John Stezaker
Image credit: John Stezaker, Horse, 2012. video, 2 minutes, 13 seconds looped. Courtesy the artist
British artist John Stezaker (b.1949) is famous for his collages. He’s been making them for decades. For raw material, he prefers dated photographic images – particularly vintage postcards, film stills, publicity head shots, and book plates. He takes them, turns them, crops them, joins them, sandwiches them, cuts shaped windows into them, removes or repeats a sliver, edits out bodies but leaves their shadows, et cetera. His minimal interventions offer humorous, poignant twists on orphan images. Stezaker’s project bridges conceptualism and surrealism. It has an analytic dimension (coolly exposing the language and logic of collage) and an intuitive, poetic, psychological one (with his dreamy displacements suggesting some lost world, a fanciful parallel reality).
Since 2012, Stezaker has been developing a new line of enquiry, making looped silent films (videos really), collaging collections of found images in time. The loops range from 2 minutes 13 seconds to a mere 9 seconds. His first, Horse, is the longest.
Back in the 1980s, Stezaker acquired a copy of the Stallion Annual, featuring photos of stud racehorses presented in profile for close comparison. When he flicked through, it behaved like a flip book, leaving the impression of a single horse standing still – albeit shuddering with variations in build and pose – with the background fluctuating more dramatically. In 2012 he made Horse, compiling, in order, the images of every stallion from every Annual from 1984 ... Subscribe to read all articles in full
