Masking, superimposing, erasing, removing and in every sense actually “de-facing” the face, that primary focus of human identity – there are further echoes of all that in the work of British artist Julie Cockburn and the Italian Maurizio Anzeri, who also use found imagery as a base to reconstruct new images.
Sewing yarn onto vintage portrait photos and adding extra, origami-like folded photos without the aid of Adobe software, Cockburn’s images assume a new life with an entirely new personality. Her embellished works have a warm, comic tone to them, suggesting a time, not so long ago, when manipulation could be applied to a photo without the help of a software programme.
Similarly to Cockburn, Maurizio Anzeri’s celluloid raw materials share the same found-image provenance as Cockburn’s, but the final results have a much more macabre, nightmarish tone than the former’s family-album images. Anzeri first began to collect vintage photo portraits after realising he had obsession with faces, an urge that led to his creating what he terms “photo sculptures”. Using intricate stitching on a woman’s face to reveal her “muscles”, monochrome thread on a man’s face to infer an Edvard Munch-like scream, or other techniques to mask and then reveal a psychedelic, entirely unreadable, face, Anzeri’s hand-worked creations transform the original vintage photographs of everyday people into cameos of a ghoulish fairy tale.
Where fine art leads, popular art surely follows. In 2011, the street artist Banksy released “Cardinal Sin”, a defaced, eighteenth-century bust of a Catholic priest with its face sawn off and a three-dimensional plate of pixelation fastened in its place. While the intention of the artists above may have been ambiguous, Banksy’s pixelated face was a direct commentary on the Catholic church’s child abuse scandal and its attempted cover up.
The urge to alter or vandalise – or improve, if you see it that way – works of art has been around for as long as art itself, and rarely fails to surprise in its ingenuity or immediacy (in January this year, for instance, a woman called Carmen Tisch from Denver, Colorado, drunkenly rubbed her buttocks on a Clyfford Still painting valued at US$40m). So too is it among the most actually “popular” of the popular art practices (let’s face it, there’s plenty of fun to be had in taking to glossy mags with a Sharpie and adding black teeth and monobrows to airbrushed celebs). But the recent focus on the face?
It could be seen as somewhat savage, all this defacing, but it’s nevertheless nuanced: Julie Cockburn and Maurizio Anzeri create new identities on existing faces, Douglas Gordon drains them of personality, while Banksy hijacks them to make a political comment. As for Willem Popelier, the simplest reading of his provocative (and legally risky) “Showroom Girls” might be that, in an era when the face itself is ubiquitous, perfected and exalted in the mass media (consider the fuss over Julia Roberts’ unnaturally airbrushed image last year) it inevitably becomes an irresistible site for alteration, erasure and even desecration.
On the face of it, that’s perhaps what these artworks are all about.
From Sleek 33, “The Brand New Retro”