John Stezaker

In conversation with Michael Archer

from Audio Arts Volume 11, Number 1, 1991

Transcript

The interview took place at the Salama-Caro Gallery, London, in February 1991, on the occasion of an exhibition of a large group of Stezaker’s recent collages.

Michael Archer: The work is different from the last show here in that it’s physical collages rather than screened images of collage on to canvas.

John Stezaker: I’ve produced collages since the late 1960s, but in the late 1970s I felt the need to enlarge them. The collages tend to be a couple of years ahead of what I’m working on, on the large scale. The discoveries I make first hand in the process of collage take time to feed back into the large-scale work.

MA: So these two things go on in parallel all the time - the small-scale collage work and the larger-scale screens. Do the collages act as sketch material for the larger work?

JS: Yes, I’ve always been more comfortable in that sort of sketch activity; even at college I preferred drawing to painting, because it's very immediate. And I feel the same about collage. We live in a world of images, a world of fragmentation, and collage is a way of trying to find a sense of singularity. Collage succeeded drawing for me as a primary obsession, and this was inspired by a book by Max Ernst, ‘ Une Semaine de Bonté’ – A Week of Good Luck. It's a very good title. The luck of finding is a very exhilarating thing. Collage is very different from drawing, but it shares the same spontaneity.

MA: Do you work through one set of images before moving on to another?

JS: I have an enormous picture library, which I’m constantly depleting and adding to. Almost all my imagery comes from early 1960s, late 1950s. There’s a sort of innocence about those post-war consumer images, whether they record the natural world, are publicity stills for the new Technicolor cinema, or are the childhood myths that I would have been brought up with via encyclopaedias, the age of science, of progress. It’s also quite a fearful world. The opened-up world of science is a very frightening one.

MA: You have used blackness, the idea of a void, in the past, but none of the works here use that.

JS: I was isolating things, rather than bringing together worlds. I suppose in recent years the void has become occupied. I feel as though one’s almost locked between worlds within the collages now. There’s no point at which one can find rest.

MA: Is there a connection between childhood innocence and this void? The 'Vase' series here, for example, seems to be some play on Ingres’s La Source. It seems you’re not just dealing with your own childhood but with childhood as an origin itself. Is this absence perhaps the fact that that origin is unapprehendable?

JS: That’s exactly what I feel about the work. The departure point for the 'Vase' series, which I’ve been working on for over ten years, was Pirenesi. I started with a silhouetted vase and have imposed it on various forms of imagery over the years. In the latest ones I’m making connections to and elements of Neo-classicism as well. The point you were making is correct, they are about origination in one way or another. It’s something that I do unconsciously. I teach art history and so I’m aware of many of the sources of the images in my work, but it still is a surprise when they come up. It’s not planned. I've become much more open in recent years to the idea that art can be regressive, not as some sort of postmodernist opposition to progress, but more that all art in a sense is looking for roots. The state of mind one enters into in the process of collage – reverie, dream, half-dream – seems to be a point at which forms of origin intermingle - childhood, recollections, remembrances of imagery from art history itself.

MA: At the beginning of the 1960s there was a sense of progress, with the first manned space flight and so on.

JS: Whatever one thinks about the late 1950s, early 1960s, it’s left a wonderful repository of myth, which is perhaps what I’m exploring. It represents a smaller and simpler world, like a world of play. Collage as a process is rather like a children’s game... I even tend to work on the floor.

MA: Some of the images you use are film stills, which are almost like paintings in that every aspect of them is designed and positioned.

JS: That was what originally drew me to film images, that they were like Neo-classical paintings. I can only use film stills from a particular period when they were staged to represent an entire scene that very often never occurred in the film. That was exactly the fascination with them, that there is something both mythic and real about them.

MA: What’s the relationship between the collaged image and any title that you give to them?

JS: Titles are important for me, though I don’t always use them. Often I’ve co-opted other people’s titles; that’s my favourite technique. The pieces are on show here, and that is a title I took from Max Ernst. It’s a way of covering myself for whatever stylistic pillaging I’m doing at the time.

MA: The 'Inside the Egg' series have a blob-like silhouette which is like the albumen in an egg.

JS: There is an amoeba series, as well. I’d been reading a wonderful essay by Calvino called 'Mitosis', which is told in the first person singular by a splitting amoeba.

MA: So science is of interest because it allows us to picture the world in various kinds of metaphorical guises?

JS: Absolutely, yes. Many of the components of these collages come from 1950s/1960s children’s encyclopaedias, which in explaining this new scientific world reveal the mythic world they inhabit.

MA: To what extent to do you see the images as complete?

JS: On the one hand I feel I’m bringing them to rest. What that means I don’t know exactly, but that is a feeling I have when I’ve completed a work. On the other hand, it’s also a point at which the image is released from its individuality and seems to become dynamic, incessant almost. It does fascinate me, trying to put into words this particular feeling, because it occurs whenever I encounter an image that I know I want to have in my collection. I often feel it’s best described by the phrase, 'The image finds me rather than I find the image'. In a certain sense the images that I’m collecting are the corpses of past meanings, which I’m resurrecting to a new kind of life, or one that was hidden. What was invisible within a culture of images - and almost everything is invisible in a culture of images - holds this possibility of visibility in a second order of life.

MA: Your references are literary, mythical, art historical, poetic – do you feel yourself to be working in relation to other contemporary artists ?

JS: In the late seventies I felt quite close to some of my contemporaries in New York, but prior to that I felt very isolated, especially in England. I didn’t feel there was anybody here that I could relate to. And since my brief encounter with New York I have felt once again in total isolation. To be honest, I like very little contemporary art. In fact, I like very little art of the 20th century. The late-19th century Symbolists I feel close to in spirit.

MA: Why is that?

JS: I suppose a fin-de-siècle atmosphere brings about a set of preoccupations, one that clearly sees art as a psychological act and as an attempt to bridge worlds. The Symbolists could see the world of the future and they had a sense of the past, and there’s this almost neurotic desire to find a bridge between those worlds. We’re leaving the age of mechanism and entering the age of electronics. And in a similar way I feel that my work is attempting to bridge the mythic universes embodied in those two worlds. I’ve been very influenced by Redon, who worked in a graphic medium, because he did not use purely psychoanalytical ciphers in the sense that the Surrealists did. In Redon there is a sense of universality relating to a literary and a mythological tradition.

MA: I would say that about your work, too. You can think of the imagery in almost Freudian terms.

JS: Yes, that’s true. If I put a train in I cannot escape the reference to a whole lot of other things. Apart from what Freud might make of trains in dreams, it can take you back to Magritte or Hitchcock. I suppose the difference between myself and the Surrealists is their interest was in a juxtaposition that would bring the train into an unusual relationship with the world, whereas my interest is the strangeness of that image of the train and its resonances historically. What I find paradoxical about Surrealist art is how stereotyped their imagery of an inner life tends to be. Though they seemed to believe that the process of collage could throw light upon the individual psyche, they only ever seem to get to the point where they manifest that fact, rather than actually using the imagery. I think there is an exception: Joseph Cornell, who was in Salvador Dalí’s only own terms ‘more surreal than the Surrealists’. He went through the process of cohabitation with images so that his works are a mental map of some kind, and that’s why I feel close to Cornell. I don’t so much feel as though I’m expressing an individual psyche as trying to put my finger on a sort of collectivised psychology.

MA: Does this have to do with the fact that the notion of automatism is inherently disingenuous?

JS: The use of chance to reveal a slip, a Freudian slip or however one connects it, is a very important trigger in most collages that work. But the point at which I feel as though I have expressed something that is important to me is the moment at which I am aware that I’m expressing something universal. In the end my works are attempts at a sort of configuration of a post-war 20th-century consumer-culture psyche. Something transpersonal seems to be involved. I see my work as a kind of psychic healing. We live in a fragmented and fractured world, and I think that collage can be a sort of rearguard action pulling back that incessant momentum into the revelation of cosmos, of world.

MA: Would part of your dissatisfaction with much contemporary art be that it tends to be on the same level as the Surrealists in that it gets as far as saying we live in a fragmented and fractured world but performs none of that kind of healing.

JS: Absolutely. Something very interesting happened in the late 1970s, which in America they called New Image. We didn’t really have a word for it in this country, although I happen to believe that the movement began here. It was a new awareness of image, but it ended up being a celebration of the rootlessness of our image culture rather than any attempt to look for the underlying cosmos that generates those images. I see my work as a pursuit of the archetypal underpinnings of those stereotypes. They are, if you like, the fixed figures by which we live, and they tend to be rendered invisible through multiplicity. For me stereotypes are a cipher of a collectivised psychological state. They’re the heraldry of our culture, and I’m interested in trying to pin them down.

MA: So art, for you, ought to be a slow process, and attempts to reach some kind of image through aping the speed and the fragmentation of society are doomed to failure.

JS: It seems to profess failure as being its form of success. I’m just bored by Late Modernism, Postmodernism and the incessant endgame it sets up within art. I feel this has been the most fundamental depletion of the imaginary that’s occurred within art in the last 20 or 30 years.

MA: Does the same go for the theorists upon whom many of these artists hang their works?

JS: Yes, I feel there is a similar kind of endgame being played philosophically and within critical circles, and it just seems very desperate, very limited. In fact, collage was my way of stepping outside the reductionistic process of modernism. From the time I started at the Slade I was equally fascinated b worlds that you weren’t allowed to mix. If I have a programme at all, it is to try to bring those worlds back together in some way.