Cut and Paste Around 1900

Cut and paste is a technique that still exists today. Its outstanding history started in the printing age and reached a highpoint towards the end of the nineteenth century that marks the center of my current book project on newspaper clippings in art and science. Selective reading and cutting of newspapers was followed by selective collecting of articles. (For the exhibition see: cut-and-paste.de)

The history of the newspaper reaches back to the early seventeenth century, but its apex came with the industrialized nineteenth century when it reached a broad public and developed into a new form of mass media. Internationalization and specialization of the content of the papers, as well as technical innovations and the acceleration of communications brought about by the telegraph and the expansion of railroads, were some of the catalysts for this enormous increase in access and production around 1900.

Beside its social and sociological implications and the institutional nascence of the clipping (in 1879 when the first clipping office was founded in Paris), my project will focus on the clipping collections of scientists and artists and what they developed scientifically and artistically out of these printed paper slips.

In my comparative case studies - the physicist Ernst Gehrcke from Berlin, the Hamburgian Archive of World Economy and the artist Kurt Schwitters in Hannover - I follow the paths of the paper-object through different, but contemporaneous areas. I will adress the question of art and science that is at stake here through four main motifs: series/reproduction, masses/collective, montage/collage and fact/document. Bringing together the practices and tools of cutting and pasting on the one hand, and the motifs that are connected with these scientific and artistic collections and mountings on the other, it should become evident that cutting and pasting is the epistemic and scientific virtue of the modern age.