'Strange Love' is an exhibition of recent collages inspired by John Stezaker’s interest in fairy tales, myths of magic and metamorphosis and, like all his work, drawing on obsolete media images from earlier ages of image enchantment — times when images still cast a magic spell, and before they became the primary interface in everyday communication. One of the paradoxes of the current culture of images is that the more central they have become to communications, the more they disappear into their use, and the less we are aware of them as images.
The now strange love for these images demands a distance from their familiar use in order to see them as images at all, rather than as transparent conduits to what they represent. To grasp the fundamental strangeness of images and connect with their occult and magical powers requires the intervention of opacity, interruptions, and alienation. However mythic the “once upon a time” world of enchantment may be, belief in it is essential to evoke the magic spell of images.
Stezaker has always seen this as a recovery operation, as a regression. As Roberto Calasso has said, “the gods have always just left the scene,” leaving traces of a former enchantment in the everyday world for poets to track in various forms of imaginary regression, the ultimate of which is metamorphosis. Perhaps it is something to do with the affinity of collage and poetry that there is such a shared fascination for metamorphosis in these practices. Hans Belting suggests metamorphosis is at the heart of images and a part of its origin in the mask.
Stezaker’s Masks are probably his best-known form of intervention in the transparency of the photographic image. The introduction of the half-mask of the postcard into the photographic portrait is used to elicit viewers’ participation in bridging the worlds of the postcard and the photographic portrait, the inanimate world of the landscape image, and the human face in an imaginary metamorphosis. Pareidolia is the word perceptual psychology has given to our neurological predisposition to see faces (and figures) in the arbitrary configurations of the non-human world.
Another series, represented in the exhibition, which employs a similar predisposition, the Spells, creates the conditions for finding figures, bodies, in the animal microcosm of invertebrate life from natural history illustrations. When the juxtaposition is between humans and the “lower orders” of animal life, the horror of metamorphosis becomes foregrounded, especially when these images of the animal microcosm are framed within the contours of a kissing couple.
The stereotypical image of the kiss, sealed in a teeming underworld of decomposition or a cinematic kiss arrested in the cavernous separation of an old postcard image of a gorge, represents different orders of horror underlying or covering the most familiar cinematic image — an image that has almost become the emblematic still of cinema itself. The kiss crops up in many collages in the show and in Stezaker’s work over several decades. Perhaps it is because the image represents the promise of an impossible consummation in film of the strange love affair with images.
Interestingly, most of the work in the Strange Love show comes from a period of lockdown and after, during which Stezaker found himself revisiting the illustrated books of fairy tales that were read to him as a child. In a sense, these represent the origins of his own personal love affair with images. The illustrated books of Arabian Nights, Water Babies, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and the animal fables of La Fontaine and Aesop, which, alongside early Disney, Sleeping Beauty, and Fantasia, represent the “once upon a time” of Stezaker’s image enchantment.
Artists: John Stezaker