If you want to see the very best work of John Stezaker, there’s a problem. Despite exhibiting all around the world, the artist saves his very best works for the walls of his studio in St Leonards-on-Sea.
“They’re there to reassure me: oh yes, I am a good artist,” he says.
Does the critically adored 75-year-old really doubt himself?
“Oh God, yes. All the time. I spend most of the time thinking that I’m completely worthless. I’m never satisfied with anything I’ve done. Apart from these momentary things, which I cling to.”
On the surface, you’d never guess Stezaker suffered from crises in confidence. With his hypnotic whisper of a voice – his wife likes him to read her to sleep; former student Chris Ofili frequently fell asleep during his lectures – he is charming company, sharing self-deprecating jokes and philosophical ideas over a cup of tea. He talks about the enchanting collages he makes with a sense of playful adventure – he never knows what his experiments will bring. Sometimes monstrous creations emerge, such as in his series Masks, where he places Victorian-era postcards over the faces of obscure 1940s and 50s film stars. Here, train bridges become cavernous eyes and gaping mouths. Masks typically hide our faces, but these reveal something deeply unsettling. About what, exactly, Stezaker is still unsure.
These creepy creations are not as fun to make as they look. When he’s on a creative spurt, Stezaker will work for hours through the night, thinking of nothing else. His doctor has told him to slow down. Stezaker suffers from a type of arthritis known as ankylosing spondylitis, which he is currently trying to treat with shiatsu massage. In 2014, he suffered a heart attack while in Sydney and underwent triple bypass surgery. He is trying not to live on his nerves so much.
“I think John’s element is chaos,” says his assistant Toby who joins us today. “John has no interest in the minutiae of the day, you know, how everything fits together practically. He’s just like a torrent of creation.”
And when he tries to stop the torrent? “I get into these terrible depressions,” says Stezaker. “They can be very dark, and I tend to go into my room and not let anybody in for a while. Usually the only solution is to start working again.”
Stezaker has certainly been busy of late. His new series Spell cuts out the silhouettes of vintage female stars and places them over – what else? – natural history illustrations of invertebrates. A spider’s web becomes a lacy dress, a slug’s antennae transform into pincered fingers. The more you look, the more intricacies are revealed. Stezaker shows me one that’s currently in the process of being made – he slides the cut-out image around, still unsure where it might land. Should the wormlike coils comprise the eye or the mouth?
“What fascinates me, or horrifies me I should say, is the idea of metamorphosis,” he says. “That bridge between the animal kingdom and the human realm.” Stezaker has become a kind of art world Frankenstein, electrifying old images with new life – and new meaning – in a way that seems almost out of his control. In his series Marriage, he slices through the faces of male and female film stars and then joins them together to create unnerving new beings. The combining of male and female forms preoccupies him.
“My work has predominantly been about transgender over the years,” he says. Stezaker seems largely distanced from the raging culture war around this issue. Yet he can trace the roots of his fascination with gender back to the 1970s, when a student of his invited him to an evening in the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. “They had transvestite karaoke and I watched this man singing Over the Rainbow with tears of mascara running down his face. And I remember myself crying too, thinking, my gosh, it’s so strange.”
Do transgender people identify with his art?
“Yes, and I identify with them, in some way. Honestly, I’m not quite sure what I am. Who knows, in a different age, I might have wanted to be a girl.”
He might have transitioned?
“No, no, I don’t think so,” he says. “But I did prefer playing with the girls to playing with the boys. Their games were about the imagination rather than the physical.”
Stezaker was born in Worcester, and began collecting images at a young age – cigarette cards, shopping catalogues, a sepia coloured dog calendar he was especially fond of. He didn’t think of it as art back then. He had actually considered becoming a police officer or joining the navy, based on the fact they wore midnight blue uniforms – his favourite colour (today he wears a suit jacket in a similar shade). He hated school and was “completely antisocial” as a student at the Slade school of art. “I thought I would be an artist who stayed inside their studio, but my career didn’t go well – and if you’re an unsuccessful artist, you end up in the classroom situation again as a teacher.”
Indeed, interest in Stezaker’s work was scarce. For years, his wife Virginia Villalba– “a really interesting painter” – was the breadwinner who allowed him to teach part-time and work on his art. There were many frustrations along the way. Stezaker had originally wanted to develop a “cubism of photography”. He shows me some early collages and, when I remark that they look similar to David Hockney’s “joiners”, he replies pointedly: “Yes, he denies that he ever saw my show.”
Proper recognition came when Stezaker’s works were rediscovered in the mid-00s. Today he is seen as a key influence on the YBAs and a visionary in his field. In 2012, Stezaker won the Deutsche Börse photography prize which annoyed some photographers on the grounds that, well, he’s not actually a photographer. He can see their point. He’s also taken criticism for slicing through photographic work – no matter how obsolete it is – and he admits to feeling immense guilt at his savaging of these vintage prints. The thing is, he’s tried making copies and it’s just not the same.
“I think I have to be that vandal. There has to be a violence, a sacrifice is involved.”
Stezaker is keen to take me on a tour of the studio. The five-storey building, all bare wooden floorboards and sparse decoration, is a treasure trove and Stezaker could not be more generous with his time as we amble through torn-up Spanish magazine photoromans, large Warhol-inspired silkscreen prints and dazzlingly beautiful works such as Father Sky, a tribute to his late dad in which a film star silhouette is used to contrast a night-time meteor shower with a serene blue sky. I’m particularly moved by Flash, which was inspired by a drawing of an explosion his then-young son made shortly after the 7/7 bombings in London; in Stezaker’s work a star-shaped explosive cut is made on various pages from Ladybird books.
Finally, we descend to the basement floor, where a projector is set up to play some of Stezaker’s films. Each one is a looped series of still images played so quickly that they overwhelm your senses. Although 24 are shown every second, the human brain is apparently only equipped to pick a couple. “Each time you look you see something else,” he says. “To me, it’s a genuine cinema of the unconscious.”
He has made films consisting solely of portraits, or steam trains, or fights, or horses standing still. The film Blind is the most chaotic, featuring all kinds of unrelated images. Originally Stezaker had decided to only use black-and-white stills with no text visible. But the film-maker assigned to put it all together picked up the wrong box of images, and the finished film featured a mix of colour and text stills. “I thought it was just perfect,” he says. “Why did I ever want to do it another way?” He pauses and adds, with a hint of humour and melancholy: “I always find that I’m the one that gets in the way of things being good.”
It’s not true, of course, not least because often Stezaker is barely in the way at all. During our tour I spot what initially appears to be a multicoloured flower bursting open but, on closer inspection, is actually two identical Mao-era postcards placed together in a mirror image. That simple act is all Stezaker has done to make the viewer see something completely differently. I ask if he at any point felt the need to do something more to it in order to feel ownership?
“No!” he says, surprised by the question. “The dream is to not do anything. The ultimate dream is to display the things I’ve just found. Because they’re like pieces that have come from God.”
