whitehot | February 2011, John Stezaker @ Whitechapel Gallery
John Stezaker
This seminal show at the Whitechapel Gallery plays a much overdue punctuation to the intricacy of John Stezaker, an artists who has been practicing since his 1960s graduation from the Slade School of Fine Art. It's fair to say that the accolades for Stezaker's work and contributions are many, with the influence of his approach and style stretching far beyond the mainstay of collage appropriation and appreciation. A cursory glance at the work of Stezaker remarks an understanding which finds his influence cropping up within not just contemporary art, but pop culture, advertising, TV media and a generation obsessed with pushing the possibility of the image. With this in mind, Stezaker has achieved more than just a sub-cultural dimension to what he makes. His work manages to unveil the cross-hatch between looking and the rare treat of actually seeing. What makes this work so unbelievably flattering is its ability to tease and alter the senses. It's difficult not to look at a Stezaker image and come away without being incredibly seduced. The delight of either glancing or staring quixotically at Stezaker's combinations creates a warmth akin to watching a Sunday matinee on a rainy day, discovering Humphrey Bogart for the first time, listening to the crack as a record skips, or curling your toes wantonly. With this in mind, his work is not primarily the exotic path of a deep vintage obsession with the past. It beguiles the need for something far more substantial than a love for times gone, retro-asphyxiation and the concern of the pretend. His images are ebbing gaps and gapes between cinematic feel-good and that troubled confusion of a present day mis-trust in the fashion of the emotional memory, and the irresponsibility of whimsy.
Love XI (2006), which greets the audience on entering the gallery, is an echo of why Stezaker should be held so dear. His acute selection process remarks a tenacity akin to Gerhard Richter and Richard Hamilton, but with this in mind these are obvious parallels. Love XI (2006) is a mere slice in our view-line, a rearranged discord or harmony. Stezaker's interpretation isn't about letting an image glide past unnoticed, neither is it about screaming the abject cacophony within his work. It's a subjective relationship that you build with the work, trying to out wit it by pin-pointing the place where Stezaker made his slice, cut, paste or focus, alas it is this quest for the command of the work which finds the viewer leaving empty handed. The parade of potential 'themes' as outlined by Herrmann could equally shed a potentially feverish light on Stezaker's choreographed visual manslaughter. The rooms of the show reflect collections of ideas which Stezaker seems to be working through; dualisms, obsolete movie stars, landscapes, caves, fountains and lastly on the back wall Stezaker's 'Third Person Archive.' Much is to be made of these sub-collections or categories of production, sympathetically it is a hotly disputed task to form a curatorial foundation to this body of work without allocating a very specific reading.
Time and time again, it is the truth of the conjoining or osmosis between the images which comes to the forefront of this reading. Stezaker's work Untitled (1977), Pair I (2007) and Pair IV (2007) finds a dual realism akin to something inherent and meant to be, over something absurd and dystopic. It is then possible to fall back into the elbow of Bogart, propped against the piano in 'Casablanca,' his wistful eyes reminding the viewer of times gone by, better times, grander times. With this in mind the work of Stezaker isn't just a tale of black and white films, noir and celuloide excess, his images portray the bones these films and times came from. The virtue of the unknown as a passage to the reality of the present. That speculation of the past often leaves holes in understanding which we shackle with retrograde romance.
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