Related Events Education Opportunities

Opening Celebration Fringe Figure Film Series Tours Friday, January 27 The Third Man (1949) The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum offers 6 pm Member Preview Tuesday, March 27, 7 pm many opportunities for free, individualized, 7–9 pm Public Reception docent-led tours and education programs. To Psycho (1960) Exhibition continues through April 23 schedule a tour for your group, organization, Wednesday, March 28, 7 pm class, or friends and family, contact Stephanie Pierrot le Fou (1965) Ruse at 314-935-5624, [email protected], or visit Panel Discussion Thursay, March 29, 7 pm us online at kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/tours. Karen K. Butler, assistant curator, Tivoli Theatre Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum Online Resources 6350 Delmar Blvd. Michael Newman, assistant profes- Visit the Museum’s education section at sor of art history, School of the Art kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu to access down- Institute of Chicago loadable PDFs of this brochure, an educational Curator-led Walkthrough , artist guide related to John Stezaker, and other Saturday, March 31, 1 pm Saturday, January 28, 11 am guides to exhibitions currently on view. Steinberg Auditorium CATALOG WRITING AND ART-MAKING Accompanying the exhibition is a full-color WORKSHOP Lecture monograph that presents the first overview of Stezaker Unmasked John Stezaker: Image Thief John Stezaker’s work from the 1970s onward. Educators: Saturday, February 18, Susan Laxton, assistant professor of Published by in association with 10 am–2 pm art history, University of California, the , , the publica- General Public: Wednesday, April 11, Riverside tion includes over 120 reproductions of the 7–9 pm Monday, March 5 artist’s found images, , image frag- Registration is required; contact Allison 6 pm Reception ments, and selections from his ongoing series Taylor at [email protected] or call 6:30 pm Lecture The 3rd Person Archive. Essays by Dawn Ades 314-935-7918 Steinberg Auditorium and Michael Bracewell, as well as a conversa- tion between the artist and curators Daniel F. Herrmann and Christophe Gallois, examine Stezaker’s practice and methodology within a historical context. The publication is available for sale on site during the exhibition at the John Stezaker was born in England in 1949, and currently lives and Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum and online works in London. He studied at the in London at http://www.ridinghouse.co.uk/publica- in the 1960s, and has since taught at Central Saint Martins School of tions/49/. Art, Goldsmiths College, and the . Stezaker has General Information exhibited widely across the UK and Europe from the early 1970s to The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum is free today; he has recently had solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Freiburg and open to the public 11–6 every day except (2010); Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst Bremen (GAK) (2008); Rubell Tuesday; open 11–8 on Friday. Visitor parking Family Collection, Miami (2007); Stills Gallery, Edinburgh (2007); and is available adjacent to the building, and the White Columns, New York (2006). Major group shows include : Museum is easily accessible via Metrolink The Unmonumental Picture, New Museum, New York (2008); Tate (one block south of the Skinker station). Triennial 2006—New British Art (2006); The British Art Show 5 (2000); For more information call 314-935-4523 or and the 40th Venice Biennale (1982). visit kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu.

John Stezaker is organized by Whitechapel Gallery, London, in collaboration with Mudam, Luxembourg, and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. Support OVERLEAF COVER for the exhibition is provided by James M. Kemper, Mask XXXV, 2007 Marriage (Film Portrait Collage) LXI, 2010 Jr.; the David Woods Kemper Memorial Foundation; 3 1 3 1 Collage, 10 /16 x 8 /8" Collage, 11 /16 x 8 /2" the Hortense Lewin Art Fund; and members of the Collection of Bona Montagu, London Courtesy of the artist and The Approach, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. London

John Stezaker January 27–April 23, 2012 7.

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5. John Stezaker 1. 2. 3.

Untitled (1977) is one of John Stezaker’s From this stockpile of found pictures, he of uncomfortable appropriateness, as if one International. Dissatisfied with their reliance otherwise they have been invisible, and simply for a film and placed outside of the cinema and difficult to read, they remain mysterious A radical approach in the 1970s, appro- 1. 3 Untitled, 1977 earliest found artworks. The photograph creates collages that are deceptively simple, had, by chance, stumbled upon a frightening on language, and, later, with what he saw more circulate.” or in its foyer. Stezaker was drawn to these and unknown, soliciting participation while priation has today become one of many 5 5 Found image, 10 /8 x 7 /8" shows a young man dreamily playing the altering the original image through a single vision of the hidden reaches of this woman’s broadly as the instrumentalization of language images that masquerade as something they holding the viewer at a remove. strategies used by artists to question the Courtesy of the artist and The Approach, piano while an attractive woman watches cut, readjustment, or interruption of two or psyche. Both of the images are old—the in , he soon did away with incor- The artist frequently works in series, many of are not: as he saw it, “these images claimed to ideologies behind the apparent neutrality of London him, her chin resting on her crossed arms, three seemingly incompatible images. These black-and-white, soft focus photograph of porating text into his work, instead altering which remain open over a long period of time. be samples of a promised cinematic entertain- Other series combine and crop a variety the photographic image and its ubiquitous her reflection visible in the shiny surface of combinations of disparate components the woman suggests the bygone era of old and manipulating found images in ways that The initial inspiration for a series often comes ment but never seemed to actually appear of found images—from film stills and film dispersal in consumer culture. Yet over time, 2. Mask XXXV, 2007 the piano. In this position, the black-and- create unexpected connections through Hollywood, and the postcard appears hand- give free reign to the plethora of psychic and from the unexpected association of a dream on the screen. They evoked for me a spectral portraits to photogravure illustrations of Stezaker’s collages remain unique, encour- 3 1 Collage, 10 /16 x 8 /8" 5 white image presents a standard romantic visual rhymes and metaphors, encouraging tinted and artificial—radiating an obsolete cultural associations conjured by the photo- or an experience with finding an image in a and shadowy underworld.” In many ways, it is painted landscapes—in ways that create aging us not only to understand the role of Collection of Bona Montagu, London trope of old Hollywood—the admiring female the viewer to explore the ways in which quality that encourages nostalgic projection. graphic image itself. secondhand bookshop, after which Stezaker this underworld that is explored in Stezaker’s shadow figures or silhouettes, another kind the image in the world of mass culture and who is a muse for the male performer. When common photographic images touch a As Stezaker explains, what fascinates him begins to collect and mount images that he collages—both the constructed nature of the of third person. The Dark Star, Silhouette, and advertising, but to recall, if not realize anew, 3. Stezaker first came across the image, a shared unconscious of dreams, impulses, is the “obsolescence of images, the point at Stezaker describes the way he selects an associates with this event. He may work with film still image—its forms and structures— Fumetti series all share this approach. The the strange wonderment it can reveal. Sonata, 2009 Collage, 10 x 8" prewar film still, it was upside down. He and projections. which they become illegible, mysterious, at image as an “encounter.” Like the nineteenth- groups of images for decades until a single and the psychology of cinematic narrative, Silhouette series, for instance, alludes to Carl Collection of Stephen Bennett, Germany placed it that way on the music stand of which they touch on another world.”1 century French flâneur who strolls through the rotation or juxtaposition makes the whole which proffers tantalizing pleasures and gains Jung’s idea of the shadow as an archetype of Karen K. Butler a piano, where it stood, a coincidence of Mask XXXV (2007) is one of these strangely urban landscape as a passive receptor of the series fall into place: “I love that moment of that are never actually realized. Film stills or the unconscious. As with much of Stezaker’s Assistant Curator 4. staged scene and real scenario, for five years appealing combinations of outmoded Stezaker was a student at London’s Slade world, Stezaker does not search for specific discovery, when something appears out of the studio portraits (another form of film publicity) work, the silhouette here functions as an The Bridge (from the Castle series) XXIV, 2008 1 Collage, 8 /2 x 13" until he recognized it as a work of art. Turned imagery that are both disquieting and fasci- School of Fine Art during the student and imagery that inspires him, but rather lets it ground of its disappearance: the anonymous provide the basis of many of his series, anonymous figure and can be interpreted in a University purchase, Parsons Fund, 2009 the wrong way up, the photograph presents nating. Over a film portrait of a glamorous worker revolts of 1968. The revolution in find him. His relationship to found imagery is space of circulation, where images remain including the Marriage series, the Mask series, number of ways—as a stand-in for the viewer a strange and intriguing doubling of the man movie star, the artist superimposed an political and cultural thinking that swept close to that of the Surrealists, who believed unseen and overlooked.”4 Although the various and the Film Still Collages. or the artist, but also more broadly as the 5. and woman who appear suspended from the ordinary tourist postcard of Lydstep across Europe that year helped change the that beauty, or the marvelous, could be found series raise complex themes and associa- repressed underside of the world of the image NOTES Underworld VI, 1989–90 7 keyboard that recedes ambiguously into the Cavern, a sea cave on the coast of Wales. way that he thought about both art-making in serendipitous encounters with objects and tions that suggest considerable conceptual Many of Stezaker’s works invoke a liminal itself, with its invitation to enter into a realm Collage, 10 x 7 /8" 1. John Stezaker, in an interview with Christophe Gallois and The Silvie Fleming Collection center of the image. Moreover, the roles are At first glance, these two images seem to and image culture. The ideas of the group of images found in the streets and flea markets underpinnings, the artist explains that it is only space or existence that invites the viewer to of fantasy and desire. Daniel F. Herrmann, “The Third Meaning,” in John Stezaker (London: Ridinghouse and Whitechapel Gallery, 2010), 37. reversed: the woman seems to dominate the have nothing to do with each other; their artists and activists known as the Situationist of Paris. Stezaker combined the lessons of after years of intuitive leaps that he begins to take the role of the “third person,” someone 6. man, who now hangs suspended and disem- juxtaposition, however, raises a number of International were especially influential for the Situationist International with Surrealist understand what he has created. who is both party to an event and objectified An image fragment—the corner of a 2. See Dawn Ades, “John Stezaker, Monteur,” in John The End, 1975 1 1 bodied from the keyboard. This simple shift associations that suggest an act of careful him.2 Much of their work employed recap- methods, letting his initial fascination with an or distant from it. This play on perspective is postcard—comprises The End, a work Stezaker, 23. Image fragment, 4 /8 x 6 /8" Courtesy of the artist and The Approach, in orientation transforms the original image, consideration on the part of the artist. tioned images, taken from advertisements image lead to an exploration of both its nature Stezaker began to work with film stills in the thematized in The 3rd Person Archive series, “made” by the artist in 1975. An image of Big 3. John Stezaker, in an interview with Michael Bracewell, London giving it a new life that separates it from its Indeed, these seemingly discordant images and other kinds of promotional materials. as a representation—how images are codified latter half of the 1970s, after the closure of which consists of tiny image fragments of Ben in the lower right corner is set against “Demand the Impossible and More,” in John Stezaker: Rubell Family Collection (Miami: Rubell Family Collection, 2007), 38. commercial role in the everyday world. fit together with remarkable formal preci- Designed to function as a critique of the by social and commercial systems—and large-scale, single-screen cinemas resulted anonymous figures set in indeterminate urban a fiery sunset sky; the four spires of the 7. Selections from The 3rd Person Archive, sion, fostering the feeling that they are visual spectacle of capitalist culture, these the ways in which unexpected juxtaposi- in the dispersal of boxes of publicity material, environments, cut from topographical atlases, Victoria Tower barely appear in the distance 4. Stezaker, “The Third Meaning,” 37. Since the late 1970s, Stezaker has built intimately connected. Stezaker places the appropriated images were altered in ways tions and a shift in context can upend those some decades old, in flea markets and second- geographic encyclopedias, and obsolete to the left. In an interview given thirty years 1976–present 5. John Stezaker, “The Film-Still and Its Double: Reflections an archive from the vast picture-culture postcard over the face of the woman in such that exposed their ideological nature as initial connotations, offering entirely new hand bookshops. Although the term “film still” travel illustrations from the early part of the later, the artist explained the significance 3 13 on the ‘Found’ Film-Still,” in Stillness and Time: Photography 1.23, image fragment, /4 x /16" 7 that developed in the first half of the a way that the opening in the cliffs covers instruments of mass culture. This repur- experiences. According to Stezaker, in both suggests that such images are scenes from an twentiethcentury. In their original context, of the work: “It stood for what I called ‘my and the Moving Image, ed. David Green and Joanna Lowry 1.45, image fragment, /8 x 1" 7 7 twentieth century, including advertise- her eyes and forehead. The rocks in the posing appealed to Stezaker, although his their obsolescence and fragmentation, these actual movie, they are in fact staged scenarios, these figures were essential but also marginal, apocalyptic possibility’ for art, and I titled it (Brighton, England: Photoforum and Photoworks, 2006), 113. 1.4, image fragment, 1 /16 x /8" ments, postcards, film stills, studio portraits, postcard frame her face like the ringlets of approach was less directly political and more manipulated images “reveal something of their often with a heightened moment of tension or like extras in a film. In Stezaker’s series, they The End. I thought—could art be just that? 6. Stezaker, “Demand the Impossible,” 37. Courtesy of the artist and The Approach, encyclopedias, magazines, and novellas. her hair, further contributing to the sensation experimental than that of the Situationist image quality: they become visible, where directed narrative, designed as advertisements are recast as central characters, but, grainy Just finding, and taking out of circulation?”6 London