John Stezaker starts with found paper ephemera—black-and-white studio glossies, vintage postcards, mothballed encyclopedias—then slices it up and rejiggers it. A tiny horizontal strip is X-Actoed from a starlet’s face, right at the eye level, the blank space replaced with a slice from a duplicate photo, giving her the look of a malfunctioning TV; the profiles of an amorous man and woman are swapped out for two facing canyon walls, with a stream running through the center. They’re unsettling to look at, but they also have a sly humor to them, like an existential mix-and-match book.
“There’s an evocation of psychological meaning,” says Karen Butler, assistant curator at Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. “You’re looking at the portrait of this person, and there’s a postcard or a mask thing over their face that’s slightly disturbing. John is interested in manipulating photographs in ways that make new and uncanny relationships.”
The Kemper is the only U.S. stop for “John Stezaker,” an exhibit of more than 100 of the artist’s collages. And it’s showing at an amazingly fortuitous time: In December, Stezaker was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, given annually for “the most significant contribution (exhibition or publication) to the medium of photography in Europe in the previous year.”
Organized by Whitechapel Gallery in London and Mudam in Luxembourg, “John Stezaker” opened in St. Louis on January 27, with the artist flying in from London to attend the opening and deliver a lecture. It closes April 23, with much rich programming scheduled before the end of its run. On March 5 at 6 p.m., Susan Laxton, an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside and expert on surrealism, delivers the lecture “John Stezaker, Image Thief.” On March 31 at 1 p.m., Butler leads a curator’s talk through the exhibit as part of the Kemper’s Community Day. This month, the Tivoli Theatre hosts the Stezaker-curated Fringe Figure Film Series, with screenings of The Third Man (March 27), Psycho (March 28), and Pierrot le Fou (March 29).
Though the Kemper often schedules film screenings in tandem with exhibits, the juxtaposition is especially appropriate for the Stezaker show, with its heavy use of old film stills. In the 1980s, Stezaker haunted curio shops and used bookstores, which at the time were flooded with these photographs due to the closure of several of the old studios. (They’re much rarer now, and Stezaker mostly pulls from an archive in his studio.) Butler says Stezaker is attracted to not only the glamour and aura of midcentury stills, but also their weirdness: Most of them are not stills per se, but rather reenacted scenes from the film. “He’s interested in how they appear to be documents, but are not—they’re staged,” she explains.
The show displays work dating back to the early ’70s, including Stezaker’s Film Portrait Collages, which the artist is perhaps best known for, and works from several other series.
“He did a series called The 3rd Person Archive,” Butler explains, “cut from old encyclopedias. So there would be an aerial photograph of a city, with little people walking in the city. He cropped these little people—they’re about the size of a stamp. They’re extraneous to the focus of the photo, yet they’re part of the city scene. Yet he’s made them the centerpiece. They become the focus.”
His Bridge subseries, based on Franz Kafka’s novel The Castle, uses imagery—often bridges and castles—cut from old travel magazines. Butler says Stezaker’s work carries the stamp of surrealism, in that it has a sort of humor or playfulness to it, but it’s also completely serious in its intent. She says Stezaker often talks about “suspending” well-worn images.
“He uses these images that on one level, you’re very familiar with, so you don’t pay that much attention to them,” Butler says. “Through the way he transforms them, they become something arresting. So in some ways, he’s taking them out of circulation of the image world we live in, and then putting them into a new image context for you…which makes you stop and pay attention to them.”
Visit SLM’s arts blog, Look/Listen, for our interview with Stezaker. The Kemper is located on the campus of Washington University; for more information, call 314-935-4523 or visit kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu.
