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reviews john stezaker
John
stezaker
stills, edinburgh
27 july – 28 october
Our visual world is saturated with the image of the
face; magnified in film close-ups and advertisements,
dissected by artists, scrutinised in the mirror. John
Stezaker is fascinated with image saturation, forcing
those visiting his exhibitions to ‘really look’ at the
images we blindly consume. Here is how Stezaker
once put it: ‘In the Third Mind, William Burroughs
describes the feeling of paranoia induced by ‘really
looking’ at what is before our eyes on an everyday
level… In this sense the encounter with the ready-
made can be a convulsive moment within the
universal blindness that the consumption of images
has become.’ His recent array of cut-and-paste
collages don’t diverge greatly from previous works
and are typically manufactured from images
originating from already-existing popular culture,
which under his surgical knife are spliced and fused
into strange and personified beings, detached from
the world they have come from.
His Marriage series (all works 2007) features
some of his most intriguing collages. Here Stezaker
has combined 1940s and 50s publicity shots,
Mask XXXV, 2007, collage, marrying two glamorous faces to create strange hybrid beings. The nostalgia usually incited
26 x 21 cm. courtesy the artist
by this type of photo is displaced, as faces match up to be not quite one person, and not quite
two, either. Sometimes two women (or men) become one, and sometimes males and females
are fused into androgynous beings – or sporadically effeminate men or masculine women.
What discombobulates is that it seems impossible to see the face as a whole, yet also to visualise
it separated.
In Portraits Stezaker embraces fantasy, amalgamating child models with pedigree cats.
The faces are split so that the forehead and eyes are that of a child and the lower half feline, yet
they again appear neither one nor the other. As in Marriage they elicit a desire to separate, this
time the real from the fantastical, but again it is impossible to fully homogenise or detach them.
In Masks, faces are partially obscured by vintage postcards. The inability to see the face
induces a desire to read meaning into the choice of postcards: does the Lydstep caverns plastered
on one woman’s face suggest emptiness, freedom, vacuousness? Is there a narrative behind a
mountain landscape obscuring a couple kissing, a diamond glittering on her engagement finger?
Stezaker seems to provoke the viewer to peel back the postcards, as if the answer to why each
scene has been selected lies in the concealed face. All that Stezaker reveals is the extent to which
we rely on the face to narrate, and the frustration that ensues when we cannot behold it.
Stezaker has previously commented that by the early 1970s he had decided that he did
‘not want to add to the world of images but only to intervene in what was already there’. In that
intervention he confuses and intrigues the viewer, rendering the face once again strange and
mysterious. And when we cannot identify, cannot read emotions and intentions, cannot ‘really
look’, our reliance on being able to see faces is made visible. Nicole Le Marie
artreview 164
NEW_October_REVIEWS.indd 18 4/9/07 12:43:30
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