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John Stezaker is a violent man, for an artist: he wreaks indignities on the human form and on our relationship with narrative truth, with very disturbing results. This retrospective shows a monomaniac, obsessive as a stalker, expressing an unchanging set of ideas in mildly different ways as the years pass. It is as if a murderer had left a trail of bodies, each killed with a slightly dissimilar weapon.
Does this sound unpleasant? Sometimes it is. The ‘Love’ series, where Stezaker has taken old photographic portraits and moved a sliver of eyeball slightly out of sync, can be hard to look at. They are so normal, apart from those weird, weird eyes, although both title and format suggest that we need to look more closely at what constitutes normal. One picture cuts the man’s eyes out entirely. It’s called ‘Blind’; Stezaker is not a man who values subtlety.
He does, however, respect his viewer’s capabilities. He often uses film stills for his work, but makes sure that when he is sticking one to another, neither is someone we recognise. He knows we would fill out the other half of a familiar face, so mitigating the distress of these mismatched visages. He understands our passion for wholeness – that, presumably, is why he cuts things up.
The loveliest of these images interpose human silhouettes made from one colourful picture on another. The wittiest take kitsch hand-coloured postcards and incorporate them into portraits, so the two arches of a Killarney Bridge offer an equivalent of the eyes and nose that the woman underneath has been deprived of. Lacking obvious stories, our mildewed imaginations begin to work: that half-seen woman is a beauty, this man behind a desk facing a couch-bound woman, a large square neatly removed from the image between them, is surely a psychiatrist talking to his patient.
One series of images is tiny, pin-sized figures lurking near steps on a picture the size of a stamp: if staring at these doesn’t rouse your inner voyeur then nothing will. Not all the images work – those of a trial juxtapose images so different that sense founders. But the ‘Stolen Sky’ series (hunks of air and smoke devoid of context) are lovely, and the sets of train tracks jammed horizontally together are at least as pointed as the man and woman with vertically soldered faces in the images entitled ‘Marriage’ (one, pretty much the same, is called ‘Betrayal’. Stezaker may be referring to his own artistic behaviour, or to the paradox of legal union – either way, you wouldn’t want to be his wife).
Stezaker, who was born in 1949 in Worcester and studied at the Slade, has confessed that the moment of putting knife to paper is one of high anxiety, which seems reasonable. Freud would probably start talking about castration anxiety, although Dalì’s comment that Surrealism is destructive, but destroys only what it considers to be limiting our vision, seems more apposite. Stezaker’s violent misappropriation of pop-cultural images continues this project, but hacking away at our blinkers is bound to be distressing work. Anyway, it seems right that creating his images causes Stezaker anxiety, since looking at them does just the same to us.