Brian Dillon on John Stezaker

"The mystery of Stezaker's art may be said to reside in these precise and shocking cuts. He has spoken of the moment when he takes a blade to the sleek surface of an old bromide print as one of heightened anxiety and tension – having handled and gazed at these images for months or even years, he likes to get the incision over and done with as swiftly as possible."

A nice article on the always fascinating Stezaker. Read the rest here.

Cindy Tells All!

"I give Cindy Sherman the once-over. Then the twice- and thrice-over. I know I'm staring more than is right but I can't help myself. I'm looking for clues. Sherman is one of the world's leading artists – for 30 years, she has starred in all her photographs – and yet the more we see of her, the less recognisable she is."

- Cindy Sherman: Me, Myself & I,  Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian

A performance so neatly calibrated it is hard not to think of it as just another installment in the ongoing fiction she has created, the business of being Cindy Sherman. But it is done so adroitly, with so much faithfulness to the illusion and all the details just right, that we don’t really feel cheated, rather we are complicit in our own deception. I don’t know if she even exists in any sense as the character portrayed here, and somehow I doubt it, but the tearful confession that she is “on a break” from her relationship with David Byrne, along with a description of her outrageously bigoted father and some other choice revelations, are so finely worked as to sit alongside the best of her photographs. 

Read it for yourself here.

Martin Schoeller

Where Martin Schoeller seems to excel is in the disclosure of reptilian celebrity, the hollow, endless need. It remains difficult to tell though if this is genuinely a facet of his work or a value of that uniquely modern state, which allows whole identities to become volatile, something merely to be traded upon, so that the supposed “disclosure” we see in this work, the firm impression of presence, is in itself just another part of the ruse. He is complicit in the traffic of individual-as-product, but of course we all are, it is a kind of social illusion, fame’s own commodity value. Perhaps that doesn’t even matter, not anymore. In looking there is no way you cannot be implicated and Schoeller realises this. There is a certain grotesque fascination to be had from it, the spectacle, and a forced intimacy with the plastic expanse of each face. The factuality of this picture (and all of his work) would have us believe it is about appearance – placement in the market does that too – but really what I see in this is the failure of representation to account for subjective experience, for other people, each being their own language, a closed text. He doesn’t allow for translations, the faces are not legible. Instead these blank spaces are filled by the slip-stream of culture, by longing, by desire – and yes, by the snake-oil editors of glossy magazines, let’s not be naive. But in stripping away all the product endorsements, internet notoriety or whatever else, the individual remains, dense and complicated as ever, if in no way admirable. The solidity of his pictures often seems to mock the idea that fame somehow absolves a person of humanity and its burdens. There’s something brutally physical about them, the hidden architecture of each skull imposes itself on the outward mask. This is indeed work about its time, our hierarchies and values, and yet does not seem so much of it. Of course, the fact that his services are for hire to some very high-profile clients goes a long way toward obscuring what is most interesting here, as does the very notion of celebrity itself. That is the devil’s bargain of actually making these pictures. Regardless, his style is one to be reckoned with and the work rewards a deeper consideration than it might receive as mere illustrative fodder.

Find an extensive selection (including his female body-builder series) here.