John Stezaker Talks With Robert Leonard
John Stezaker has one foot in conceptualism and the other in surrealism, but his work is also a reaction to both. His deceptively simple collages generate complex sensations, thoughts, and feelings. Instantly appealing, they occasion lengthy unpicking—formally, psychologically. There always seems to be more to say.
The London-based artist says collage is about ‘stuff that has lost its immediate relationship with the world’ and involves ‘a yearning for a lost world’. He works from an archive of out-of-date images—mostly old film stills, old actor head shots, and antique postcards. These images come in standard sizes and are highly conventionalised—variations on themes.
Collage involves taking existing images, decontextualising them, reorienting them, cutting them, pasting them. But Stezaker may perform just one or two of these operations. Sometimes he cuts and pastes, sometimes just cuts, sometimes just pastes. Isolating these moves, highlighting the contributions they make, he foregrounds collage’s grammar and logic.
Stezaker’s exhibitionLost Worldhas just been touring through Australasia. He talks to the curator, Robert Leonard.
Robert Leonard: Your work is an inquiry into the language and typologies of collage.
John Stezaker:That’s maybe part of what I do. I make three kinds of collage: image fragments, image subtractions, and image combinations. The fragments are the rarest, the combinations the most numerous.
My Underworldworks are image fragments. I crop off the top thirds of film stills. They remain rectangular photos, but you can tell they’re fragments, because heads have been cut off.
Beheading was one of my earliest strategies, but, like most things in my work, it first occurred by accident and came as a revelation to me. When I cut the heads off an image of a... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Camera, 2015. Altered found image, 12.4x24.8cm. Courtesy John Stezaker and The Approach, London.
Circle II, 2013. Collage, 24.4x20.8cm. Courtesy John Stezaker and The Approach, London.
