Surgical ChicbySarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Cutting away. Cutting into. Cutting apart. Under-cutting. Cutting up. Cutting out. Cutting down. Cutting off. To do surgery on an image would involve a certain amount of metaphor. Surgery is an invasive operation conducted on a living thing, or a living being. Fundamentally, it figures, and reconfigures, a body. Surgery goes below the surface, under the skin with thin blades and metal instruments, lenses and gauze. Cutting into the body’s flesh is one of the most potent gestures of the iconoclast. Surgical cutting, identified here with cutting done in relation to the body, also connotes a sense of the religious: to cut into the image suggests that what is at stake is either the sacred or the sacrilegious. But, surgical cutting has another, more secular suggestion of the iconoclastic: it breaks open the falsity of our seamless body-image with a bloody rupture, an awareness of depth and thickness and interiority that runs counter to the flatness of the icon-image. While a doctor performs surgery on a patient, maybe a collagist is the kind of artist that does surgery on an image, making John Stezaker the kind of collagist that is doing surgical work on images of bodies and on bodies of images. Some of the procedures may seem analogous – incision/cutting, suture/ pasting – and both are concerned with modes of correction, medical and aesthetic. But if the body a surgeon deals with is one of masses and thickness, then a collagist like Stezaker reformulates two-dimensional bodies and opens them up onto an almost paradoxical thin depth, or deep thinness, of accumulated planes. And if surgery can metaphorize collage, then collage can probably metaphorize plastic surgery, collapsing the aesthetic onto the medical and encountering the body as surface — as a surface of relative flatness. The non-plastic kind of surgery draws the eye to observe what would otherwise remain unseen, undiscovered. Where medical correction performed by a surgeon aims to restore lapsed health, to make whole what was broken, to remove a foreign malignancy, to fend off the threat of change for the worse, to stop or reverse deterioration and maintain some kind of status quo, the aesthetic correction done by the collagist tends to work toward an opposite end. Perhaps figurative collage posits the aesthetic in service of the medical as though its disassembling and reassembling of images enacts some social, cultural, psychological, or moral diagnosis. The cutting up and cutting out of collage often complicates either through inappropriate or unexpected juxtaposition, or through excess, imposition, and removal. It tends to deform and disfigure; to introduce malignancy and break what was whole. It thrives in discrepancy. To do surgery on an image would be to undo that image, to break it apart in order to change transform it. To do surgery on an image jeopardizes its health and could result in blindness, as in John Stezaker’s collage Blind II (2006) where a black and white celebrity headshot of a Hollywood actor from a past age loses his eyes when a thin horizontal strip across his face is removed: the brow collapses down to the bridge of the nose and the bottom eyelids with surgical precision. Conversely, rhyming with Blind II, the eyes stutter and repeat themselves in Stezaker’s Love II and III (2006) where an additional pair of eyes runs right across the face and through the pupils of two actresses’ headshots. The viewer trips on this excess, the careful seams of which only register a second later, delayed. These are quiet moments of minimal insertion and removal within the image, resulting in maximal interruption and disturbance of perception. His source material for his recent collages are old black-and-white headshots, publicity shots, and film stills from a distinctly bygone cinematic era, vaguely seeming around the 40s. Cuts are made with precision and sharp edges. Stezaker splices faces with faces and faces with landscape. His Untitled (Film Portrait) works fuse masculine and feminine halves on a diagonal axis. The Frankensteinian results are anandrogynous,neutered celebrity. Landscapes, cut into clean rectangles, cover up the faces of other actors, or maybe they are terrestrial filters through which facial features emerge so that deep gorges and waterfalls imply syphilitic recesses and decay. Arching bridges and stone formations suggest eye sockets, rocky projections mime a beak-like nose, and the doors and windows on the upturned side of a building redefine a possible map of the face. These blockages are the Mask series. Silhouettes become cut-outs and cut-ins, keyholes. A man’s shape, his body posed in a contrived studio shot, becomes the borders of another world, another scene drawn from an antiquated film still populated with actors in costume — a period piece. The silhouettes cast a darkness that gives light to another set, a cast of characters, a scenario seemingly played out behind, at some distance; these pieces are the Shadows series. Some of the collages are moments of pure removal. All or part of a silhouetted figure from a publicity shot or film still is excised, and the black of the ground behind fills the shape as a void.
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