Alain de Botton – A Temple for Atheists Image: Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgson

The writer, Alain De Botton, famous for his musings on Proust and the nature of happiness, has always had an interest in the way humans are impacted by architectural spaces. De Botton has explored transitional places and the way they affect human emotions – and he has lived in an airport continuously for a week for research on his book A Week At the Airport. But, for his latest project, De Botton has been inspired to create an edifice for atheists to counter the millions of monuments that exist for gods.

For the scores of glorious cathedrals and mosques built by architects there appears to be none that had been built for atheists. Places of worship have been built for Jesus, Mary and for the Buddha, but temples can also be built for love, friendship and calmness…

Alain de Botton – A Temple for Atheists Image: Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgson

De Botton intends to build his tower in London at a symbolic height that reflects a scale of 300 million years of life on earth. He explained in the Guardian, “Each centimeter of the tapering tower’s interior has been designed to represent a million years and a narrow band of gold will illustrate the relatively tiny amount of time humans have walked the planet.” De Botton’s idea is to encourage contemplation. He also added, “the exterior would be inscribed with a binary code denoting the human genome sequence.”

Alain de Botton – A Temple for Atheists - Image courtesy of Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgson

The Secular Retreat designed by Peter Zumthor, in South Devon for Living Architecture concept for 2012

De Botton has said that he finds Richard Dawkins‘ and Christopher Hitchens’ approach to atheism too aggressive and destructive, and not positively persuasive to people who are just not that interested in religion but not aggressively opposed to it.

He believes that a temple for atheists fits into a tradition of secular places such as Rothko’s chapel. De Botton also manages Living Architecture, which is an organization that invites people to rent and holiday at some of the most innovative spaces designed by contemporary architects, and recently Peter Zumthor has designed a new building for Living Architecture, “Secular Retreat” which will be available to renters later in 2012

Alain de Botton - researching airports

The Balancing Barn, Alain De Botton, Living Architecture

Alain De Botton has a new book out, Religion for Atheists, which poses the idea of whether religions are neither all true or all nonsense – http://www.alaindebotton.com/religion.asp

© Shane Vincent, Stay Connected, from 'Stand in Line' 2011

© Shane Vincent, All Directions, from 'Stand in Line' 2011

Nineteen year old street photographer Shane Vincent has an eye for capturing those ephemeral moments when the changing light transforms the mundane into the sublime.

The project, Stand in Line, came about when Vincent began photographing utility poles in the streets of North London where he lives: “The series started at a time where the sky looked pretty cool,” he says. “It was autumn so it would change constantly. It caused me to look up a lot.” The outcome of his first photograph, Stay connected of a utility pole “with wires coming out at all directions,” was captivating enough, recollects the young photographer, that it caused him to pay more regard to the perpendicular poles and lampposts which most take for granted and which habitually punctuate the urban horizon. By isolating them against the vivid autumnal sky, and shooting them from an anamorphic perspective, Vincent enhanced their geometric abstractions.

© Shane Vincent, Change Direction, from 'Stand in Line' 2011

© Shane Vincent, IPhone, from 'Stand in Line' 2011

© Shane Vincent, 25th Hour, from 'Stand in Line' 2011

Never having been formally trained in the field, Vincent fell into photography as a hobby. Soon, his spontaneous street images brought him enough attention as a photographer to develop his dabbling to a more serious professional level. Initially, he says, he began by experimenting with 35mm because he liked the grain and quality of the images, but because of the expenses of printing, he later gave way to digital, whose more crisp, modern feel led him towards a contemporary vision.

“Visually, film has had the greatest influence,” the photographer tells me, remarking on his inspirations, “mainly those that show futuristic visions.”

“The interest in the future, dystopian and utopian sides is shown in the series, in the colours and moods particularly,” Vincent elaborates. “I decided to shoot them from a similar angle, straight up through the centre, fading and distorting towards the peak. It struck me as a most intimidating perspective.”

© Shane Vincent, Diagonal, from 'Stand in Line' 2011

© Shane Vincent, Heavy Support, from 'Stand in Line' 2011

© Shane Vincent, Stab Wounds, from 'Stand in Line' 2011

© Shane Vincent, Straight Up, from 'Stand in Line' 2011

For more information on Shane Vincent’s photography: www.shaneellisvincent.com

Jake and Dinos Chapman - Detail from - One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved

Jake and Dinos Chapman recently showed at White Cube in London in their first ‘non-collaborative’ show, where each worked separately on works isolated in their studios bringing their art together in the final stage of the exhibition: much like the working method of ‘exquisite corpse’ – the Surrealist game where each contributor adds his part to a drawing without revealing his artistic input to the other.

Their interest in shocking their audiences with puerile and playful provocations against bourgeois culture is evident in their sticking genitals on childrens’ and adults’ bodies in inappropriate places: In an interview with curator Norman Rosenthal at 92Y, Jake Chapman said, “Victoria Miro [their gallerist at the time] was a lovely demure bourgeois woman… Our interest was stimulation…we learned that if we called a sculpture ‘fuckface,’ it attained value – you could hear Victoria on the phone talking to some collector saying, “Yes, I can do you a fuckface, or a two-faced cunt.” We were interested in how far we could affect, invade bourgeois language…”

© Jake & Dinos Chapman – God does not love you O.M.F.G., White Cube gallery

Artist Jake Chapman, © Kisa Lala

Jack & Dinos Chapman – The milk of human weakness, White Cube gallery

Jake Chapman, who seems more overtly cerebral than his brother, talked about Goya as one of his inspirations citing him as one of the first modern artists. “He invents this rapt internal torment.” But Chapman believed Goya’s work was protected by the institutionalized belief in the humanistic content of the work – “What we were interested in was that, you could also look at the work as having a libidinized content that exceeded the institutional claims made about it. On one hand, the work could be confused as being an indictment of atrocities, and yet if you look closely at the work – the concentration of areas of violence [and genital areas], seems to betray a certain kind of pleasure.”

By recreating each of the 83 scenes in Goya’s etchings and depicting them in pathetic little plastic tableux, the brothers changed the existential quality of the work, belittling the works’ magnitude by using childish toys, and reducing it to play.

Fucking Hell, By Jake and Dinos Chapman

The Chapman brothers obviously enjoy the controversy they provoke but remain incredibly articulate in defending themselves. Speaking to Will Self, Jake Chapman exulted about DMT: “Makes you feel like a shrinky-dink in the oven – all shrivelled up. It was the most intense drug experience I’ve ever had – you become completely subjectless, there’s no you any more. It’s terrifying.”

© Jake and Dinos Chapman - One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved - That it Should Come to This... 2010 Oil on Canvas

On their music video for PJ Harvey, Jake Chapman said to the Guardian, “This formula, which demands you provide eye candy for ear candy, isn’t one we want to follow. For us, when you’re making art the point is to intervene in the formula. We’ve made two videos. The first, for the Peth, was basically a camera disappearing up Rhys Ifans’s arse. The second, Black Hearted Love, for PJ Harvey and John Parish, featured Polly jumping up and down on a bouncy castle, which undermines the rules of what a pop video should be….Making a pop video is obviously different to making art. While the time pressure is greater, that’s alleviated by the resources. It’s the difference between building the Eiffel tower and the pyramids: it all depends on how many slaves you’ve got…”

More Information: http://www.jakeanddinoschapman.com/

Sculpteur de Nourissons - detail © Charles Matton, Courtesy All Visual Arts, Photo: Tessa Angus

Sculpteur de Nourissons © Charles Matton, Courtesy All Visual Arts, Photo: Tessa Angus

The fascination with doll’s houses is that we glorify our need for tidying and collecting objects with imperial strokes and a make-belief sense of omniscience. Replicating the world exactly had been Matton’s passions, and his artistic journey began with painting hyperreal interiors that he eventually extrapolated into three-dimensions, creating rooms with walls exactly as he would have painted them on canvas, drawing cracks on the patina, filtering sun and shade on the furniture, miniaturizing the effects of light itself.

Alberto Giacometti Studio - with hand © Charles Matton, Courtesy All Visual Arts, Photo: Tessa Angus

New York University Club Library I -2002 - © Charles Matton, Courtesy All Visual Arts, Photo: Tessa Angus

An imaginary studio: Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Attic.© Charles Matton, Courtesy All Visual Arts, Photo: Tessa Angus

Reduced to a scale of 1:7 the boxes use mirrors and light to project an anamorphic, miniature wonderland, in which our sense of perception is enhanced rather than being diminished by the scale: The wires and outlets, chipped wood, dust and stains, the slant of a picture, a crooked frame, a curtain’s crease and mirrored reflections astonish us with details that would likely be overlooked if the same room were at eye-level. Seeing is amplified. Our eyes sweep entire vistas instead of vision being patched together by our consciousness.

Painter's Studio, Sue on the Sofa - © Charles Matton, Courtesy All Visual Arts, Photo: Tessa Angus

Charles Matton inside one of his Boxes © Charles Matton, Courtesy All Visual Arts, Photo: Tessa Angus

It is not easy to suspend disbelief. At times we may be fooled by Photoshopped images of trashcan lids masquerading as spaceships, but skilled craftsmen building make-belief film sets to imitate large landscapes understand that the way light falls, or how a fabric folds, and the manner of gravity on a mote of dust can give the game away.

Matton’s boîtes are not just an arrangement of artefacts but encapsulate the memory of a fleeting moment. His series of ateliers, Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti’s studios and Sigmund Freud’s study, were meticulous reconstructions created through exhaustive research of the originals. He painstakingly crafted miniature newspapers and book covers, wall hangings and scaled down sculptures to give the studios the authenticity of a lived-in space, pushing the spectator to the position of voyeur.

Francis Bacon's Studio - © Charles Matton, Courtesy All Visual Arts, Photo: Tessa Angus

Sigmund Freud's Study (Day) - © Charles Matton, Courtesy All Visual Arts, Photo: Tessa Angus

Sigmund Freud's Study (Day) Detail - © Charles Matton, Courtesy All Visual Arts, Photo: Tessa Angus

Jean Baudrillard, who was a close friend of the artist for twenty-five years, described Matton’s worlds, “when they are condensed in a marvelously small space, one rediscovers their quintessence. Recreating a space and a scene on a smaller scale convinces us to enter it more intimately.” Delighting in his obsessiveness, Baurdrillard concluded that Matton, was “quite certainly a fetishist.”

Alberto Giacometti Studio © Charles Matton, Courtesy All Visual Arts, Photo: Tessa Angus

See more of Charles Matton’s works at All Visual Arts Gallery, 2 Omega Place, London N1
Charles Matton: Enclosures: 9th September – 7th October

Alastair Mackie. Detail from sphere showing mouse skulls. Photo Tessa Angus

Alastair Mackie’s art builds correlations between the realm of human culture and the natural world. In his exhibition “I was there in Arcadia” he shows four spherical bone sculptures displayed under glass. The spheres are composed of hundreds of intricately connected mouse skulls. The bones had been collected from ‘regurgitated barn owl pellets’ found around the artist’s family farm. Mackie also photographs the completed spheres in situ, at the place where he found the skulls.

Alastair Mackie. Spheres with mouse skulls. Photo Tessa Angus

When describing the natural world we often exclude our species from the corpus of fauna on the planet’s surface as being other than and apart from creatures, and yet we mirror nature as it mirrors us. An article in the NY times today talks about urban evolution, and the biological changes that cities bring to the wildlife that inhabits them.

Untitled, 2008 mouse skull sculpture re-united with its place of origin. photo: Tessa Angus

Untitled, 2009 mouse skeletons, mouse fur, loom, concrete dimensions variable over a period of one year barn owl pellets have been collected and processed in to their raw components of mouse fur and bone. the fur has been spun in to yarn and, with the use of a loom, the yarn has been woven in to a sheet of fabric. the skeletons have been left as a heap

Below are earlier works by Mackie that serve to remind us of our many appropriations of the natural world, and reevaluate authorship and originality.

Mud Hut, 2005 mud, straw, and horse manure 135cm x 76cm x 76cm An architectural model of the Capitol building in Washington has been made from a daub mix of mud, straw, and horse manure - an ancient building material still used today.

Shapeshifter, 2010 matchsticks 214cm x 114cm x 54cm According to a strict pattern approximately 120,000 matchsticks were used to create a ‘blank' from which this piece was carved. Photo: Tessa Angus

Mimetes Anon, 2009 bronze 82cm x 52cm x 50cm commissioned by the contemporary art society as a public sculpture for the Economist Plaza. The title refers to a synonym for the chimpanzee originated in the 1820s (Mimetes – from the Greek word meaning 'to imitate'. anon - at an unspecified future time). Photo: Tessa Angus

Mimetes Anon, 2009 bronze Photo: Tessa Angus

More information on Alastair Mackie: http://www.wizz-it.com/42/artists.php

Pertweeandersongold.com
15 Bateman St, Soho, London, W1D 3AQ
info@pertweeandersongold.com
+ 44 (0) 20 7734 9283

Still from Wim Wenders Film PINA - based on Pina Bausch's life

Director Wim Wenders has a new 3D film PINA that captures the work of his friend the artist and choreographer Pina Bausch who died in 2009 of cancer.

Pina Bausch photographed by Donata Wenders (2004)

Wenders and Bausch first met in 1985 and he had been wanting to do this film for twenty years. “I told Pina, ‘There’s an invisible wall between what you do and what I can put on screen. My craft can’t handle it. I couldn’t do justice to this contagious quality of her work, to the joyfulness of it, the physicality of it,” Wenders said of his long struggle in making the film.

Wenders used Bausch’s dancers, those closest to her to tell her story through their experiences and memories of working with Pina Bausch.

Poster of film PINA by director Wim Wenders

http://www.wim-wenders.com/

Lovebird, 2005, Taxidermy lovebird, Taxidermy mouse skin, Brass, Metal, Glass, Wood, 30 x 20 cm @ Polly Morgan

Interview continued with Polly Morgan Part 2 (Read Part 1)
Morgan grew up in the country, “It wasn’t a farm. [My dad] was an eccentric character. He used to start businesses up, generally importing and exporting of animals, but then he would get sentimentally attached to them, and never let them go. They were never killed. We had Angora goats, llamas, ostriches, chickens for a while.”

Still, Morgan prefers small creatures than large mammals for her art. The largest has been the white-back vultures, which took a good year from concept to finish. She works with a 3D computer modeler to visualize relative sizes. “I try not to be set on the birds…because I could go for years without finding enough…so the flying machine was a variety of birds… I made a smaller one with bright orange finches and canaries to look like flames but it’s impossible to find enough, so I had to experiment in dying feathers with hair dye.”

When she finally visited Deyrolle in Paris, she was, “Underwhelmed really – so many people mentioned it, I had built it up to be an incredible mecca I had to go to. I spent hours looking for it, so I was knackered when I got there, and half their stock was gone – since the fire. The taxidermy was very badly done – and I’m not just being a taxidermy snob!” she laughs.

In Polly Morgan's fridge: Fox and Magpie. Photo: Kisa Lala

Polly Morgan's Blackboard photo:Kisa Lala

Still Birth - Purple 2010 - Taxidermy Pheasant chick, resin balloon - © Polly Morgan

“Systemic Inflammation” references concepts for imaginary flying machines. Morgan was interested in the way animals had been historically harnessed: Carrier-pigeons, monkeys in space. Air balloons. In Still Birth, a chick is tethered as though through an umbilical cord to a balloon cast in resin that won’t deflate. She’s fascinated with birds and flying and used Muybridge as a reference in Black Fever. In fact, Morgan says it ruined her holiday in Jamaica when she forgot her bird book.

Systemic Inflammation, 2010, Taxidermy Finches © Polly Morgan

Departures, 2009 © Polly Morgan - Installation View at Thomas Olbricht's Me Collectors Room on Augustrasse in Berlin

No, because in mummification you’re preserving what’s already there, whereas in taxidermy you are taking out a vast majority of the animal. It’s like peeling a latex suit off a human. You are keeping the skin, feathers or fur, and a few bones. Bones don’t decay. With birds, I keep the skull and strip them off flesh. When you’re bending the wires in place it helps as guide. I use woodwool, used to pack crockery, bind it with string and penetrate it with wires then stick it into the body’s central core. That anchors them there. Then you stitch up the skin in the front. You fill up all the cavities and skull with clay. You take out the brain and eyeballs. Often you remove the skull in mammals because after you take off the gristle and flesh around the skull – it will disconnect off the jaw and the padding is gone, so it’s best to sculpt the shape.”

The skin is still organic – can it decay?

Not once you’ve tanned it. It’s preserved like leather. With birds, sometimes you put chemicals on the skin but often when you take the flesh off, it’s just brittle, like parchment and dries. Then you position it and don’t touch it for a few weeks until it dries out. If you try to move the head after it dries it will just tear like paper.

Could you do that to a human being? Has it ever been done?

It has – not sure what methods were used. The former incarnation of Haunch of Venison (at Burlington Gardens, London), used to be the Museum of Mankind. They had a taxidermied black woman that an explorer had brought back. They used to do that – preserve people and bring them back; they couldn’t take photos, but they could go, ‘look what I found back there.’ I would have liked to have had seen it because I could have worked out how they’d done it. Must be pretty ghastly…

Mummification preserves the facial expressions – it’s much more real in that sense, right?

Exactly, if you’d taxidermied a human being – all you’d have was skin and it would be up to you to model, the face. You could end up with anything! Taxidermists are reluctant to do people’s pets because they’ll make it look like a dog, but the person will come back and go, ‘that’s not my dog’ – something different about the expression. They have a rule: put the animal in the freezer for 3 months, and if you still want to have it done after that, then they’ll do it…it’s because owners often don’t come and collect once it’s done because they can’t bare seeing it again…

© Polly Morgan, Dead Ringer

Polly Morgan’s work can be seen at following shows in London and Venice:

‘Women make Sculpture’, at Pangolin London from 19th May – 18th June.

Polly Morgan, Burials, Venice, June 3rd through July 22nd, 2011

Atrial Flutter: Taxidermy Cardinal in Ribcage - Portrait of Polly Morgan by Stuart Hall for Spread ArtCulture © Stuart Hall 2010

I walked into Polly Morgan’s studio in East London with the wild hope that it might be a dungeon of dripping carcasses or a Madame Tussaud’s of stuffed cadavers. That turned out to be fanciful thinking as instead I found myself in a warm and cheerful place with assistants hard at work and a kettle on the boil, and if there was a funny smell it was, Polly assured me, just her lamb stew at lunch, not the waft of an odorous beast she’d flayed.

There was a fox in the fridge snuggled in its bushy tail, looking more cosy than dead: It was a good place to guard against moths in the afterlife. I sat near an old ruptured coffin with a plague of quail chicks oozing from its cracks while an assistant picked over a bird skinned, drawn and quartered on an old newspaper, but nothing out of the ordinary. Morgan’s dogs, Trotsky and Tony sniffed and scratched around as we chatted, too civilized to snack on anything other than tinned food.

Reciever © Polly Morgan

Assistants at work at Polly Morgan's studio, London. Photo: Kisa Lala

Morgan is attractive, lively and charming which might seem socially at odds with her morbid fascination for dead things. But Morgans’ art is interesting all the more because we obsess over the body while it lives but care little after it stops being host. Our lack of interest in the life of things obsolete was the topic of my conversation with Edward Burtynsky. One might assume that anything now non-living, could once have stopped living. A corpse is special for being the shed husk of something that had recently lived. By preserving the moment before the onset of decay, Morgan makes corpses eloquent. She is not sentimental about the creature’s life, though she admits she would never stuff a pet. Yet the thread of mortality still exists – her art being more than just stuffed, pretty dead things.

“To start with it was a bit like that – and I was just fascinated about the taxidermy process and hanging onto dead animals.” But knowing a creature intimately was a learning process – she could study the shape of their skulls, varieties of beaks and eyes, and they couldn’t run away or rot.

Carrion Call, Taxidermy Quail Chicks, 2009, © Polly Morgan

“You are making them look alive, or making them look dead.” Pointing to the coffin near me, (Carrion Call) that she had built out of old floorboards, she say, “The idea behind it is inspired by a picture I took of a dead blackbird used as a nesting site for flies; it was riddled with maggots. I intentionally put the blackbird out to get infested with maggots because I was working on an exhibition loosely themed ‘Tomorrow’ for the ICA’s 60th anniversary. I was disgusted as we are prone to be, but something dead becomes a nest for new life. Coffins are fairly egg-shaped. It’s a symbol of life triumphing, emerging from death.”

Rest a Little on the Lap of Life, 2005, Taxidermy Rat, Champagne Glass, Crystal Chandelier, Glass, Wood, @ Polly Morgan

Vestige, © Polly Morgan

You choose birds because there’s something vulnerable about them that’s right for your art?
There’s something vulnerable about a bird lying down. You see mammals lying down, sleeping. But birds tuck in while perched when they sleep; if they’re lying down they are dead. When you see a bird unable to fly it’s powerless and motionless. It’s like a tiger without teeth.

How did you learn to debone flesh? Did you study anatomy?
“It’s not that different from butchery really. People assume the taxidermy process is about going inside the body and pulling out entrails etc., but it’s really about skinning the body. The first is butchery; the second part is sculpture. You pick up this innate understanding of the structure of a body. It would have helped to study anatomy but I haven’t. I’m tactile. Some people can have something pointed out, [and grasp it] I have to physically touch it.”

“When carving meat I know what to aim for, I’m not just hacking, I know how to go for the muscle and go through it.”

Have you ever had to kill the creatures yourself?
“No, and I haven’t had any killed for me either. It’s lazy and illegal too in a lot of cases. You can’t just go and kill garden birds in Britain. I put the word out amongst family and friends and they put the word out, and slowly over the years I have built up a network of people. I’ve been proactive to put ads in aviary magazines and fairs where people sell live birds, explaining that I will buy them if and when they die. So they put it in the freezer and send them to me. And taxidermists often swap things too.”

****
Read Part 2 of this interview
****

Made of soap: © Meekyoung Shin, 'Translation', installation view of vases made of soap, on display at Haunch of Venison, London. Photo: Kisa Lala

One thing made clear during the recent Japanese deluge was that the earth does not discriminate, and all human-made objects were equally subject to the forces of destruction. The substances we choose to build with are measured in reference to human scale: Objects are hard enough only to withstand our own needs for toughness. They are as tall, soft or as resilient enough to meet only our own standards for what is optimum. Though we may build things to last several human lifetimes, they are ephemeral gestures in time as demonstrated by the waves that washed away, with a mere tide-swing of the pendulum, centuries of human toil.

The Korean artist Meekyoung Shin mimics precious Chinese porcelain vases and vaunted classical sculptures – and remodels them out of soap. Her replicas seem to mock the value of the original and their illusion of authenticity. Everything pictured is made of soap…

Sculptures in Greek style made of soap © Meekyoung Shin 2011, 'Translation', installation view, Haunch of Venison, London Photo: Kisa Lala

Ghost Series, © Meekyoung Shin, 'Translation', installation view, Soap Vases on display at Haunch of Venison, London Photo: Kisa Lala

Soaps vases, 'Ghost Series', © Meekyoung Shin, Translation, Haunch of Venison, London, photo: Kisa Lala

© Meekyoung Shin, 'Translation', installation view, Soap Vases on display at Haunch of Venison, London Photo: Kisa Lala

Kouros, Installation View © Meekyoung Shin, Translation, Haunch of Venison, London, photo: Kisa Lala

Kouros, all slightly weathered and dissolved - Installation View © Meekyoung Shin, Translation, Haunch of Venison, London, photo: Kisa Lala

Chinese porcelain vases are fragile to begin with, and this is intrinsic to their value. Porcelain and glass at least have the illusion of stability, giving collectors who covet them a chance to gamble on their potential for eternity. Shin also models Kouros, and other classical Greek sculptures out of soap. The translucent quality of soap can be made to resemble marble or coloured glass. Soap, a substance so commonly used in households, is associated in our minds with catabolism, solubility, breaking down…not as a building tool of permanence.

Buddhas made of soaps © Meekyoung Shin, Translation, Haunch of Venison, London, photo: Kisa Lala

Buddhas made of Soaps, Buddhas made of soaps © Meekyoung Shin, Translation, Haunch of Venison, London, photo: Kisa Lala

Meekyoung Shin’s Buddha soap statuettes were lent to hotels for use in their washrooms temporarily. Displayed in cabinets, in their semi-dissolved states, they seem to emphasize the precept that all things must pass…as is often symbolized by the Buddhist construction of elaborate mandalas that remain vulnerable to erasure by the wind.

No doubt porcelain is susceptible to earthquakes and soap to tsunamis, but under radiation they will probably have far more longevity than humans.

Meekyoung Shin, 16 Feb – 2 Apr Haunch of Venison, 6 Burlington Gardens, London UK.

John Stezaker, Marriage - 2006 Collage 23.5 x 28.5 cm (Photo courtesy of: saatchi-gallery.co.uk)

The British artist John Stezaker has a retrospective of his photographic collages in London at the Whitechapel Gallery and newly commissioned works on display at the Louis Vuitton Maison. Stezaker appropriates iconic imagery from the past, landscapes, vintage studio headshots of forgotten film stars, those that show up in old shoe boxes in antique shops collecting dust along with nostalgic memorabilia, waiting to be picked through, rediscovered.

What is unusual in Stezaker’s use of these images for his collages, is that his manipulation of them is minimal – often a single incision slices and splices two photographs creating uncanny symphony. Or a composite of just two images, a poster shot of a generic waterfall placed over a face, creates a window of such powerful reflection, that the simplicity in technique seems astonishing in the context of today’s excessive digital doctoring.

Mask XXXV, 2007 Photograph: © John Stezaker/Courtesy of Bona Montagu, London

© John Stezaker, Betrayal (Film Portrait Collage) XI 2007-8 collage unframed: 10.75 x 8.27 inches/27.3 x 21 cm (photo courtesy of: www.petzel.com Petzel Gallery)

Stezaker makes no effort to conceal his cuts or mitigate the edges, because here, it is the artist’s clever hand that is on display. In most cases Stezaker uses the two photographs, one juxtaposed to mask the other, or uses a continuous cutaway that reveals the second underneath. Despite the obvious edges, it takes a conscious effort at dislocation to see them as two separate halves. The perfectly poised studio portrait is turned into something more sinister with a skilled slash that imbues new meaning to the figure’s gaze. Sometimes the faces are mismatched between male and female leading to an androgynous gaze, penetrating beyond gender.

© John Stezaker, Marriage (Film Portrait Collage) XXVIII 2007 collage 29.6 x 23.8 cm (Photo courtesy of: saatchi-gallery.co.uk)

John Stezaker, Pair IV, 2007, Collage, Private Collection, © John Stezaker

Stezaker was in a bicycle accident in 2006 which injured the left side of his face, during which time he was inspired to make many of his collages. The broken symmetry of the composites, two perfect halves seem at times to make a grotesque whole. But for me, it is not the distortion created by the two that is the focus, (that would be too easy) but their unexpected resolution.

Stezaker has said about his process, “The image starts in some way to commune, which is to do with fascination. A state of unconsciousness. A sort of trance. I am interested in the way that images create trances, how they entrance and how one is seduced into them. And where one is taken if one follows.”

The ‘celebrity-style’ of headshots often have an illusory effect on the subconscious, feeling at once familiar to us – not just from their standard take on movie portraiture – but often from a trance-induced recognition, which sidesteps clashing details, and renders a single impression on our visual cortex. We see something recognizable and familiar – the nuances of a human face are psychologically inscribed, intuitive and timeless regardless of whether they are historically rendered or otherwise. Future viewers who will have access to an increasing archive of visual iconography from movies, films, photographs of the human face will perhaps find that celebrated figures of the past often reappear in likenesses, repeating themselves upon the human race, in the media, and in our subconscious.

How easily identity is tampered with. How differently we respond to an expression as it transitions into something unexpected from what we had assumed to be its natural completion. Symmetry is skewed, a smile warps into a sneer, the amalgam of the two unmasks a new potential.

Untitled, 1977 Photograph: © John Stezaker/Courtessy the Approach, London

The shot above is simply turned upside down to create a new perspective. Many artists work with appropriated images, but often the work has to be substantially altered to be justified as a new work of art as the Shepard Fairey lawsuit case illustrated. Today’s copyright laws regarding image appropriation might be limiting to many artists who might work along Stezaker’s principles of incorporation. Stezaker’s work makes an interesting point – not only does the artist work with found photography, but it is the simplicity of his alterations that carry the transformative force of generating new art.

The show at Whitechapel is supported by Louis Vuitton and they have also commissioned new works by Stezaker at their Maison on New Bond Street. At their Librairie bookstore, one can browse through Stezaker’s “Curated Shelf” – works that have inspired the artist.

John Stezaker, Marriage (Film Portrait Collage) XXXII, 2007 Collage Private Collection © John Stezaker

John Stezaker Marriage (Film Portrait Collage) LXI 2010 Collage Courtesy of the Artist and the Approach, London © The Artist