In Which the Magpie Spies Collages in the Trees

Mike Nichols’s films . . . Hannah Höch’s cut-outs . . . Wallace Stevens’s jar on a hill

Magpie, definition, Cambridge Dictionary: 1) a bird with black and white feathers and a long tail, 2) someone who likes to collect many different objects, or use many different styles

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The director Mike Nichols once commented to a friend of the Magpie’s that film was mostly shapes on screen. It was a brilliant and odd observation from a man who was so sharply insightful about relationships (Carnal Knowledge), generational angst (The Graduate), and power (everything he did). He seemed to have been suggesting that when we think we’re responding to the talk or the drama or the charisma of the actors, what we’re really being moved by is shapes, moving. If his great theme was, indeed, power from the most intimate to the most macro levels, then his comment might mean that we have some kind of primal relationship to the shadows cast by objects and people as much as, if not more than, the objects and people themselves. Could this be true? Is there a deep grammar of shapes that has never been mapped?

For instance, the shreds of plastic bags and other things—sneakers, pieces of umbrellas, items of clothing—that are now visible in the branches of bare trees in the city where I live. They seem like the shapes of sadness, of forgotten creatures, bits of personal history, discarded moments that drifted up and got caught in the trees in another season. Now they’re exposed, tattered, wind-blown, and whenever I glimpse them, often from the window of an elevated train, I wish someone would take them down and give them a proper burial. They have no dignity, clinging in shreds like that. It’s the shape of the tatters I find poignant, and the way, say, the arm of a sweatshirt will be wrapped around a branch, the rest of the sweatshirt hanging down, that makes me want to look away. I mean, it’s nothing, really: trash in the trees. When the trees bloom again, the trash will disappear. But I can’t shake the feeling that there are spirits in those lost things, animistically; and how did they get there, anyway? How do they stay there, all winter long? There is something of a desperate persistence in these wraiths.

Backing away from anthropomorphizing for a moment, I could also see them as found collages, the detritus of the city cut up by chance and affixed to natural things by nothing more than wind and arboreal architecture. They might be Dada installations, urban readymades, their meaning radiant and continually shifting with the wind. Dada collagist Hannah Höch, who made her works out of found images from magazines, often of women, is frequently read as a commentator on women’s position in society, but what if she was also reading gender as a commentary on, or play of, shapes? As a Surrealist, Höch believed in what she called “the beauties of fortuity.” As a bisexual, Höch’s desire was fluid, moving among shapes, shadows of the ever-irreplaceable original good thing. Why do we think her collages mostly concerned the Greater Good of Womankind? Gender may have been her medium, but was it necessarily her subject? Maybe the torn-out, mass-produced, clichéd shapes of women and men were just her way of thinking through something else.

Anyway, I think Höch would have liked the trash in the trees, the beauty of their fortuity, and the way in which, together, they make a weird, third thing for which we have no particular name. The Nazis had a name for Höch’s juxtapositions: They called her art “degenerate.” She spent most of World War II quietly working away in her house outside Berlin. I often think of her, sitting in her house cutting pictures out of magazines with scissors, layering found shapes, ripping holes in images, joining unlike things year after year, as the war went on its bloody way. Was she brave, or not? I’m not sure.

I spent one whole winter in Berlin trying to get special permission to see that house of Höch’s, which is only open to the public one day a year, in the fall. I failed, but it seemed fitting, Dada-wise, that that inner door to Höch’s privacy would open according to an accident of the calendar. And what did I hope to see, anyway? Her furniture? Her shapes were her obsession. If one looks at them without paying all one’s attention to the various genders of the figures, what one notices is a continual imbalance of scale. Faces, and facial features like noses, are massive while bodies are tiny; the faces themselves are distorted, one side or feature much bigger than the rest. The shapes work the way memory works, focusing on a few elements without regard for the surrounding world or what may have been going on in History. I remember your eyes. I remember that leader’s hateful smile. I remember the forced happiness crowding out the pile of broken parts in the bottom corner. The shapes are cut out according to the scale of their importance to the one framing them. We experience the scale subliminally, before we note the content. And maybe that’s what Nichols meant: The scale of, say, a close-up gets to us in the split second before we even see the identity of the face. Or maybe that’s what the Nazis meant by “degenerate”: What matters is determined by the artist on a certain day or moment, and its exact meaning is abundantly elusive. The artist’s eye decides what figures or shapes dominate a given landscape, not the dominion of a particular leader or group.

In the Wallace Stevens poem “Anecdote of the Jar,” the speaker puts a jar on a hill in Tennessee whereupon the jar “took dominion everywhere” despite being “gray and bare” and “round,” i.e., just a jar. But once it is placed on the hill, it organizes the landscape around it. “The wilderness rose up to it/ And sprawled around, no longer wild.”

When I think of that poem, the tatters seem almost unbearably brave to me, holding their position in the wind.