understanding media: Samantha Sleger: 1004632

Samantha Sleger: 1004632

Understanding Media – Freud, Stezaker and The Uncanny

John Stezaker is an artist who works mostly with found imagery; he creates other his pieces using a variety of pictures juxtaposed onto one another to make a new image. Stezaker not only cuts existing pictures but changes the way existing ones may be viewed for example by rotating them. His work is contemporary but has been linked to Surrealism just because of the way he presents the subject matter, this links to Freud and his idea of ‘The Uncanny’, what can be perceived as fear-provoking. The work discussed here is from a variety of collections spanning thirty years chosen due to the different content and ideas.

The term ‘The Uncanny’ is often used in description of Stezaker’s pieces and Freud studied this, linking his work to psychoanalysis. Freud describes the uncanny as ‘related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror... it tends to coincide with whatever excites fear in general’ (1985, p. 339). Freud was exploring into aesthetics which what he believed ‘concerned themselves with the beautiful, attractive and sublime’ (1985, p. 339). With Stezaker’s work ‘Love’, he takes images of what could be considered to be beautiful people and layers other images on top. The end result is people with extra eyes or strangely morphed features. Stezaker has taken the imagery onto a level like Freud’s aesthetics and changed the faces to physically represent the uncanny. Stezaker’s piece ‘Love X, 2006’ shows a beautiful woman but she has had her eyes changed by Stezaker’s replications. This completely distorts her image, making her look not like the timeless beauty she is but possibly ugly, something on the verge of the content of nightmares, it’s the reality of her face that has changed, we know what she should look like but these modifications make it hard to relate to.

In Freud’s work, the uncanny or ‘unheimlich’ is translated from German to English to literally mean the ‘unhomely’ (1985, p. 339). It is uncomfortable and unfamiliar which when we look at some of Stezaker’s collections and we can appreciate this, it is more profound with any series focusing on faces. Humans identify with people’s faces, particularly the eyes which in Stezaker’s collections such as Marriage or Love are almost deformed into some new kind of portrait. In many of his marriage images, the use of two images running alongside one another to make a new face such as ‘She (Film Portrait Collage) XI, 2008. This image uses two female faces both which could be considered to be attractive but the different profiles of each portrait means the viewer has to really consider what Stezaker is trying to achieve as we recognise it as an almost deformed face or try to mirror each picture to make two whole faces. Stezaker, when questioned as to why he didn’t shoot images so that the married pieces were inline correctly replied that ‘The ‘Marriage’ pieces have nothing to do with the marriage, the matching of items, they are to do with the fact that they do not marry, and that is the point.’ (2011, p. 39) He makes it so that the viewer has to make a connection with the images and why he put them together.

Stezaker has been creating pieces for around forty years that push the viewers understanding, his methods of photo montage and collage create new identities, new realities. The work he creates means that ‘the beholder has to participate in the meaning’ (Stezaker, 2011, p.39) making the audience become involved in the images and ask what message is being said. He uses found imagery such as postcards, film stills, books or magazine illustrations and collages them in a way that the end result is contradictory; the work can be seen as both beautiful and grotesque. At times, by pasting, cutting or even rotating images, the viewer is lead into a new dimension, partly wondering how the subject may have looked before these alterations and partly why Stezaker used the images as modifications that he has done. The piece ‘Untitled’ from 1977 is found imagery showing a couple sat at a piano. The image the right way up shows the man playing the piano with the woman looking on in admiration, but the way Stezaker presents it to us means the woman’s reflection with both of her eyes now being seen almost makes her look like she’s in control and the man is playing for her not to her. It was this idea that Stezaker liked because it makes the piece mysterious and the audience now looks at what the relationship between the people in his selected work.

Stezaker has created a huge body of work, all with different ideas and outcomes; I like all of his work and was first introduced to it last year at the Whitechapel Gallery. I think the way Stezaker amalgamates seemingly meaningless images of landscapes or film stars time has forgotten and makes something new draws the viewer in, curiosity makes us ask why he done this. Stezaker sometimes uses harsh, dramatically cut pieces pasted together creating lines across his work, it makes your eyes sweep across the image to try and make sense of it. Although with some of his pieces such as ‘Enter... (Exit)... The Third Person’ (1977) he places repeated imagery on top of itself, parts of the picture is replicated but we can never see the whole image. It is this technique that adds to the audience asking for more clues therefore completing his idea that we have to find the meaning.

Stezaker’s work verges on the surreal, like the masters of this movement from the past; he takes what is and merges it to create a new world, a new reality. His collections such as Masks, Silhouettes and Marriage link this idea of an alternate reality, the viewer asks but why has this been done. There is a piece by Dali that is called ‘Communication: Paranoiac Face’ (1935) which is part of his work using two different themes in one piece to make a double meaning. This work can be linked to his Mask series which it can be seen that the faces are replaced by postcard landscapes which hold features that could represent this persons faces and symbolise something to represent the person themselves. With the Dali painting, it is striking to see how this can be related to Stezaker’s work but instead of another image placed on top, Dali has made the face out of features in the landscape. Stezaker likes to use things that can be seen as obsolete using objects that by one person can be seen as old and out of date but Stezaker uses these to create something new. This is apparent with all of his collages because he uses found imagery from times past, people whose looks have faded and gone but he revitalises these by placing other images in the piece.

Stezaker’s influences have changed throughout over the near 40 years he’s been practising. He was influenced by a range of artists including Keith Arnhaft, John Murphy and later Joseph Cornell. It was Cornell’s whose work really interested him, Cornell’s show at the Whitechapel in 1981 make Stezaker contemplate how he really related to images. He didn’t consider Cornell’s work to be linked to Surrealism as such but he was inspired to then follow hi s visual fascinations that then ‘became illegible, mysterious, at which they touch on another world’ (Stezaker, 2011, p 37). Stezaker also uses Roland Barthes’ idea of how people will read the image in years to come, this is because he concerned himself with the idea that ‘it is not possible to create new images anymore, the only option is to appropriate existing ones’ (Stezaker, 2011, p.38) which basically describes what Stezaker does. Barthes’ also spoke about how people read the ‘text’ or in this case the images in front of them, which is what Stezaker concerns himself with concerning his work, he thinks about ‘legibility’ and what the reader can make of the image but in some ways that is different as individuals will all have different ways of seeing the same piece of work. In Stezaker’s piece ‘Mask X’ (1982) we see what we can conclude is an acrobatic girl from the rope ladders around her and her glittering costume. Where her face should be is actually a river landscape with a bridge which could mimic eyes. Stezaker creates these images, blinding the subjects and hiding their common features, he only reveals to us a certain amount of what he wants us to see and to distinguish from the chosen postcards how we would expect a the face to look due to the misleading features of the landscapes. Talking about how masks can be seen as horror arousing because we do not know what is underneath them, ‘this is how we experience the face as uncanny’ (Stezaker, 2011, p. 43), it also could be seen to identify humans with the world around us, the two together. By blindfolding that person and taking away what we can identify with the most he makes these portraits that conform to Freud’s idea of the uncanny and being unfamiliar.

In all of his work, Stezaker challenges us to question what we really see. His work is interesting and striking in its own right, even if it is just looked at for what it is a collage. The idea that Stezaker wants the audience to truly look at the work and decide what they want from it is what makes his pieces different. Relating to the uncanny, Stezaker takes what we see as normal making it mysterious which is indeed unfamiliar to us, his work should be enjoyed for whatever assumption the audience can make whilst viewing it.

Bibliography:

Appignanesi, R. / Zarate, O. (1992) Freud for Beginners, Cambridge: Cavendish House

Bonn, W. (2002) The Rise of Surrealism, Albany: State of New York Press

Craib, I. (1994) The Importance of Disappointment, London: Routledge

Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, (2009) Available at: http://www.scribd.com/doc/36058283/Cultural-Theory-and-Popular-Culture (Accessed 5^th April 2012)

Freud, S. / Dickson, A. (1985) Sigmund Freud Volume 14: Art and Literature, London: Penguin Books

Rand, N. / Torok, M. (1997) Questions for Freud, The Secret History of Psychoanalysis, London: Harvard University Press

Stezaker, J. / Ades, D. /Bracewell, M. (2011) John Stezaker, Ridinghouse, Whitechapel Gallery

Walberg, P. (1965) Surrealism, London: Thames Hudson

Images:

Stezaker Images from ‘John Stezaker, 2011’:

Untitled, 1977: p.7

Enter...(Exit)...the Third Person, 1977: p.64

Mask x, 1982: p.79

She(Film Portrait Collage)xi, 2008: p.132

Love x, 2006: p.138

Dali Image: http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=dali+communication+paranoiac+face, (Accessed: 5^th April 2012)