- Venue
- Karsten Schubert
- Location
- United Kingdom
Photographic portraits of the cinematic stars gaze at the viewer from the soft focus of a celluloid golden age. But something is afoot in past: John Stezaker has taken a blade to the portraits, clinically halving the figures to reform and repair the portraits into varying degrees of uncomfortable cohabitation. The newly formed images are principally hermaphrodites offering an illuminating comparison of masculine and feminine pose.
Stezaker's simple act makes the modified photographs a engaging visual essay in the presentation of male and female types in Hollywood. An essay all the more pertinent for the familiarity in pose and posture between the portraits of these first stars of global culture and their contemporary descendants. He looks on with steady inquiry, she in disbelief. He in cynical anger, she frozen in fear. Pour homme strength, seduction, pour femme desire. Each portrait could come from a film still, yet flash lights in the iris is evidence enough of the actor's professional performance for the camera.
The methodology in Stezaker's work is the careful, interrogative approach of the archivist. Comparison is used as a way of delineating difference, a technique that places his body of work in the documentary traditions of August Sander, Walker Evans and Bernd and Hilda Becher. Yet while his antecedents carefully created huge archive bodies of work, John Stezaker is destroying an archive so that in the moment of its destruction it may become visible.
The success is palpable in the rich speculative journeys each image offers the viewer. The title 'marriage' takes me back to its biblical definition, that 'a man… shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.' A definition whose delicate pharmakon 'cleave' might act as a verb that expresses the contradictory poles of 'to separate' and 'to adhere.' In Stezaker's forced marriage of two images the gaze must endlessly cross this cleavage that is both separation and combination. The line of the cut has become an insolvable tectonic split in each face and each image.
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John Stezaker's work is exhibited in several locations this winter:
The Approach W1, Mortimer Street, London, 22nd Nov 07 – 19th Jan 08
The Open Eye Gallery, 28 -32 Wood Street, Liverpool, 2 Nov – 19th Jan 08
Camden Arts Centre, As part of a group show, Arkwright Road, London, 8th Dec 07 – 10th Feb 08
