Two contemporary anarchist artists who have succeeded in creating effective future imagery are James Koehnline and Freddie Baer. By employing the technique of collage, both artists have effectively combined criticism of contemporary reality with visions of alternatives. Their collages challenge contemporary political reality by portraying its disintegration and then creating new visions from the broken fragments. Collage is a popular technique with many modern artists, but a collage often ends up as merely a pastiche of cuteness, a collection of meaningless fragments pasted together. A truly effective collage brings different meanings together in a dialectic gestalt to create a new, integrated meaning.

Freddie Baer’s collages are especially effective in contrasting the death of contemporary civilization and imagining a new world. She brings the old and the new into dialectical interaction and the postmodernist fragmented narrative is re-integrated. She portrays the contemporary world as a sterile technological, mechanistic environment of controls, clocks, and organization. To counter this vision and to open up the possibility for a different reality, she appropriates into her collages images of the natural environment, social life, interaction – all representing a culture of life and vitality, suggesting growth and expansion. Baer makes effective use of historical images – memes and moods that are familiar and comfortable. Some of her images are reminiscent of, if not direct appropriations of classical Greek sculptural art, nineteenth century graphic art, organic images of Art Nouveau, as well as clippings from contemporary newspapers. The titles of her works carry political messages as well: an image of a woman warrior striding down a nineteenth century boulevard bearing flowers in both hands is entitled, “Don’t Fuck with Mother Nature.” In others, the humble and the personal is shown in stark contrast to a large and menacing machine – a Japanese woman goes about her business serving tea and playing a musical instrument while in the background gigantic gears seem to be ready to chew her up. Baer sums up elements of her aesthetic style in the introduction to Ecstatic Incisions: The Collages of Freddie Baer:

A more coherent theory needs to be developed that takes into account past history and current events, a theory that won’t become stagnant and dogma[tic] but can grow and incorporate the changes taking place in our world and respond to current events. This theory needs to be self-critical and self-examining. Anarchists should also examine their own motives, need to change. Dysfunctional by living in this society, by which methods can individuals heal themselves, becoming more whole and complete beings? How can we change the world and ourselves simultaneously?

Artpolitik: Social Anarchist Aesthetics in an Age of Fragmentation by Neala Schleuning (Minor Compositions 2013). Available open access at MinorCompositions.info.