Demand the Impossible
Of the generation that came through art school during the upheavals of May 1968, John Stezaker has long been intrigued by the power of images
Michael Bracewell: Is there a defining statement of intent that covers your career as an artist?
John Stezaker: I’m dedicated to fascination – to image fascination, a fascination for the point at which the image becomes self-enclosed and autonomous. It does so through a series of processes of disjunction. First, obsolescence – in finding the image – then various devices to estrange or ‘abuse it’, in order to bring out that sense of the autonomy of the image. It involves either an inversion – cutting – or a process that cuts it off from its disappearance into the everyday world. I’m very much a follower of Maurice Blanchot’s ideas when it comes to image and fascination; he sees it as a necessary series of deaths that the image has to go through in order to become visible and disconnected from its ordinary referent. I don’t know whether that’s an ideal, but I suppose it could be a guiding principle.
Do you feel when you’re searching out the materials for your work, from charity shops or second -hand bookshops, that you are assuming a form of psychic responsibility?
Yes, I do. I’m taking things very seriously that aren’t usually taken seriously. And there is often an uncanny dimension to collecting images. You go out looking for one thing, and you find the image that you really should have been looking for and you realize that your ego’s been in the way. Picasso said, ‘I don’t search, I find’, and that’s true. The ‘found image’ is a very important term – it’s not an image that has resulted from a search; it’s found, and that’s much more spontaneous. It puts the image on equal terms with your own subjectivity; it has a power that overwhelms you. I’m looking for the sublime, in many ways. And I think that the uncanny is a miniature version of that.
Your work is in the tradition of the flâneur, for whom there are going to be occurrences in the urban landscape that enable a moment of transcendence.
Absolutely. You can go for months and years and not have those moments, and you’ve lost it. But it keeps you wandering, looking; ‘allowing yourself to encounter’ – there should be a word for that. It doesn’t matter whether I’ve had the images around on my bookcase for 20 years when I start a series; it’s finding an image in a bookshop that starts a new series of thoughts. In a way, what I want to do with a viewer is put them in that same dazzled state that I first encountered the image in. A good example, which started ‘The Bridge’ series, was from around 1985 or 1986. I had this dream in which I was floating under a bridge. And for some reason it was an incredibly important image. It disturbed me so much that I woke up. I don’t often have very vivid dreams, so
Michael Bracewell
frieze is now accepting letters to the editors for possible publication at editors@frieze.com.
