JOHN STEZAKER

Press contact: 875 North Michigan Avenue Chicago, IL 60611 312.642.8877 [email protected]

PRESS Table of Contents

2014 Artinfo, October 14, 2014, “John Stezaker Loses Control at Petzel,” by Scott Indrisek.

The Saturday Paper, August 30, 2014, “Joe Furlonger and John Stezaker,” by Patrick Hartigan.

Ocula, July 30, 2014, “Ocula Conversation: John Stezaker,” by Stephanie Bailey.

Artinfo, July 30, 2014, “Interview: John Stezaker on ‘Collages’ at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney,” by Nicholas Forrest.

The Guardian, March 217, 2014, “John Stezaker: ‘Cutting a photograph can feel like cutting through flesh,’” by Sean O’Hagan.

2013 Art in America, November 27, 2013, “John Stezaker, Berlin, at Capitain Petzel,” by Mark Prince.

2011 The Guardian, January 29, 2011, “John Stezaker: What a carve up,” by Brian Dillon.

The Art Newspaper, January 24, 2011, “So much emerges from what I destroy,” By Louisa Buck.

2010 Artforum, April 2010, “Third Life,” by Martin Herbert.

The Guardian, January 28, 2010, “Artist of the week 72: John Stezaker,” by Skye Sherwin.

2009 artnet, November 17, 2009, “Chicago A Go-Go,” by Brook S. Mason.

ARTslant, September 2009, “Juxtaposed,” by Robyn Farrell Roulo.

Art in America, June/July 2009, “Exhibition Reviews: John Stezaker, Friedrich Petzel,” by Stephen Maine.

Artforum, March 2009, “John Stezaker,” by Michael Wilson.

New York Times, March 19, 2009, “Art in Review: John Stezaker,” by Ken Johnson.

2008 Art Review, The Power 100 Issue, November 2008.

Art World, January 2008/December 2007, “John Stezaker,” by Ben Luke.

2005 Frieze, March 2005, “Demand the Impossible,” by Michael Bracewell. !! John Stezaker Loses Control at Petzel! ! BY SCOTT INDRISEK | OCTOBER 14, 2014! BLOUIN ARTINFO!

!John Stezaker's "Shadow 1," 2014, currently on view at Petzel in New York. (Courtesy Petzel Gallery )! “Women’s hair is a problem,” said John Stezaker, walking me through his latest exhibition at Petzel in New York (through November 8), which contains a new series of large-scale silkscreen-on-black-canvas paintings adapted from film stills. “It’s amorphous, it’s all sorts of strange shapes. So the only women I could use are ones with very specific coifs.” Outlines and contours are important to these works because Stezaker has excised the main figures, leaving their silhouettes (and the shadows the actors originally cast on the image’s background). The 65-year-old British artist is perhaps best known for his collage works that jam together conflicting images — natural landscapes, or trains, layered over human faces — as well as a series, titled “Marriage,” for which he creates fictional hermaphrodites by folding together portraits of male and female actors. But “removal — taking things away, is one of the strategies in my !work,” Stezaker clarified, and has been for quite some time.! It’s tempting to read a narrative into these silk-screens — the police interrogation! A violent scuffle! A man and a woman confronting their dying romance! — but Stezaker is against that sort of thing. “My work is about removing images from those kind of readings,” he said, “taking them out of that context of legibility and trying [to] confront what’s left of the image when it’s drained of signifiers.” The basic contours of this latest series, the artist said, were fleshed out in a 1989 piece. That silkscreen was based on a film still !depicting young children and their parents; Stezaker blotted out the parents.!

http://www.blouinartinfo.com/photo-galleries/slideshow-john-stezakers-new-silkscreens-at-petzel-gallery Scale itself has waxed and waned over the artist’s career; in comparative terms, these new works are huge. Stezaker, back in the late ’70s, received a fan letter from recent art-school grad Sherrie Levine, who wrote that she and her friend Richard Prince had noticed his work in a magazine and found it interesting. “[They said] if I was ever in New York to pop in and join the discussion,” Stezaker recalled. “It was my first positive feedback — I almost caught the next plane!” During that pivotal visit he remembers the impressive scale that young artists like Robert Longo were working on; he also visited the Museum of !Modern Art and found himself floored by the physical dimensions of Barnett Newman’s paintings.! “I went back to England desperate to start working on that scale,” he said. And he did, until life intervened: Stezaker hurt his back, which made silk-screening difficult; he started teaching and suddenly “small-scale suited working on the evenings and weekends.” In many ways this new exhibition is a return to larger form and also, he said, a way to visually compete with the vastness of Petzel’s relatively new exhibition space on West 18th Street. (The viewing room at the gallery does hold a series of recent, intimate collages, made from cutting and layering two different film stills atop each other.) Picasso, oddly enough, also had an effect on these larger silhouette works — or at least what Stezaker termed the “bodily scale, that sense of bodily presence” in Picasso. In some ways, the silhouettes allow the viewer to enter into the !painting, to fill that emptied-out role.! The exhibition changes gears quite abruptly with a 2014 film, “Blind,” that gets its New York debut here. It’s a 90-second loop composed of nearly 2,000 film stills from Stezaker’s archives, each flashed on screen for a mere 1/24th of a second. Its part of a series of films the artist has made by combining stills of varying types: He’s got one about horses, one about churches, one about large, German crowds. “Blind” isn’t thematic — there’s no underlying connection between any of these images — and it’s actually the result of a fortuitous mistake. Stezaker had gone through his archive, placing stills into two boxes — one to scan for the film, one to skip. “Anything with text or color was out,” he said. “I had all sorts of ideas — I had conceived it as black-and-white. But the person who was scanning them happened to be Brazilian, and her English wasn’t very good. She thought the box I wanted scanned was the one I didn’t want !scanned. When it came back it was unbelievably beautiful.”! Letting yourself get absorbed by “Blind” is a disorienting experience. There’s no real way of knowing how long the film is, before it loops; you see things but can’t really explain what they are (or if they’re even there). Stezaker said that he originally intended the film to be purely abstract, since technically the brain isn’t able to process images at 1/24th of a second — but then he found out that this is somewhat of a fallacy, since flashes and snippets of imagery are indeed retained. “Everyone sees something different,” he said. When Stezaker screened an early cut for Jack Miller, his dealer with the Approach in London, Miller approved, but said he was “concerned about all the swastikas.” They went back through the thousands of stills and indeed found some Nazi imagery — but it was a mere eight stills in total, which !somehow Miller’s brain had processed in the blur of images.! Gisela Capitain, Stezaker’s Cologne gallerist, was one of the next advance viewers. “She said, ‘It’s strange, the way the nudity stands out,’” Stezaker recounted. “And there was no nudity — these are 1940s, ’50s [stills], there’s no nudity in films of that period. That’s when it first began to click: everyone does see something different, because it’s operating beneath the conscious radar of ordinary perception. What you’re seeing is going directly to your brain.” Not everyone is happy with his recent film-collage experiments, Stezaker admitted. “My work is generally very contemplative, and about stillness, halting the image,” he said. “This is about violence, and mobility, and the incessant cinematic image: Too-muchness.” As a counterbalance to his usual working methods — grappling with the source material, changing it or obfuscating it, redirecting its potential meanings — “Blind” was an exercise in abandon. “Every time I look at this film, I see a different film, and I find that disconcerting,” he said. “I’m a control freak.”

http://www.blouinartinfo.com/photo-galleries/slideshow-john-stezakers-new-silkscreens-at-petzel-gallery

Joe Furlonger and John Stezaker

AUG 30, 2014 BY: PATRICK HARTIGAN

Two very different artists traverse the twin peaks of innocence and economy.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND ANNA SCHWARTZ GALLERY John Stezaker’s Opening I (1994)

Economy is a rare and important thing in art. Even when it looks to have been achieved, it will be snatched away at the last second – no longer merely there, but uncomfortably anchored by deliberation and agenda. The concept of economy in painting can be found in the briefness and immediacy of its gesture and the emptying out of anything unnecessary. Colin McCahon referred to that very first, very direct quality of response – something so close yet so unattainable – as innocence. But he also acknowledged the paradox and difficulty of achieving such a thing with the knowledge and awareness of needing it.

To find oneself in a room of uncomplicated works born out of complication and deliberation is always a treat; it is to be in the grip of nothing in particular but something very decisive. These things hold you in their grip rather than offering up the cheaper luxury of assessing their merits. That’s the experience I recently had in a small room at Sydney’s Hughes Gallery where a suite of Joe Furlongers currently hang. The works making up Joe Furlonger: Grainfield Markingsinclude one large acrylic painting, a couple of ink studies and a set of gouaches titled Between St George and Dirranbandi (2014). As a group they quietly unlatched the door on an artist I’ve felt drawn to but struggled to be taken in by.

Furlonger’s paintings continue along a dotted line crossing the palimpsest paintings of Ian Fairweather, the muted tones of Sienese frescoes and the fleeting marks of Chinese brush painting. It’s hard to say what it was that bothered me about his paintings but I suspected it had something to do with their comfy Australian attire, the collar of that painterly language and learning in response to the landscape. Never entirely sure whether they were their own things or merely disciples of somebody else’s, the couple of Furlonger exhibitions I’ve seen over recent years had left me begging for an axe blow against that impetuous horizon line, some shadow of doubt at the very least.

Thinking along this line reminds me of an experience I had at a major Fred Williams exhibition a few years ago. There was a moment in it, during his You Yangs series of pictures, when the works overcame the pathology of the horizontal so entrenched in landscape painting, and rose into the toughness and tenderness of grace. A few of the You Yangsworks weren’t vertical so much as directly strung between the side-to-side sweep of the land and the stalwart up and down of a gum or crucifixion. Among rooms of works more habitual and limp, they reminded me of how dreadfully complex, but worth the effort of negotiating, the Australian landscape is for a painter. For Williams the moment was, unfortunately, all too brief as he slid back into his horizon habit – those late cheesy Whistler-esque beachscapes, for instance.

I don’t speak about any of this lightly: the landscape has been the one subject through which Australian painting has found its mystery and grace. And while it persists in being something of the painter’s religion here, it shouldn’t be surprising that the lure and magnitude of that mystery led to certain habits. So why, in a small room of Furlongers, doing what his paintings seemingly always do, am I suddenly held captive? Why do I neither care about nor notice that unflagging division between top and bottom? Was it my own blind spot or gripe, or something in this hang and the presence of relatively few works that captured the breadth of his process? Taking scope into consideration it occurs to me there might be another clue in the form of an ink study,Combine Harvester (2012); perhaps that detail, the way it sullies the habit, provided a little key.

The reasons, while curious to this hesitant admirer, needn’t matter. Until the end of September, Furlonger’s works are right there, tenderly and effortlessly nailed down by their faith.

The qualities of economy and innocence find a completely different guise in the collages of British artist John Stezaker, currently on display at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney. When I first encountered Stezaker’s works at the Biennale of Sydney, huddled in a room of their own at the Museum of Contemporary Art, I found pleasure in the way they interacted, as a group and activity, with the prevalence of video art. Amid technologically savvy peers there was something both chaste and coquettish, a quaint lifting of the skirt, about these modest juxtapositions and excisions of foggy Hollywood memorabilia, of old studio portraits and production stills.

While collage, the technique of cutting and pasting as we generally know it, was keenly adopted by all schools of early Modernism, it continues to provide the playpen for Surrealists. Stezaker takes a canny, wilfully childlike knife to the formalisms of studio photography, sometimes emerging with worlds more odd and tense. While the associations found in his pasting can seem alarmingly neat and predictable, like ironed hankies, uncanny tension and poise is occasionally clinched in the slightest of interventions. It is the act of subtraction becoming abstraction, as found in the play of pleats and white in Opening I (1994) and Opening II (1994), which I think points to this artist’s special skill. I found myself walking by half a dozen or so works before being pinched by envy in response to the brutal precision of a single cut.

Stezaker is something of a souvenirist, quoting the tropes and games – split faces being the regular example – of the Surrealists with a boyish earnestness. This should be dull but something in the way it gets spliced with the tourism and glamour of his subjects results in works that are very much their own things. A key to this might be that these images are very specific objects and due to my earlier interaction with them in the context of video: these works talk to technology and the slippery dip into digital moving image but remain absolutely objects of the hand.

I’m not sure if it’s Magritte’s paintings or scrupulously tailored suits that have that erstwhile juxtaposer lurking close at hand to Stezaker’s collages. Likewise the playful, serialised pictorial experiments of Californian artists from the 1960s come to mind when peering into the tiny, thumbed postcard fragments from his Crossing Over series (2010). Somehow these phantoms help clarify vacillating regard for this work; the cog on which these collages rotate feels like it should be connecting to something – bigger cogs – but delightedly continues turning round and round, as if stuck in a minute of a more expansive artist’s brain. And yet when standing among them it’s impossible to begrudge their self-satisfaction, the cutthroat fancies of their creator producing moments of simple wonder.

The twin pursuits of innocence and economy, of saying everything through barely saying anything at all, provide a most enigmatic target across all forms of art. Commenting on Dogme 95 filmmaking and The Idiots, Lars von Trier compared filming to “being a nudist and not having to worry about what you aren’t wearing”. While accessing this garden of innocence may never be straightforward, requiring as it does the act of forever chopping and freefalling from the branch of learning one sits on, those moments will always be ones worth striving for and celebrating.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on Aug 30, 2014 as "Spate of grace".

OCULA CONVERSATION Interviewed by Stephanie Bailey | Published July 30, 2014

John Stezaker ARTIST, UNITED KINGDOM

“I’m obviously an image fetishist, and the desire in image fetishism relies on seeing the image as a whole as well as seeing both into it and through it.”

John Stezaker, is an artist who has worked through ideas around the nature of images for some forty years, and who, while developing his practice in the late-sixties and seventies, made the decision to retreat from the art world, becoming a teacher in historical and contextual studies at the Royal College of Art in London. The reason for his retreat, as he explains, was the fact that people did not understand what he was doing during the seventies. “People were mystified by it,” he explained as we sat down for a conversation around an upcoming exhibition at the Anna Schwartz Gallery in Sydney, in which Stezaker will be showing the full selection of works that was made for the 19th Sydney Biennale (not all of it could fit into the space in the end). “I was getting labeled as a kind of latter-day surrealist, which wasn’t very helpful, and being put in a strange eccentric pigeonhole. So I thought it was easier for me to carry on my work without exhibiting, without the constant challenge of public opinion.” It was at the turn of the millennium that Stezaker suddenly experienced a massive wave of interest—Charles Saatchi began collecting him, he had numerous gallery shows around the world, and a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2011, followed by the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2012 and a major participation in the 19th Sydney Biennale. The rest, as they say, is art history. Some four decades on, Stezaker continues to develop his practice with a singular approach that he reflects upon in this interview, which also explores how his ideas around the image have changed over the years.

Stephanie Bailey | Ocula | London

What you will be showing in your next show at Anna Schwartz?

The work I am showing, which was intended to act as an introduction to Australia when it was put together for the Sydney Biennale, has its roots from 35 years ago, so it’s not exactly new work—the Masks, Marriage, Third Person Archives series were all started in the mid-to-late Seventies, and most of my work has developed from the conceptual seeds that were sown back then. New series emerge, of course, but I had already cemented the basic ideas. You have said that your retreat from the art world in the seventies was related to how surrealism was unfashionable at the time, which reminds me of Duane Michals once said that to produce narrative work during this time was a kiss of death!

I couldn't agree more. The unconscious at the time was completely taboo you see, and narrative was part of that taboo. Surrealism was the kind of thing you would see on advertising posters in the seventies. Culturally it was at its most debased. But in a way—and I thought this was very significant —it felt like art was taking a step against the unconscious through conceptualism. Of course, what we discovered was that by trying to maintain that conscious control, things had to be sacrificed: narrative, the unconscious, and meaning—the most fundamental things. At the time, I felt like all of art was heading into this cul-de-sac and there was a need for some kind of a reverse. I could feel that there was an aspect of Pop art that hadn’t fully explored a relationship with the found image, but I felt that this had to connect with surrealism, for me—to the unconscious and the unknowable. But of course, trying to produce work in a climate completely antipathetic to the idea of the unconscious or the unknowable, even less mystery, just felt like this cumulative impossibility in that people really could not gain an understanding of what I was trying to do, so I thought it was best to get on with my life.

When you think back to that time, was there a core message you were attempting to communicate?

I said this a lot—though I’m not sure if I still believe it: that there were enough images in the world already, and for me it was really about negotiating through this multiplicity. I didn't want to produce any more images, but I wanted to find a way of cutting through that volume through collage.

Another thing was that the word collage was very important to me. I later discovered that the American appropriators, Richard Prince included, weren’t using the word collage at the time because it had to be about this kind of Duchampian conceptual appropriation. I was more interested in collage because it opened the possibility of discovering things that weren’t conceptually pre-ordained, and this was the limitation I found in the so-called New Image appropriation movement in America: that it knew what it was doing too much, even though what was interesting in what they were doing was the unknowable part! That didn’t seem to be recognized: American critics who supported them were almost in denial of that fact. It took the Europeans, people like Sigmar Polke, to really make those connections that I was looking for.

Of course, because you were very much influenced by the Capitalist Realists: Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, as a student…

Yes, that’s right. I’d seen them as a way out. In fact, as a student, I went penniless to see the show in Berlin at René Block. This was in the late-sixties, and I arrived with the hope of meeting my heroes, only to discover that the openings happened the night before!

But in terms of influence, I didn't want to go that way either. At the time, I had joined the painting department at the Slade, and I had realized that everything I did with paint was useless—that’s why I went to see the Capitalist Realism exhibition. I had to see Gerhard Richter’s Politburo series as I’d only seen it in reproduction. But when I saw it I was slightly disappointed. What Polke and Richter had was a public and political relationship to the found image, and I wanted something that had to do with secluding the found image and taking it out of circulation and out of its various spheres of meaning. Come to think of it, the seclusion of the found image was a mirror of my own seclusion that developed around that time.

So after seeing this show I returned to London with a quite definite idea that painting was not the answer for me, so I started to make films. I was also in a bit of a dilemma. I felt more and more strongly that if I was going to find my path—because I was changing week after week as a young student and was definitely forging a path no one else was on—I really needed to be uninterrupted and unaffected by the forces of the art world. I realized that I was very affected by other people’s opinions, so gradually I found this modus operandi of working as a teacher and working as an artist out of view.

Did the teaching help you flesh out or solidify ideas?

Quite right. I’ve always said this to students, especially when writing their dissertations, that very often I’ve found by working through an idea purely theoretically, you can jump stages in your own development. You can actually cut through a lot of that sitting around waiting for things to happen. And it’s very useful actually to write thoughts out. So yes, I did develop from teaching, but equally, my work was an escape from it. I would spend my time seeped in philosophical and aesthetic thinking in my daytime activities, and then at night I would completely escape.

You have said of working at night, that this is when the unconscious really takes over, and that when this happens, you become a viewer of your own production.

I think I wouldn't have placed so much emphasis on that part of making if I hadn’t been teaching art history and theoretical studies, because I would have had a slightly more integrated sense of the intuitive and the conceptual. My art became purely this escape from the conceptual and consciousness, actually. It became about allowing things to happen. Of course, it’s important that I was working at night, after work, when I was tired. And that tiredness allows you a release from the shackles of conscious control, and allows things to appear before you. I always feel that my work gets going when I’m not in control. It’s a paradox, really. You can only see things when you abandon things. So oftentimes, it happens that after an evening of totally frustrated activity, I suddenly see something that works from the corner of my eye. In your definitions of the terms collage and montage, you have said that collage is about making something illegible and interrupting the seam, while montage is about making something seamless—how does this relate to film? Is your film work an antidote to your collage work?

I mean, these are purely my own distinctions, but I tend to think about it as the difference between Eisenstein and Vertov—the showing of the seams in Vertov and the suppression of the seams in the continuity of Eisensteinian montage. Of course its that seamless continuity which becomes the Hollywood mainstream. I’ve made four films now, the best-known of which is called Blind, consisting of one after the other film stills from my collection in the order that they come out of my collection. Each film still is projected at 1/24th of a second. All of my films up till now consist of still images projected in this way, at 1/24th of a second. These films are deliberately discontinuous. You can’t apprehend an image at this speed. . So what you happened to see will vary. Every time you watch the film you see a different film: it’s never the same. This is completely the antithesis of cinema, which is about incremental difference: following the image. It is a fractured cinema—image fracture rather than integration I suppose.

This relates to the cut. You’ve said in the past that there said there is something very violent and surgical to cutting images in your work; bodily almost.

Most people can’t tell the difference between my early and my later work, but I feel there is a total difference. In my earliest work there is this emphasis on cutting in the bodily sense. The very first words I used to describe my collages were incisions or excisions: the surgical metaphors. Excision is the surgical name for the removal of the eye. They had a very strong violence, which, in some ways, I now find difficult to relate to.

Later, I produced a kind of reparation to that violence with the Love series, which emerged out of the series I’d done before called Blind, in which I’d removed the eyes in portraits, cut through them and overlapped them. By doubling the eyes through the cut the “Love” series were a kind of reparation for me.

In thinking about the cutting, I think there is always violence in a cut—though sometimes it is emphasized more—and I think the image, in a way, always has to be interrupted to be revealed. The seam has to be exposed to see the inherent violence of the cinematic image. You have to be aware of the nature of the image as fragment, and of the point in which the image abutts with nothingness, to be aware of the image-as-image This seems to be a relationship with the image that is both an experience of loss and somehow a connection with desire. I’m obviously an image fetishist, and the desire in image fetishism relies on seeing the image as a whole as well as seeing both into it and through it. In my own image fascination, I think of it as being attached to the “death’s space” of the image as opposed to its life space—the life space of an image is its currency: the way a particular trait represents a known personality, or if its an unknown personality you can see things from the period in which the image was taken—there are various ways you can see it and this is its transparency. The opacity of the image is the mystery, peculiarity and strangeness of it — that unknowable part. And my work always needs to have that connection to the unknowable.

How might you summarize your practice at this point?

I don't think it’s possible. My work has been about an abandonment to the fragment.. I think I started a long time with an idea—that there are too many images in the world and I needed to find a way to negotiate the space between images, but I couldn't give myself any kind of agenda as broad as that anymore. I’m so enmeshed in what I do and my feeling is that I know less and less about what I do. The further I get and the more adept I am at actually working with collage, the less I feel I know about what the processes are and the more mysterious they become to me, strangely.

I know this sounds like the kind of thing you’d expect someone to say, but it’s the truth and it’s scary. It’s not something I enjoy, because the whole time I’m trying to get to some sort of sense of what I’m doing. I’m not complacent about the unknowability of it all— quite the contrary.

INTERVIEW: John Stezaker on “Collages” at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney

By: Nicholas Forrest, July 30, 2014

John Stezaker

Sydney’s Anna Schwartz Gallery has launched the first solo exhibition in Australia of the renowned London-based artist John Stezaker. The exhibition, simply titled “Collages,” builds on the momentum generated by the presentation of Stezaker’s work in the 2014 Biennale of Sydney, bringing to Sydney highlights from the last two decades of his career.

Stezaker is best known for creating surreal photo collage works using print and film stills from the 40s and 50s which he slices, splices, and re-positions. “Remnants of the film industry are used to revitalise the power of the static image, insisting on the dynamism of the single frame and of the silent picture,” reads the curatorial statement.

“Collages,” which is at Anna Schwartz Gallery until September 6, 2014, features works from some of Stezaker’s best known series, including his “Masks,” “Marriages,” and “Film Still” series as well as extracts from his “3rd Person Archive.” According to Stezaker, the exhibition is aimed at being a fairly comprehensive overview of his collage and appropriation practices.

BLOUIN ARTINFO got in touch with the artist prior to the launch of “Collages” to find out more about the exhibition and his practice.

You are best known for your series of photographic collage works. What was the inspiration and motivation behind the development of this ongoing body of work?

In the early 70s, when I made the decision to work within the horizons of already existent found images, it was in response to a sense of image glut- that there were already too many images in the world. I could not see a reason for adding to them. Rather I felt the important thing was to find a way of negotiating a path through this image multiplicity. The solution for me was collage.

The images you work with are primarily print and film stills from the 40s and 50s. Why do you choose to work with these particular images?

I'm often asked this question and unfortunately I'm no closer to an answer. On the one hand the historical period of the images seems irrelevant. It is more to do with the images being out-of-date. Obsolescence, a loss of representational function, is important to my fascination with the image. Images seem to have to be out of circulation. They seem to have to have lost their ties with the current cultural world. In this way they can be appreciated as images in themselves rather than in relation to what they represent or connote.

However, the fact the images that I am attracted to predominantly come from the time immediately before I was born, I think must be significant. There is a fascination for a world in which one is not yet present and this is different from nostalgia for a world of one’s past.

The title of your first solo exhibition in Australia at Anna Schwartz Gallery is simply “Collages.” Could you elaborate on the works that comprise the exhibition and what they reveal about your practice?

The selection was originally made for the Sydney Biennale, but there were too many works for the space I was given, so Anna Schwartz decided to give an airing to the originally intended selection. The idea in this was to give an Australian audience an overview of some of the best known series of my collage works: the "Masks"; the "Marriages"; the "Film Still" collages as well as extracts from the "3rd Person Archive". It is aimed at being a fairly comprehensive overview of my collage and appropriation practices.

Your practice involves very precise and restrained interventions. What informs and directs the creative process that you undertake with each work?

"Restraint" seems to be the key word in this question. I adopt the role from logic of "Minimum Mutilation". The least manipulation is the best. Because I am interested in what is already there in the images my practices are mostly subtractive. They are ways of withdrawing what detracts from my fascination with the found image in question. My favourite pieces I call my "Unassisted Readymades" (after Duchamp), in which I have made no physical manipulation of the image at all. Mostly they are images which have been damaged or subjected to graphic manipulation for magazine publication. There is one in this show titled "Echo" in which a graphic designer has faded out the female face in a double portrait in order to use it as a publicity portrait for the male actor involved. It struck me that there was a relationship here with the Narcissus myth in which Echo, who is condemned to repeat Narcissus' utterances fades away as he falls into rapt silent contemplation before his own image.

It has only been in recent years that the art market has really embraced your work. What do you think influenced the market to embrace your work as it has?

I really don't know how to answer this. I was always mystified by the inability of the art world to understand what I was doing. I think that collage must have seemed somewhat aberrant to a generation brought up to think of art in conceptual terms. By contrast my work lays claim to a relationship with the unconsciousness and the unknowable. I think of it connecting in this sense with an earlier tradition of Romanticism and Surrealism. I have always felt out of place in the contemporary art world. How this has come around to embracing my work is an equal mystery to me. But I have noticed that suddenly one doesn't have to be apologetic about practicing collage. What do you hope to convey and evoke with your collage works?

That is not the way I think about my work. I'm not trying to communicate, convey or evoke. That is the fundamental difference in my vantage point on the image. It is not that I am using the image to do something to someone else. It is about how images affect me personally and about how I hand on the mysteriousness of this encounter with images to others. What it is that is being conveyed, evoked or communicated is what the work is trying to probe. It is unknowable and in a sense all of my work is addressed to the central mystery of what an image is.

*See more at: http://uk.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1049885/interview-john- stezaker-on-collages-at-anna-schwartz-gallery#sthash.mWe9Xvl5.dpuf

! ! ! ! John Stezaker: 'cutting a photograph can feel like cutting through flesh'! The artist has made his disquieting collages in private for 40 years. Now they're exhibited in major galleries, winning prizes – and a highlight of the Sydney !Biennale! BY SEAN O’HAGAN!! 27 MARCH 2014!

! John Stezaker: Pair IV, 2007, Collage. Photograph: Alex Delfanne! “Collectors of cinema memorabilia have a name for anonymous actors who were photographed for publicity stills, but never actually made a film," says John Stezaker. “They call them 'virgins'. When I go to collectors' fairs, it's the virgins I'm after. There is a certain melancholy attached to the faces of actors that !did not make it and to images that were destined to disappear. I'm very drawn to that.”! A large desk in the back room of Stezaker's house in north London is cluttered with photographs of “virgins”, some of which have been sliced in half diagonally or carefully cut around so that only a silhouette of the face remains. These black and white portraits of anonymous failed actors, found at fairs,

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/australia-culture-blog/2014/mar/27/john-stezaker-sydney-biennale flea markets and online, are one of the key sources of raw material for Stezaker's art. He collects !photographs in order to deface them and, in the process, create something new and arresting.! “I'm using an archive to create another archive of my own,” he elaborates. “My ideal is to do very little to the images, maybe just one cut: the smallest change or the most minimal mutilation. What I do is !destructive, but also an act of deliberate passivity.”! Stezaker has been quietly making his photographic collages for 40 years, but recently the art world, led by Charles Saatchi, who began collecting his work in the mid-noughties, has “discovered” him. As a result, he has only recently given up his day job teaching critical and historical studies at the Royal College of Art in London. “I am finally being embraced by an art world that, for a long time, I consciously kept at arm’s length,” he says, smiling, “And, at an age when most people are thinking of retirement, I !suddenly find myself able for the first time to make a living exclusively from my art.”! A retrospective of his work is now part of the Sydney Biennale. It features several themed series of collages, including Masks, Marriage and Third Person Archive – which consists of tiny human figures cut from bigger photographs and isolated. The exhibition follows on from an acclaimed retrospective at London's Whitechapel Gallery in 2011 and his surprise nomination for the 2012 Deutsche Borse !Photography Prize, which, even though he is not a photographer, he went on to win.! “I have always thought the world would catch up with me one day, but perhaps not in my lifetime,” he says, smiling, “It has been a bit overwhelming. I actually fell ill last year with pneumonia and I do think it was to so with the stress of sudden success. I was saying yes to every show, every opening, ever invitation to lecture. I've stopped doing that now now, though I will be going to Sydney for the Biennial as it's quite a big deal to represent Britain there.”! ! Soft-spoken and thoughtful, Stezaker graduated from the Slade school of art in 1973, having gave up painting for film in his first year. “I had a big TV in my bedroom and a camera set up to shoot old B-movies that were shown late at night on BBC2,” he elaborates. One film that resulted featured a series of found images of people approaching windows, all taken from old Hollywood films. He showed it on a carousel slide projector with no sound. He has recently returned to film, having bought a huge photo archive from a music agency that was closing down. “It's mainly press and publicity pictures of long-forgotten female trios and male duos. I'm making a film in which they are pictured singing, but you do not hear anything. I'm fascinated by the application of silence and how it creates a spectral world. For me, it's a way of showing the sovereignty of !image over sound.”! For now, though, it is his photographic collages that have belatedly made John Stezaker's name in a global art market that, in these more restrained times, is in retreat from the recent excesses of conceptualism. “I've always made a Betrayal XVIII by John Stezaker. Photograph: Alex distinction between collage and photomontage,” Delfanne he says. “Montage is about producing something seamless and legible, whereas collage is about

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/australia-culture-blog/2014/mar/27/john-stezaker-sydney-biennale interrupting the seam and making something !illegible.”! Over the years, he has become a master of slicing and splicing, often, as in the Marriage series, juxtaposing two vertically or diagonally cut faces – one male, the other female - to create a single often-surreal portrait that both exaggerates, and subverts, our received notions of glamour, personality, gender and celebrity. “There is something very odd, even unnerving about cutting through a photograph,” he says. “It !sometimes feels like I am cutting though flesh.”! Sometimes, too, by simply placing an old hand- coloured postcard of a landscape across a face he creates a strange new world where the romantic pictorial tradition meets surrealist iconoclasm. The end results are always both deceptively simple in their execution and oddly disturbing in their suggestion. “When we look at a face, we assume that we are looking behind the face for a personality,” he says, “By making literal that behindness, I often create something Untitled, 2010, John Stezaker. Photograph: Alex Delfanne that twists into an image of horror. It often takes me by surprise, because it is not what I have set out to do.” To this end, his work often evokes literary as well as visual precursors and he namechecks Kafka, Mallarmé and Bataille alongside Jasper Johns and !“the stranger side of the English romantic tradition”.! For a long time he worked long into the night fuelled by strong coffee. “In the early hours, through tiredness, the unconscious takes over and that is when the real creativity happens.” Since his illness, though, he has had to adjust to normal working hours. “When I'm deep into my work, it's like my alter-ego takes over and all I am doing is witnessing the creativity,” he says, smiling. “That's what I love about what I do. I am nearly always the viewer; I'm only a producer at the moment of the flash of the knife.”

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/australia-culture-blog/2014/mar/27/john-stezaker-sydney-biennale John Stezaker BERLIN, at Capitain Petzel by Mark Prince // November 27, 2013 Since the 1960s, artists taking photography as their medium have often found it limited by a lack of material specificity, and have attempted to redress this imbalance by stressing the medium's substantiality over its ability to generate illusion. British artist John Stezaker, now in his 60s, makes most such attempts appear laboriously didactic by grounding his work in previously printed objects. His combinations of found vintage prints, whether soiled, sepiaed, creased at the corners, stamped by production company logos or inscribed with fountain-pen calligraphy, automatically acquire material specificity by betraying their age. Most of his 39 new photo-collages consist of two prints from the 1930s, '40s or '50s—film stills, actor portraits, nature illustrations or landscape postcards—deftly spliced together. The archly theatrical worlds of early film melodramas are rendered more fantastic by clashes of content. Two contradictory impulses—structuralism and surrealism—are fused, effectively reuniting materiality and illusion. John Stezaker: Natural History III, 2013, collage, 9¼ by 11½ inches; at Capitain Petzel. In each work from the "Natural History" series (2012-13), Stezaker has set a nature image into a film still of an interior scene, the jarring discord of the prints exacerbated by the difference in subject matter. The inset image partially conceals the one it overlays as it replaces the "punctum" of its action—the area to which our eyes would naturally be drawn—creating an alternative perspective that flattens and extends the underlying space. For the "Tabula Rasa" series (2012), a rectangular area of a single still has been removed, substituting otherness with absence, and reminding us that superimposition and subtraction are both forms of concealment. The "Crossing Over" series (2013) consists of fragments (only an inch or two across) of single images of an outdoor scene, minute peepholes onto remote worlds we can only begin to intuit from the given vignette. The fragments are hyperfocused details—of parasols raised over what we assume to be a promenade, or of a crowd clustering around an event we don't see—divorced from their context. Stezaker's attention to minutiae extends from image to presentation: the fragment's diminutive scale and isolated vantage are emphasized by its substantially larger passe-partout frame. Many of the film stills derive from an archive that Stezaker recently acquired from a defunct German film magazine. World War II-era stills, with swastikas stamped in their corners, are juxtaposed with British landscape postcards from the same period, reminding us that, despite the overt artifice of the photographs, they are not merely aggregates of abstract information—in the digital manner—but historically charged and geographically sourced artifacts. An "escape" into nostalgia is routed back to the here and now of a dog-eared print. It might seem that analog film—the imagery always at a physical remove from the reel of frames from which it is projected—would preclude the tension between photography as image and photography as object that Stezaker is cultivating; and, in his new films, the individual image submits to an exponential proliferation that dematerializes it. Hundreds of early 20th-century photographs of single subjects—a horse, a crowd, a cathedral—have been sequenced at the standard film speed of 24 frames per second, like a superhuman flip book. In structural terms, these are films, although the relation between frames is conceptual rather than linear. Stezaker impels us to question what we mean by "film"-whether the term is defined by content or structure. His structuralist emphasis on the basic properties of the medium—in his use of standard film speed as a collaging parameter—contrasts with the flickering expressionism of the results. He liberates himself from his usual painstaking attention to the individual print into a realm of pure, exhilarating effect. Brian Dillon on John Stezaker at the Whitechapel Gallery | Art and design ... http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jan/29/john-stezaker-white...

John Stezaker's collages using black-and-white film photos and old postcards are nostalgic but also uncanny and absurd. As a career- spanning exhibition of his work opens at the Whitechapel Gallery, Brian Dillon pays tribute to a sly romantic

Brian Dillon The Guardian, Saturday 29 January 2011

larger | smaller

Detail from Marriage (Film Portrait Collage) LXI, 2007, by John Stezaker. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and the Approach, London

The English artist John Stezaker, whose uncanny collages are the subject of a career- spanning exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, tells a revelatory tale about the origins of his luminous art. Stezaker was born in Worcester in 1949; when he was 13 his family moved to London, and around this time his parents supplanted their crackling old snapshot albums with a new slide projector. The teenager was fascinated by the apparatus, and especially by the single demonstration slide that came with it: a wide-angle photograph of two men overlooking the Thames, with the Palace of Westminster and a lurid sunset behind them. Stezaker swiftly grasped that the projected image might be used to make art, thus obviating the tedium of freehand drawing. But when he took the machine to his bedroom, he found all he could squeeze on to a sheet of paper was a corner of the picture: Big Ben, a few turrets and a stretch of red sky. He tried painting over it in his best approximation of an "expressionist- psychedelic" style, but when he turned off the projector the result was "horrific".

In light of the artist's subsequent romance with the found photograph, this anecdote is

1 of 5 3/22/2011 5:04 PM Brian Dillon on John Stezaker at the Whitechapel Gallery | Art and design ... http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jan/29/john-stezaker-white...

almost too apt to be true. By the time he enrolled at the Slade in the late 60s, his main influences were Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke: painters whose use of photographs overlapped with and trumped, in expressive terms, the pop art of a few years earlier. But Stezaker was a student too at a time when a wholesale critique of the pop-cultural image was being launched by such thinkers as Guy Debord; the Situtationists' scurrilous repurposing of media imagery became an exemplary strategy for him, alongside his abiding, and then unfashionable, interest in surrealism. (He recalls being shown Max Ernst's Une semaine de bonté, based on the illustrations to earlier novels, by William Coldstream on his first day at the Slade.) Schooled also on the recently translated writings of Walter Benjamin, for whom the conjunction of photograph and caption had altered forever how we looked at images, Stezaker began making work with text and pictures, intent on exposing the mystique of the visual.

It was a move that was very much of its time – London-based artists such as Victor Burgin and Susan Hiller (whose own Tate Britain show opens on Tuesday) were doing parallel things in very different registers – but for Stezaker it was a dead end. He suspected that his territory was the collective fascination with image itself rather than the conceptual urge to undermine that fascination. At this point, in the mid-70s, that sliver of sunset from his adolescence unexpectedly returned. He had since learned that the complete photograph was also a hugely popular postcard, but it was still the skewed portion in the corner that obsessed him. And he began to realise, with a mixture of conceptual insight and lingering emotional attachment, that it required little or no artistic intervention beyond his first excision of the haunting fragment. (The resulting work, The End, is in the Whitechapel show.) The image itself was the work of art and, although the various painstaking subtleties of his style remained to be worked out, the mature Stezaker aesthetic was coming into focus.

He was not, of course, the first artist to deploy the found photograph, or combine such photographs, without comment. It was a favoured trick of his surrealist precursors, from Ernst to the pages of Georges Bataille's late-20s journal Documents. But it's important to gauge his careful distance from the tradition of photomontage – a term he avoids, in favour of "collage". As Stezaker sees it, the great monteurs such as John Heartfield and George Grosz always worked at some remove from the image itself – indeed, this was often the critical or satirical point of their work: to conjure radical ideas out of pictures that otherwise allured the everyday viewer. With his residual romanticism and often frank embrace of 20th-century glamour, Stezaker is perhaps closer to an artist such as Hannah Höch, whose Album of 1933 juxtaposes press imagery with ravishing fashion illustrations and fragments of a sublime or disturbing nature. In Stezaker's collages as in Höch's, images sidle up to and seduce one another, shying from overarching arguments or narratives.

That's not to say that there isn't a degree of knowing distance – and a strain of disturbing violence – in Stezaker's work. It is first of all a historical distance. Early on, he began to work with actors' portraits (mostly black-and-white) and film stills from the middle of the 20th century – images he culled from defunct cinemas and picture

2 of 5 3/22/2011 5:04 PM Brian Dillon on John Stezaker at the Whitechapel Gallery | Art and design ... http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jan/29/john-stezaker-white...

agencies that were then going out of business. (Stezaker once bought the entire contents of one such establishment, although the prints are now so precious and rare that he cannot bring himself to make work out of them.) The film stills are especially peculiar artefacts: posed publicity shots taken during production rather than frames reproduced from the finished film. Like the colourful, scenic postcards with which Stezaker often overlays them, they hold the same kind of attraction that Victorian engravings held for the surrealists. The distance – inflected with nostalgia and absurdism – is essential, because one of the things Stezaker is engaged in is a daring rescue of images from the memory dump of the recent past.

It's hard to say precisely what the artist does with such images. In a sense, practically speaking, it's ludicrously simple: he places one picture on top of another. Consider Negotiable Space I, from 1978. The larger, "background" image shows a psychoanalyst at his desk, his analysand stretched on a couch, a medicine cabinet in the corner and a photograph of Freud on the wall. In the centre of the image, and seeming to threaten the foreground of the scene, is a colour postcard showing a train emerging from a tunnel – its edge obscuring the face of the patient. The inference seems clear at first: this is a comically "Freudian" emanation from the unconscious of the figure on the couch – except that this initial schematic response won't exhaust the collage. The crude intrusion of the postcard makes us notice oddities about the film still – a lattice of shadows around the Freud portrait, the surprising expanse of empty floor at the bottom of the picture – as well as curious details by which the two images rhyme: railway tracks aligning with the desk so that it, too, looks about to charge out of the frame.

There are many other works of this type. In the Trial series classical ruins, a picturesque waterfall and the Bridge of Sighs at St John's College, Cambridge, all erupt among the anxious monochrome attitudes of a cinematic courtroom scene. In an untitled collage from 2008, a crowd of Hollywood bathing beauties is framed and almost overwhelmed by a sideways-on photograph showing the complicated sculptural entanglement of St George with his dragon. But the signature Stezaker gesture is more frequently the cut and splice of two or more images, doing suggestive violence to both. Here is a young Lauren Bacall, her face diagonally bisected by roiling floodwaters or – the series is entitled Film Portrait (Disaster) – obliterated by an image of torn-up trees. Here, in a series titled Third Person, are lesser stars whose faces are half-hidden by anonymous silhouettes, from the depths of which a third image obtrudes: a garish landscape or an eerie flight of birds. And in recent works the background picture may also explode through the centre of the interposed image, in a cartoon flash worthy of Roy Lichtenstein.

The mystery of Stezaker's art may be said to reside in these precise and shocking cuts. He has spoken of the moment when he takes a blade to the sleek surface of an old bromide print as one of heightened anxiety and tension – having handled and gazed at these images for months or even years, he likes to get the incision over and done with as swiftly as possible. Unfinished works in his London studio have the look of gaping wounds, something like the suddenly opened slit, product of a slip of the thumb in the

3 of 5 3/22/2011 5:04 PM Brian Dillon on John Stezaker at the Whitechapel Gallery | Art and design ... http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jan/29/john-stezaker-white...

kitchen, described by Sylvia Plath's poem "Cut": "a sort of hinge / Of skin, / A flap like a hat, / Dead white." They remind us that historically photographs have been as much things to be touched as looked at, that our fascination with them is at once visual and tactile, almost grisly.

This impression of keen-eyed assault is strongest (and frequently funniest) in Stezaker's cutting and suturing of close-up portraits. Everywhere in his work there are faces made monstrous, comical or weirdly attractive by their carving up and careful wedding with others. In fact one series is called Marriages, and shows pairs of men and women – mostly, it seems, they are actors' studio portraits – incongruously conjoined to suggest new faces. A mustachioed man in a pullover meets a wavy-haired blonde to produce a figure with an oddly raffish cavalier look; a middle-aged woman with a complex hairdo acquires the aquiline nose of the actor she obscures. For all their strangeness, however, the faces are also exquisitely aligned, the arc of an eyebrow or the thrust of a jaw running on from one image to another, so that the whole is bizarrely credible as a glamorous or grotesque new being. One's eye moves tirelessly, entranced, between the two faces and their Frankenstein offspring.

What is less endearing, and more alarming, about these "married" faces is the extent to which their own eyes have frequently been attacked by Stezaker's scalpel. (There's a reminder here of the founding image of surrealist oculism: the slitting open of a woman's eye – replaced at the last edited moment by that of a cow – in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's 1929 film Un chien andalou.)

More generally in his work, it's often through the eye that the incision passes: whether vertically (as in the splicing of two faces) or horizontally, as in a series titled Love, where a narrow strip of the same image is inserted along the eye line, so that the subject stares out at us with expanded, blurred and alien orbs. The result is that the people in Stezaker's collages seem to suffer a variety of austerely rendered optical afflictions, from a squint or strabismus to full enucleation: in the series Blind, the eyeballs have been razored out along a straight line and the edges of the photograph brought together again.

Such images are part of Stezaker's continued investigation of the intimate strangeness of the photographed human face, the way it exposes and veils at the same time the feeling, thinking creature within. This fascination finds its fullest expression in his Masks series. Here there are no cuts, just the judicious placing of colour postcards over monochrome portraits. They're among Stezaker's slyest and most unsettling works, because what they intrude into the portraits is a series of gaping holes: chasms and waterfalls that cleave faces in two, yawning caves and sunlit sea arches that tunnel into unknowable interiors. These collages are the more ghastly and comical for once again being perfectly aligned: clumps of rock become noses, the arches of a stone bridge a pair of gawping eyes.

The Masks return us to another, less nostalgic, story that Stezaker tells us about his development as an artist. As a student, he happened on a photograph in an old medical textbook that showed a woman's face half eaten away by a rodent ulcer – inside and

4 of 5 3/22/2011 5:04 PM Brian Dillon on John Stezaker at the Whitechapel Gallery | Art and design ... http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jan/29/john-stezaker-white...

outside had become horribly confused. Stezaker closed that book with the thought that he must never look at it again, but in other ways he has not stopped looking since.

John Stezaker is at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 18 March 2011.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

5 of 5 3/22/2011 5:04 PM

“So much emerges from what I destroy”

John Stezaker explains why he never throws anything away and how teaching allowed him the stability to develop his work

By Louisa Buck | From issue 220, January 2011 Published online 24 Jan 11

John Stezaker, "Pair IV", 2007

For over 30 years John Stezaker was a quietly influential figure in the British art world, teaching the likes of Peter Doig, Chris Ofili and Isaac Julien at the Royal College of Art, with his own elegantly uncanny collages admired by a select band of artist-insiders. It was only when Stezaker was taken up by one of his alumni, artist turned gallerist Jake Miller of the Approach gallery, that his cuttings and splicings of classic movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations reached a wider audience and within a few years these unholy fusions of found images were heading the bill at the Rubell Family Collection, and were sought after by collectors and institutions from Saatchi to the Freiburg Kunstverein. Now Stezaker is about to have his first public solo exhibition in the UK with a major show at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (29 January-18 March) which has a particular focus on his work with film portraits and movie stills.

The Art Newspaper: You’ve said that when you are looking for images to use in your work you don’t find them, they find you. Can you elaborate on this? John Stezaker: When I come across an image I don’t know why it has a particular effect on me, I can only think of the word “fascination” to describe this. It’s something that interrupts me and stops me in my tracks. The process of taking possession of the image and trying to understand what it means may be by fragmenting it and cutting it—sometimes by the process of subtraction I can find that aspect of my fascination that was triggered.

TAN: Do you store material for future use or do you immediately know what you can do with each photograph?

JS: The more obscure images I encounter are the ones that tend to sit around because they take time to reveal themselves. With others I absolutely know what I have to do straight away and I can’t wait to get home and complete the piece. Collage for me can be very simple, it can be done two minutes after I walk through the door or else it can hang around for over ten years and still not be resolved in the way that I want it to be. I can’t help but see these lost fragments that I find as somehow informing my sense of my own psyche. But then paradoxically the very moment that it is seeming to find me, is also the moment that I am absent from the encounter and the image takes on an autonomous identity of its own.

TAN: Do you reject any of your collages once you’ve made them?

JS: Oh yes, at least 90%. Probably much more than that, actually. “Love XI” TAN: That’s high risk—you must lose a lot of precious images…

JS: I don’t, because then I recycle them! I look forward to destruction–because so much emerges through what I destroy. I have a shed at the bottom of my garden where I keep a pile of collages for dismantling and that’s often where I start if I am stuck in my work.

TAN: But once you’ve cut a photograph to work with another doesn’t that narrow its options?

JS: No, not really. This is how little control I have over my work. I usually find that if I make a specific cut in relationship to another image—if I have something in mind for it and it works straight away then I tend to become suspicious of the result. I only feel as if the work gets going once my original intention has been derailed. Generally speaking when I cut an image I cut it to preserve one part but I find in nearly 50% of cases the discarded bit becomes more useful and is the one I end up using.

TAN: You trained as a painter for six years at the Slade but stopped painting when your work was destroyed in a fire.

JS: I took the destruction of my paintings as a kind of sign. I knew that I wanted to use found images and I knew I wanted them to be on a similar kind of scale to paintings. I wanted the everyday, small-scale image to command the same space of contemplation as painting. The “capitalist realism” [I saw] in Berlin in 1969 was really a pivotal experience and when I came back from it I decided that I didn’t want to paint. It wasn’t because I didn’t like the Richters or the Polkes but it just seemed to be the wrong thing for me to be doing, there seemed to be something inauthentic about enlarging photographs or found images through paint and I felt I couldn’t do it. This led me into a kind of wilderness for several years, with various influences—situationism, extreme left-wing politics—I experimented with a whole variety of things, and then I started working with Italian photoromans [photo-story magazines], and then gradually I found myself buying film stills.

TAN: You’ve said that surrealism was an early influence…

JS: My interest in surrealism came about through a strange route because when I was a teenager the big thing in England was pop art. I was one of those magpie teenagers who collected images and when I discovered pop art I realised that was what pop art was doing, appropriating images. I didn’t make the connection with surrealism until my first year at the Slade when I discovered [the surrealist, collaged “graphic novel”] Semaine de Bonté by Max Ernst. I was attracted to the psychological dimension of surrealism and then I realised that this was just a dimension of romanticism and a kind of engagement with the image which had started at the end of the 18th century and earlier. [But] I tired of Max Ernst very quickly as I felt a lot of the surrealists played experimentally with the idea of the unconscious as an engine to create work. By contrast, what I continue to find interesting about Joseph Cornell is that he genuinely used the process of collage as a form of self interrogation.

TAN: For over 30 years your primary activity was as a teacher, first at St Martins and then at the Royal College of Art. Was this a conscious decision?

JS: Early on I felt that earning my living from my art wasn’t really going to be an option—and when I did get the occasional interest it was just too much of a worry. I needed a feeling of stability for my work and a structure in my life and teaching provided that. It created the practice I have now because collage was the only practice I could keep up in those spaces between lecture preparation and delivery of tutorials.

TAN: Over the past four years you have been able to give up teaching as your work has been increasingly shown—and sold. How are you finding market success? "Mask XXXV", 2007 JS: It’s great, I love it! The fact that I can get up in the morning and the only thing I have to think about is my work is just heaven! It has been an amazing period creatively: essentially over the years I have been doing a skeleton of work around which I am now beginning to flesh out a lot of the series that were just at the beginning of their development.

Artist of the week: John Stezaker | Skye Sherwin | Art and design | guardia... http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jan/28/artist-of-week-john-...

With his eye for old-fashioned collage – and his mean hand with a scalpel – Stezaker gives new life to images from our past

Skye Sherwin guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 January 2010 11.48 GMT

larger | smaller

Cut-and-paste ... Untitled: For Angus - Film Still Collage I (2009), by John Stezaker. Image courtesy The Approach, London

With a few deft incisions with his scalpel, John Stezaker reveals what is lurking beyond the glossy surface of postcards and publicity stills. Sometimes one picture is simply positioned over the centre of another, but in a series such as Marriages (2006), men and women are forcibly yoked together with a swift, decisive incision down the middle. In Bridges, Stezaker's ongoing series started in the 1980s, buildings are chopped and reconfigured. Elsewhere the silhouette of a figure is cut out; its ghost-like absence filled in by more landscape or someone else's body. The technique is stunningly straightforward, the effect profound. As strong-jawed men are spliced with B-movie glamour pusses, bodily forms with architectural ones, painstakingly posed promo material becomes unruly, disorientating and freakish.

Stezaker soaked up a variety of influences while studying at London's Slade School of Fine Art in the 1960s. His teachers included Ernst Gombrich, an iconic art historian and Richard Wollheim, the Freudian philosopher. During this time, in France, the Situationist group of artists were arguing that reality had been replaced by the endless flow of images in the capitalist mass media. It was an idea Steazker took to heart, using the most straightforward kind of cut-and-paste to question the meaning of images.

Stezaker doesn't use just any picture: his raw materials are long-forgotten B-movie relics from British cinema, dating back to his childhood in the 1940s and 1950s, or retro picture postcards full of quaint grottos, waterfalls and terracotta roofs. Thanks to Stezaker's weird conjunctions, however, these images seem alienated – cut off from culture, place and time.

His technique has been constant since the 1970s, but success arrived later in life. The past decade has seen extensive solo shows in the US and Europe, and his inclusion in major survey shows such as the 2006 Tate Triennial. Perhaps this recognition has come about because his psychologically charged, modestly-scaled work seems ever more

1 of 2 1/29/2010 9:53 AM Artist of the week: John Stezaker | Skye Sherwin | Art and design | guardia... http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jan/28/artist-of-week-john-...

relevant in our technologically supercharged moment.

Why we like him: For Masks (2005), a series in which actors' faces are replaced with postcards of Romantic landscapes. A dark cave, gushing waterfall or train tunnel merges with a perfectly coiffed head. A man's brow slides into a motorway bridge; a craggy rock face stands in for eyes and nose. These are disturbing, dreamlike forms that burrow their way straight to our subconscious.

Poster child: A 1950s billboard advertising Start-Rite shoes introduced the young Stezaker to the hidden meaning of images. Its depiction of children seen from behind as they walk down the long road of life – seemingly towards their death – haunted his childhood.

Where can I see him? John Stezaker's show, Tabula Rasa, is at The Approach , London E2, 29 Jan – 7 March.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

2 of 2 1/29/2010 9:53 AM

Juxtaposed by Robyn Farrell Roulo

JOHN STEZAKER Richard Gray Gallery 875 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611 September 11, 2009 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Since the 1970’s, John Stezaker has been at the forefront of Conceptual and New Image Art and a leading figure in the contemporary renaissance of collage. His formula of practice consists of a few salvaged images, re-arranging them and re-constructing them to reveal a striking juxtaposition. The latest exhibition on view at Richard Gray Gallery features new collage work from the British artist. Simply titled “John Stezaker” the show will run through October 24th and marks the artist’s first venture with the gallery and exhibition in Chicago. The installation of eighteen works is an alluring survey of the artist’s recent experiments with collage. Vintage photographs, film stills, postcards and printed ephemera are the chosen materials for Stezaker’s craft. The perfectly spliced creations demonstrate his impressive discipline and mastery of collection and selection. Taken from many of the artist’s series, this body of work clearly illustrates the power of image and perception.

Confronted by photographic vestiges from a different era, entrance to the gallery feels as if you have transported back in time. At first glance, the series of formal portraits hang in the main gallery space seem ordinary, indicative of the 1940’s: a gentleman posing with his hand on his chin, a lady with a cigarette and a Hollywood starlet posing for a headshot. But a closer look reveals that the surgical compositions play on the idea of melding personality with persona. The impetus of this series, referred to as Marriages, are what Stezaker has described as a “fortuitous find” of some 4,000 plus photographs purchased for a very good price.

In many of these images, disparate portraits are assembled into one, schizophrenic hybrid. Stezaker divides his selected photographs into halves, and then methodically aligns the dis-jointed parts into glossy re-vamped head shots. The result is uncanny. Muse (Film Portrait Collage) V (2008, directly above), blurs the line between the masculine and feminine. Stezaker nods to the tension between sexes, but focuses on the beauty of his monstrous construction. Comical and eerie, these portraits are a mental exercise in reality and fantasy. The starlet or leading man no longer holds a specific identity. Stezaker’s painstaking attempts create a surrogate from the past; one that we can almost recognize, but is just out of memory’s reach.

A (2007, seen above) is a three-part collage consisting of separate photographs of female legs. Keeping with the traditional process of collage format, Stezaker re-invents the approach of cut-and-paste to obscure the familiar and suggest a different meaning. In this composition he disposes of the upper half of each picture, leaving the face and identity of each woman up to the imagination. Besides the obvious stance of all three models posed so their legs form the letter "A," the triptych touches on earlier works from Stezaker’s oeuvre featuring decapitated ladies. In a lecture the artist gave at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago on September 6th, he gave some insight behind this approach: “I have several collections of beheaded figures… I became aware that this process of decapitation was a good way of interrupting the images legibility and became an accent – and a confrontation with the materiality of simulation.”

Obstruction of view is a motif seen in other works in the exhibition, Star I (2008, seen above) provokes the viewer to invent their own perception of the sitter in this occluded portrait. Here, Stezaker has places a blank, white starburst over the face of a gentleman seated for a formal portrait. This collage is a collision of art practice. Rene Magritte meets Yosuf Karsh as the artist draws on influences from mid-century surrealism and photography. In his lecture, Stezaker explained his attraction to the cut and the role it plays in his work, “The way that a cut or a wound creates a sense of the invisibility of surfaces interests me – the connection between the seam and the seamless. Imperfection somehow shows a point of entry into its perfection”.

The artist continues this practice with Excision I (2007, seen above), a still image from the 1946 film Somewhere in the Night (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz). The male gaze is literally depicted by a spotlight cut-out that almost eliminates actress Nancy Gold’s entire face. Another film still shows a scene reminiscent of Christmas morning that is contrasted by a vintage postcard showing gatherers on holiday at the beach. The postcard is carefully positioned in the center of the still creating a disruptive intrusion in Untitled (Film Still Collage) XVI (2005, top right). In both of these works, the viewer is left to formulate their own narrative.

Cathedral I (2009, below) is the only work in the exhibition that is not a two-dimensional collage. Part of the artist’s Bridge series, the work is a collaged book sculpture inspired by Stezaker’s interest in Kafka and his collection of mid-century tourist books from Prague. The aptly titled series serves as a metaphor for the work itself as the disparate images “bridge” together to form a dreamy illusion. As with Marriages, things are not always as they appear. With Cathedral I, Stezaker puts more emphasize on the bleakness of the castle atrium and fragility of the material, than the fantasy of the space.

Highly influenced by Pablo Picasso, Joseph Cornell and Dada, Stezaker is a pioneer of his own medium. His work is a collage of context and content. In a digital world of virtual cut and paste it is refreshing to see that the practice of collage is still relevant and contemporary.

--Robyn Farrell Roulo

(Images and lecture notes courtesy of Richard Gray Gallery)

JUNE/JULY 2009

March 19, 2009 Art in Review

JOHN STEZAKER

The Bridge

Friedrich Petzel Gallery

535 West 22nd Street, Chelsea The British artist John Stezaker’s portraits merge photographs of two people into one.

Conventional surrealistic collages juxtapose wildly diverse images. By contrast, those of the British artist John Stezaker conjoin slices of similar images to uncanny effect. The ones he’s become known for in New York in the past couple of years marry parts of two old, black-and- white movie actor portraits. The parts line up more or less approximately along straight, diagonal edges; often they are of opposite sex.

The means are simple but the effect is darkly comical and mentally violent. The mind tends to unify the two halves into one figure, yet the differences between the two sides makes that figure seem monstrously disfigured. There’s a sense of a schizoid persona; the disintegrated portrait implies a kind of psychosis.

In a sense, Mr. Stezaker’s work is an extended meditation on photographic imagery and its effect on consciousness. (He began as a conceptualist in the early 1970s.) A part of the mind responds to photographic images as though they were real; Mr. Stezaker’s conjunction collides with our trust in the seamlessness of reality. This happens despite how obvious it is that we are looking at mere photographs, and antique ones at that.

A number of collages in the exhibition join different landscapes and views of castles from old tourist photo books of Prague. These are less aggressive than the portraits. As the title of the series, “The Bridge,” suggests, the artwork bridges the gap between divergent states of consciousness, and the effect is dreamily poetic.

KEN JOHNSON

A 50 PAGESOFNEWWORK N john Stezaker + CaDFei+ MarkusHansen CharlotteDumas + LeoFitzmaurice JockMcFadyen+jules de Balincourt -= jemima Stehli + Callum Innes +juan Usl€ -

DECEMBER 2007 / JANUARY 2008 £5.95 US$10 €10 NEWWORKJOHNSTElAKER John Stezaker "Thework only really gets going whe n I lose a sense of direction and get lost in digression . Distraction is essential"

JOHN STEZAKER has been an important artist across four decades. He is best known for his collages, in which he takes two or more photographs or im ages from books and magazines , and cuts , inverts or overlays them . The resulting images are lyrical , dreamlik e and oft en un settling . Numerous strands of his w ork are on view at international venues now and in the near future (seebelow) , a sign of his increasing vi sibility and enduring relevance. INTERVIEW: Bl'lll.rJke

What'sthe origin of your surname? collectionof film stillsoneBay.I decidedto image-findcreatesanadditionto another Viking.ThenameSterzakerislistedinthe rescuethem. ButI amtornbetweenthe seriesthenIfollowthat digression,Thework Domesdaybookasresidentsof aplaceof the desireto usethemandtheneedto conserve onlyreallygetsgoingwhenI loseasenseof samenamein Lancashire,whichisnowa them.Theyarepresentlyin a limbo. directionandget lostindigression. ghosttown (akermeaningacreor areaof Distractionisessential. land).TheSterzswerea vikingtribe In a serieslike Marriage, do you start shipwreckedin England.Stezakerisbelieved with a pool of imagesand gradually find What triggered the Maskseries? to bea 19th-centurymisspelling. the right pairing, or is it lessimprovised? What'sinterestingaboutcollageisthatwhat No,evenmoreimprovised.Differentphases triggersanideaintheworkisimmediately Youshowed widely but steadily for of thefilm portraitcollages,liketheMarriage thereinthefoundimageorcollage... Iwas manyyears,before, in the last few years, series,involved differentgamesplayedalong lookingfor postcardsthat represented seemingto be more in demandthan theseambetweenthedifferentfaces. differentmetaphorsfor anterioritywithinthe ever.How do you account for this? Sometimesforexample,thecutisthroughthe face, muchasI hadusedrailwaypostcardsto A latedeveloper?Lettinggoof the pressure eyeor betweenthree-quartersandprofile cutinto theinteriorspaceof thefilmstill. of teaching[StezakertaughtCriticalStudies vantagepointsor,asrecently,a combination at London'sRoyalCollegeofArt for many of thetwo. LatelyI'vebeenusingtheteethas IsSurrealismimportant to you? years}in thepastcoupleof yearshasallowed a pointof alignment,creatingananimalistic Idon't actuallylikemuchSurrealistvisualart, meto bringto somesortof fruitionthe seeds broadeningof thefaceandthecreationof a besidestheworkof GiorgiodeChirico. of ideasscatteredacrossdecadesof working kindof snoutout of doublednoses.Earlierit Itaughtcourseson [Frenchwriterand in betweenthe demandsof teaching. involvedathinningoutof thefacesothe philosopher]GeorgesBataille inthemid·70s dominantfigurewasof themaninthe moon andsotendedto takeon hisdistrustofthe Hasteaching affected your work? Of Punch.Therulesofthegamechangeand Surrealistgroup.Ido howeversharethe Undoubtedly.Teachinghasrepresentedan sodotheimprovisatoryresponsesto them.In Surrealistfascinationwith cinema.ThisIsee importantspaceof intellectualreflectionover thisway,the imagesseemto evolve asthefullestformationof akindof image 3 theyears.Beingforcedto presentone'sideas independentlyof consciousdecision. consumptiondesignedto appealdirectlyto weekafterweekintheformof lecturesand the unconscious.AndCornell, themost seminarshashelpedmakemeconsciously What are the owl works about? important20th-centuryartistfor myown awareof thedirectionmyadoptedimages Myfirst useof nestingbirdsinfilmstillsdates practice,isoftencalledSurrealist,butIwould havetakenmeat anygiventime. fromtheearly-80sandat thetimewasa onlydescribehimasthat inthesensethat referenceto theartistJosephCornell.I used Batailleused,whenhesaidthedifference Whendid you begin to usecollage? thetitlesNestandHabitatto referto him.The betweenhimself andtheSurrealistswasthat I havebeenmakingcollagessinceIwasa owl in particular,asawell-knownsymbolof hewasa Surrealist. teenager.I collected'foundimageslongbefore thenight,representsnocturnalreverieforme Iconsideredit to bea partof artisticpractice. aswell asfor Cornell.Theowl isalsoa symbol Finally,if you could live with anywork of of thedevil soitsspacesof habitationare art ever made,what would it be? Howdo you find your material? demonic.It issaidthattheowlwascastdown Beyondthe BluePeninsulaoranyotherwork I liketo thinkthat imagesfind me.Butof bytheeagleto itslow-altitudenocturnal byJosephCornell.Onsecondthoughts, I TreeVIII (2nd Series) coursethereareroutinesof searching: sweeps, muchasLuciferwascastdown.There Vermeer'sThePainter.Actually,Idon'tthink (2000-01), cottage,95 x 71cm frequentingsecondhandbookshops, charity isa tinyowlwhichhasalwaysfascinatedme I couldlivewith anysuchgreat worksofart. 2 Portrait II (2007),collage, shops,postcardfairs,film memorabilia in Bosch'sTheTemptationof SaintAnthony. I imaginetheirpresencewouldbe 18 x 14.5cm websites,etc.Butfinding,asPicassopointed Withthesaint,it inhabitsaruinedtemple disconcerting;it wouldbea perpetual out,isnotjustthe outcomeof searching. dedicatedto thedevil.Ina sense,myworkis confrontationwith myowninadequacy. @ 3 Nest I (2007),coLlage, 26 x 21cm abouta liberationoftheimageto a nocturnal Exhibitions:Karsten Schubert, London, ends21 And you recently bought the stills afterlifeoffascination. Dec;TheApproach(inaugurationofnew space archive of a defunct specialist shop. at 74 Mortimer Street,LondonWI), ends 19 It wasaquestionofno longerhavinga Doyou work on severalseriesat a time? Jan; OpenEye Gallery, Liverpool, ends 19Jan; sourceof thiskindof imagerywhenthe shop Thereisusuallyoneat the centreof my NewMuseum,New York,opens16Jan; Rubell closeddown. It wasaboutto dispersethis attentionat anygiventime,but if a new FamIlyCollection. Miami, ends 28 Nov2008

I!II BOlli:1949, Worcester,UK Siuilied:Slade SchoolofArt, London, UK IiIiI Iives and works:LondonRepresented:The Approach, London

62 UT WOII.LD DEC20071JAN2008 ------._ ------­

_ . ~ Undoubtedly.Teachinghasrepresentedan sodotheimprovisatoryresponsesto them.In Surrealistfascinationwith cinema.ThisIsee importantspaceof intellectualreflectionover thisway,the imagesseemto evolve asthefullestformationof akindof image 3 theyears.Beingforcedto presentone'sideas independentlyof consciousdecision. consumptiondesignedto appeal directlyto weekafterweekintheformof lecturesand the unconscious.AndCornell, themost seminarshashelpedmakemeconsciously What are the owl works about? important20th-centuryartistfor myown JOHNSTEZAKERNEWWORK

Mask XXXV(200 7), collage, 26 x 20.5=

DEC2007I JAN 2008 .&aT WO&LD 63 NEWWORKJOHNSTEZAKER

Masks In thisseries, Stezakerappliesapostcardoverafilm still,oftenobliteratingmuchoftheunderlyingimage.In a recentdevelopment,he hasbeenusingimagesofcaveswhich haveslowlydevelopedinto archesofrock:"Ifelt the recentshiftfrom closedcaveto rockarchwasan evacuation. Seeingthe light at the end of thecave doesn't seem reassuring. It's thedeathof thatimage of thecave."

2

3 .;

l Mask LXIII (2007),COllage, 24 x 20.5cm 2 Mask LXXII (2007), collage, 24 x 20cm :, Mask XLIX (2007), COllage, 21 x 18cm '" Mask L (2007),collage,21,5 x 18cm

64 AlIT WOaLD DEC 2007I JAN 2008 JOliN5TE7AKFRNEWWORK

1 Pair 11(2007),collage, 19.5 x 26cm 2 Pair I (2007), collage, 19.5 x 26cm

DEC20071JAN2008 ,.,... 65 NEWWORKJOHNSTEZAKER

2

4

Maniages and Untitled Film Portrait Collages Stezaker'sMarriages combinemaleandfemalefilm stillstooftenstartlingeffect,asdohis same-sex combinations."In general, theMarriage piecesfeellikebringing together opposites,"he comments, "while theFilmPortrait Collages tend tobeaboutfindingfissureswithin theimage." Theworksshownhere havenotyet beenexhibited, andStezakersays that image2, tiptoeingtheline between comicaland monstrous, is a favourite.And ofimage5 (intended asa presentfor his son), the artisthassaid thatfor himit representsa "real marriage";truefacial continuity, separate andyet together. ..

66 .... TWOaLD DEC 20071JAN 2008 JOHNSTEZAKERNEWWORK

5

Untitl ed (Film Portrait Colla ge XXIX)(2007),collage, 25.5 x 20cm 2 Untitl ed (Film Portrait Colla ge XXVI)(2007),collage,30 x 24.5cm 3 Betr ayal (Film Portrait Colla ge I) (2007), collage, 26 x 21cm 4 Untitl ed (Film Portrait Collage XXVIII)(2007), collage, 25 x 19.5cm 5 Marri age (Film Portr ai t Collage XLIII) (2007), col/age,25 x 20cm

DEC2007I JAN2008 .&aT WOIUoD 67