John Stezaker's Blind
For as much time as I spend staring into my phone or laptop (an hourly total I’m thankful to have never formally calculated), it’s funny, curious even, that I tend to make my favorite discoveries outside of the digital sphere. That’s the case with this one! A couple of years ago I was scanning the spines at one of my favorite local bookshops, Brickbat Books1, when I grabbed John Stezaker’s Unassisted Readymade2 and started thumbing, just because. I’m not a big art-book buyer, but I’m always pretty curious to know what’s inside of them, even if it’s hundreds of pages of crumpled scribblings or ink smudges, which often seems to be the case; back when we didn’t have to worry if inanimate objects were harboring deadly viruses, I’d always rummage through a few. In this case, my fascination was immediate upon first glance: Stezaker’s precisely-rendered, never-overdone collages, particularly those that worked with 40s and 50s black-and-white movie stills, compelled my undivided attention.
I should go back and add that not only am I not a big art-book consumer, I’m not a big art-history guy either, which I somewhat-ironically find beneficial to my appreciation of art, if you’ll allow me to try to explain. I’m big on the joy of unintentional discovery, and many of my favorite art experiences are those where my perspective is unexpectedly altered, revealing a new angle I hadn’t already considered or knew to exist. I love that feeling, but while I can listen to the same song a thousand times and still feel the same powerful connection3 as I did that first time, I can only really open a previously-undiscovered mental doorway once - it stays open after that. Call me a poseur, I deserve it, but I enjoy feeling like I have much to slowly learn, that an untold number of epiphanies await me, not to be decided by formal study or immersion so much as chance and serendipity (and a thorough reading of Maggie Nelson’s The Art Of Cruelty). Besides, I’m already an insufferable music nerd; adding “insufferable art nerd” to my personality would scare off the few friendships I’ve been able to maintain.
Anyway, let’s get to this piece in question. I didn’t buy the book, if you were wondering, but I wrote John Stezaker’s name down and looked him up as soon as I got home. Through my online searching, I came across an exhibition he had at Ingleby Gallery in London, a show entitled “Blind” that showcased his ocular-centric collages. For as much as I loved the collages I saw in that book, this is the series that really caught my eye (pun intended). Though none of his work could be said to approach the messy glory of a Winston Smith gate-fold sleeve, these were particularly focused and direct, working only the eyes. Here he more or less uses the same trick over and over, in fact, removing the sclerae with surgical precision and leaving it at that. In many of the male portraits, their pleasant dispositions remain mostly undisturbed, but in the image above, the uncredited actress’s sultry, stoic demeanor is broken, a sinister scowl in its place. It’s a little haunting, but the kind of haunting I tend to seek out - one that doesn’t frighten so much as warn of possibilities I hadn’t considered. This one is such an elegant cut, too - if it wasn’t for a wisp of her hair on the right side, one might assume this to be natural proof of gorgons or mermaids or other mythical creatures known for deciding men’s fates through their unfailingly wicked beauty.
This seems like a good moment for me to admit that, as much as I’ve stared at this image over the last few years, I don’t actually own it (unless you count JPEGs, but let’s please not get into that). I was able to determine pretty early on that the image I loved was for sale in a limited edition sold through that very same gallery, at a price I had to email them to discover. (It was a not-entirely-unreasonable £500 plus VAT (which I think, as a US resident, I could somehow avoid paying?), so why they can’t just plainly state that on their website is an art-world custom I’ll never understand.) That’s more than I’ve ever paid for a photo print, and dear reader, I didn’t pay it - after hemming and hawing, it felt like more than I could justify each of the many times in the past few years I considered it, and I suppose it still feels that way right now (especially when you take into consideration that a mere $95 could land me these six Viletones photos this very moment). Don’t consider this case closed, though - it’s still available over on their site, from what I can gather, but their physical gallery is currently closed and they only seem to be shipping books at the moment, so who knows, maybe it’s gone, or maybe they’re just laying low for a while with intentions to double or triple the asking price - go ahead, show me any class of collectible artifacts that hasn’t jumped in price over the past year.
For as much as I love owning things, I’m content to simply appreciate Stezaker’s Blind, and in this case, I didn’t stop at mere passive appreciation. Back in 2018, I was immersed in my hard-gabber duo called Fine Jewelers, and in conceptualizing the cover art for our debut EP, I straight-up stole Stezaker’s idea, giving myself and my fellow Fine Jeweler the same unsettling lack of optics. It’s not as technically exquisite as Stezaker’s work, but taking the design as a whole, I like to think it became something else entirely4. All I can hope is that someone lifts this cover design and ends up making their own thing from that, continuing to pay the inspiration forward.
Also an occasional music venue with charmingly squeaky hardwood floors and a pushing-it-at-twenty-people capacity! I’ve seen Bill Orcutt, Bill Direen and Bill Nace perform there, among some decidedly less memorable Bills.
Or at least I’m fairly confident it was Unassisted Readymade? In writing this article, I was looking around online to figure out specifically which book it was, but he has a startlingly large number of books out there, and seeing as much of his collage work overlaps between them, I can’t confirm for sure. Maybe I never grabbed a book at all, and this was all a dream??
ie. “Bro Hymn”.
The final product here reminds me most of when, as a little kid, I’d go to a video store and look through all the Super Nintendo games that were kept in hazy-clear plastic cases with poorly-photocopied pictures of the actual video game box taped to the front. I like it!