, <\/em>which involved him collecting webcam photos of strangers he discovered on public computers. Cruising in a well-known computer showcase store, Popelier stumbled across almost a hundred shots and two movies of a pair of teenage young girls striking poses, blowing kisses and mugging up for the camera, famous for 15megabytes, but unaware that their images would ever be made public, let alone exhibited as art in a gallery in a big city.\u00a0<\/p>\nIn an act that most people would perhaps have thought twice about, Popelier downloaded the photos, took them home, and superimposed large pink circles over the girls\u2019 faces. The new images went on to form a strand of his project entitled \u201cShowroom Girls\u201d, and were exhibited in Amsterdam’s Foam museum in the summer of 2011. On his website, Popelier wrote that the webcam pictures where \u201cmade by true Digital Narcissists.\u201d The American gossip website Gawker duly asked whether this \u201cmight be the creepiest project ever.\u201d<\/p>\n
But what, exactly, was Popelier doing? What did he intend by his altered images, and the brutal erasure of the girls\u2019 faces? Was the project some comment on celebrity culture in the social media age, or was it about voyeurism, exhibitionism and the supposed self-obsession of contemporary youth?\u00a0<\/p>\n
His spotty girls are only the latest and most eyecatching examplars of what happens when artists choose to create new images from the faces of unsuspecting subjects, real or imagined, current or historical, alive or dead. \u201cObliterism\u201d you could call it: the act of altering, masking or just annihilating the face of a subject within the image, and as a consequence, the identity originally attached to it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Popelier\u2019s most obvious antecedent \u2013 the godfather of the face-spotting – is John Baldessari. The American conceptual artist is often labeled as the pioneer of creating new identities and personas using found imagery and anonymous, unowned works, stripping them of their previous stories, and creating an entirely new image, often with only the use of an dot placed over the face. Baldessari believed that covering the faces with a sticker \u201ctook the power away from them in someway, they became more generic.\u201d<\/p>\n
Baldessari\u2019s method of applying candy-coloured dots was radically simple, and so is Scottish artist and 1996 Turner Prize winner Douglas Gordon\u2019s. He applies a process of accelerated deterioration to his work (the effective opposite of Baldessari\u2019s approach), in a sense extracting the subject\u2019s identity through the face, rather than masking it. The burning, scratching and ripping of iconic images of superstars gives the celebrities in question a new identity; when you look at Gordon\u2019s image of James Dean, you\u2019re no longer able to think of James Dean, and see instead Gordon’s own intervention in the image: the obliteration itself becomes the focus of the work.<\/p>\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/Boo-300-760x1024.jpg\")
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Masking, superimposing, erasing, removing and in every sense actually \u201cde-facing\u201d the face, that primary focus of human identity \u2013\u00a0there 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sewing yarn onto vintage portrait photos and adding extra, origami-like folded photos without the aid of Adobe software, Cockburn\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Similarly to Cockburn, Maurizio Anzeri\u2019s celluloid raw materials share the same found-image provenance as Cockburn\u2019s, but the final results have a much more macabre, nightmarish tone than the former\u2019s 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 \u201cphoto sculptures\u201d. Using intricate stitching on a woman\u2019s face to reveal her \u201cmuscles\u201d, monochrome thread on a man\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Where fine art leads, popular art surely follows. In 2011, the street artist Banksy released \u201cCardinal Sin\u201d, 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\u2019s pixelated face was a direct commentary on the Catholic church\u2019s child abuse scandal and its attempted cover up.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The urge to alter or vandalise \u2013\u00a0or improve, if you see it that way \u2013\u00a0works 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 \u201cpopular\u201d of the popular art practices (let\u2019s face it, there\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n
It could be seen as somewhat savage, all this defacing, but it\u2019s 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) \u201c<\/em>Showroom Girls\u201d <\/em>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\u2019 unnaturally airbrushed image last year) it inevitably becomes an irresistible site for alteration, erasure and even desecration.\u00a0<\/p>\nOn the face of it, that\u2019s perhaps what these artworks are all about.<\/p>\n
From Sleek 33, \u201cThe Brand New Retro\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Some modern artists are so obsessed with the human face that they can\u2019t stop messing with it, imposing big pink dots, scrubbing out eyes, or sawing it off altogether. Is this art\u2019s stand against facial identity? By Amy Binding Last year the Dutch artist Willem Popelier made news after what started out as a routine…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[100,422,273,423,424],"class_list":["post-5418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-amy-binding","tag-douglas-gordon","tag-john-baldessari","tag-julie-cockburn","tag-maurizio-anzeri"],"acf":{"main_category":null,"legacy":"1","exclude_from_ads":null,"hero_title":null,"subtitle":null,"hero":null,"teasers":null,"facebook_image":null,"related_articles":null,"next_article":null,"sleek_card_focus":null,"content":null},"yoast_head":"\n
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