phalle and the people from Anthology, who published it. I wasn’t expecting to have a book or a show, but Arielle de Saint Phalle encouraged me during the pandemic. I’ve been making these minimal newsprint collages for quite a few years now, and I did it mostly for a kind of solitary escape, a form of automatic writing, but with reappropriating visual things. I wanted a new show and hopefully a new small book. The previous show was about reappropriating things and replacements, mostly the heads. The new ones I’ve been making for the last year or so are a little more somber and involve removal with black left behind. They’re sort of a different feel. But I don’t analyze them. They are what they are. I also have a few lithographs in the show.
Why did they get more somber? Are you affected by the state of the world?
I’m sure that has some effect, but they are pretty intuitively created. I don’t like to think about them much when I’m making them. They come out of somewhere that’s not analyzed. When I opened my first show, if the collages seemed overtly political or proselytizing in some way, I would remove them. I tried not to be too obvious about anything,
Why are all the faces removed?
I’m interested in juxtapositions that are not obvious. I worked on a film about William Burroughs many years ago, in the late ’70s, by Howard Brookner, called “Burroughs.” We spent a lot of time, over a year or more, with Burroughs, and I used to sit with him when he was working on his scrapbooks, which were cut-ups from newspapers, magazines and different sources. He would find these unexpected juxtapositions. That was a lingering inspiration.
I’ve always loved Surrealism. I love the disruption of logic. I love masks, and when I switched heads around, it was like playing with masks as well. But now, removing [the heads], they seem stronger. I like my new show more than my previous one, but I don’t look back on anything I do. For example, once my films are completed, have reached a paying audience and [are] distributed, I never look at them again.
Untitled newsprint collage by Jim Jarmusch, 2023
(All images courtesy of the artist and James Fuentes, Los Angeles and New York.)
There’s just one collage in the show that has faces in it. Could you talk more about that work?
That sneaked into the show, and it’s maybe a little doorway into the next series. I always use text from where the image is sourced. There are two faces, I think they’re some kind of billionaire, AI entrepreneur guys. The text refers to them. I don’t know what they mean. I think e.e. cummings said you can understand the poem without knowing what it means. That’s true probably of all my work.
Are you tearing out the faces with your hands, or are you using a tool?
My little tool kit can fit in a briefcase. It has tweezers, whatever backgrounds I’m working with and cutting tools that are usually ballpoint pens that have run out of ink.
What materials do you use?
I love newsprint, because when I was very young, my parents gave me a microscope and the first thing I looked at was the edge of a torn newspaper. It was a jungle of thread. It was very striking, and I still have the image in my head. The fragility of newsprint appeals to me as a tactile substance.
Where are you sourcing the newspapers?
Mostly from the New York Times, but I’ll take them from anywhere. For a while I was making some only from Chinese newspapers that I got from Chinatown. I like the idea that I’m subverting the idea of information and making something else.
What attracts you to this minimalist, highly edited approach?
I love the idea of taking things from other places and making something else out of them, which is why I love sampling and hip-hop or certain schools of poetry that involve game structures. I’ve always loved these head removal and replacements that I find in a lot of artists that I love, like Bruce Conner, Richard Prince, Ray Johnson, John Baldessari and David Wojnarowicz.
Untitled newsprint collage by Jim Jarmusch, 2023
(All images courtesy of the artist and James Fuentes, Los Angeles and New York)
I saw that one of the lithographs uses Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Could you talk about that?
A lot of my collages refer to art. There’s a Frank Stella reference in my book and a number of Warhol references. I use images of art, then basically damage them. I’m not a huge Picasso fan — I respect him, but he’s a little too ego-oriented for me as an artist — but that is one of his most beautiful paintings.
I wanted to make some larger images from the small newsprint collages. In L.A., the small originals are part of the show, and then you can see the lithographs, which are enlargements. Maurice [Sanchez of Derriere L’Etoile Studios] makes them with a very special technique. He re-creates the collages and then fixes them onto the black backgrounds in a similar way to the way I create. Maurice creates lithos in Long Island City for everybody. Every artist you’ve ever heard of goes to him.
All the newsprint [collages] are originals, and they’re very delicate, very small. There aren’t multiples of any of them. I like the idea of making a few larger ones that could be reproduced.
Are there any Surrealists or Dadaists who really inspire you in particular?
Collage-wise, Max Ernst is probably my favorite. There was recently a show at the Pompidou Center, a really exhaustive retrospective of Surrealism. The very early Max Ernst collages were taken out of catalogs, and there was a whole wall of them. It creates a dream world. You disrupt the perceived logic of things in a very minimal way. I love repetition and unexpected connections.
Do the themes in your collages reoccur in your poetry, music or films?
I don’t really think about themes, honestly. When I write a script, I don’t start with the story. I start with characters and actors. I start gathering details —little pieces of dialogue, little ideas, places — and I gather them for quite a long time, sometimes for years. Then I write the scripts very fast. I do the same thing with music, because I’m not a trained musician and structure is not my strength. Sometimes I will lay down, for example, a sort of psychedelic guitar track, and then I’ll lay a second track down without listening first. Then I see what they become. When is the structure kind of aligned? When does it depart? It seems like everything I make has a similar thing, and the collages are just the most reduced illustration of my procedure.
What’s the plan for the new collages?
I would love to make a new book. The only thing I would change [about my first book] is that I put too many collages into it.
Anything else you’d like to share?
I’m not hierarchical about things. I’m a self-proclaimed dilettante. What’s high art, what’s low art, all of that means nothing to me. There’s something about collages — they’re very accessible. They can be primitive or sophisticated or they can be complicated or obscure. I love the collage form because it’s so universal. I’ve made collages alongside children, and we’re all in the same boat.
