Adding and Taking Away: John Stezaker Collages

Abstract

John Stezaker writes ‘I am conscious of trying to do the impossible: to hold onto something which is not consciously visible and which evades such a grasp’. What is possible, however, is to share this experience through collage. This article analyses the work in detail to show how Stezaker provides the conditions for such sharing. It shows how the collage is organised. First, by drawing on Deleuze’s idea of a series to understand the play of fragments. Second, by analysing each collage to determine the simultaneity of fragment and whole. Third, by understanding Stezaker’s wish through psychoanalytic ideas of gaze and the uncanny. However, that does not mean that psychoanalytic theory tells us about the conditions under which collage can have that effect. It is the particular way in which Stezaker compresses space and time in the organisation of the whole and the fragments that brings the gaze into play.