These are two of my favourite face collages. The original images are from Vogue magazine and Hairstyles magazine, so the brighter coloured hair comes from the hairdressing one.
The images are bright and bold and have an immediate effect on the viewer, catching the eye and creating a whole image out of fragments of many others.
Cindy Sherman is an American artist who is best known for her photographic self portraits. Her black and white photographs are very simple and incredibly effective, using herself as the model, dressing up and changing her appearance so she was nearly unrecognisable.
The Bus Riders series was literally what it said it was, she created herself in the image of people she saw riding the bus everyday. I like her work because although it doesn’t reflect popular culture, it does mirror everyday life in such a direct way that it makes the ordinary look extraordinary. With an amazingly simple method of production, she creates work that has an immediate impact on the viewer that can resonate with anyone.
Sherman’s work is considered feminist and one of her series of images, Society Pictures 2008, in particular, was supposed to address the obsession with female youth and beauty in American society. Sherman herself doesn’t see herself as a feminist or see her work as it either but said “The work is what it is and hopefully it’s seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised work, but I’m not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff.” Her straight up approach and no nonsense talk reminds me a bit of my own opinions and viewpoints and also the fact that some of my work has been accidentally feminist.
These are some of collaged faces. After pillaging loads of magazines for eyeballs for the dolls house, I had a collection of faces that were missing their eyes or sometimes all their facial features but I had a feeling that the ones I kept were interesting enough to be made into collages themselves.
I love how these images are disjointed and distorted. I like the jagged lines that were created when I removed their features, not precise and not pretty. Totally different from the airbrushed images they were beforehand.
I want to make imperfect imagery from the perfect photographs from the magazines, the more bright and unusual images I can collage together to make new ones the better. Taking the familiar and the normal and turning it into something totally different.
Douglas Gordon is a Scottish artist who I had previously looked at in my first year at uni. He is mostly known for his work with video and photograph, the piece I had seen before was 24 Hour Psycho where he slowed down Hitchcock’s thriller to make it last 24 hours. I like his work as it’s source material has its roots in celebrity and the popular.
In his series 100 Blind Stars 2002, Gordon is looking at the ‘cult of celebrity’. The series is of 100 publicity photographs of 1950s and 60s Hollywood icons of the golden age of cinema.
The eyes are cut out and either replaced with mirror or black or white paper. By removing the eyes the image that is left is uncomfortable viewing. It steals the identity of the subject of the original photo and takes away their individuality. By removing the eyes the artist leaves the faces as nothing but masks, empty people with nothing behind the eyes.
In Self Potrait of You + Me Series, Douglas Gordon again uses iconic imagery of film stars, even having a specific series dedicated to Bond Girls. He attaches the images to mirrored surfaces or black or white surfaces but instead of just removing the eyes, this time he mutilates the picture by burning it. This allows a conflict of the adoration of the images used and the mutilation. The photographs change from the familiar, recognisable icons of the silver screen, to quite scary, distorted images that have a totally difficult effect on the viewer.
I hadn’t seen these images when I started creating my own work, they were suggested to me and I immediately fell in love with them. There is a blatant familiarity between these and my own work and I feel as though the thoughts and ideals of the artist are in line with my own.
Gordon is quoted as saying-
“I try to take something familiar and look it again and again, and again, reexamine go it and representing it…….looking at something familiar can act as a metaphor for all sorts of other things in your life. One way to look at something over and over again is to take it apart…in an analytical, structural, quite academic fashion, or we can simply put one thing beside itself and see how it compares.”
Hannah Hoch was a German artist emerging at the beginning of the 20th century. She was one of the pioneers of photomontage and was renowned for her collages. Friends with Kurt Schwitters, Hoch was a controversial woman who liked to push the boundaries in both her lifestyle and her art. A strong participant in women’s emancipation and also having a lesbian relationship, that while it wasn’t directly defined as that, the fact was not hidden, which would have been very controversial at the time.
Hoch was part of the Dada movement but was more tolerated than accepted as the founding artists of the movement such as Franz Jung, were not overly impressed by a female artist. Hand Richter described her contribution to Dada as “Sandwiches, beer and coffee.”. This may have been one of the reasons she built such a good relationship with Schwitters as he was shunned by most the Dadaists as well and also had a more modern outlook on life.
Da-Dandy Was a reflection of the hypocrisy of Dadaism and German society of the time, apparently promoting freedom but in reality still so restricted. Hoch worked on magazines aimed at women and was fed up of the difference between the women of the media and the women in reality.
She considered herself active in the women’s liberation movement in the 1920s and her work was breaking down boundaries in the traditional gender roles. The women in her work were not particularly feminine, often muscular and bordering on masculine. This was to do with her unhappiness with what women were supposed to be according to the media and also possibly a reflection of her attraction to women.
I like Hannah Hoch’s work because I can see a familiarity to how I see things and to some of what I try to reflect in my own work. She also uses images from magazines and contemporary material from her time. I find her collages interesting as well as her as a person. I think she has a dry sense of humour and a strong personality that is reflected through her work and the legacy she has left behind her.
