Joiners

I have written a lot about a number of practitioners that can be described as “joiners”. This is a term I discovered in John A. Walker’s invaluable dictionary of art: Glossary of Art, Architecture & Design Since 1945 Third Edition. My copy was withdrawn from Beverly Hills Public Library on North Rexford Drive, Beverley Hills.

Anyway, back to the business of “joiners”. This is a term, Walker says, that was:

invented by the British artist David Hockey to describe those of his works produced in the 1980s which are composed of a series of small photographs joined together. The photographs are taken from different viewpoints and then arranged so they link up or overlap with the result that the finished collage resembles a photographic version of cubism. Due to his fame, Hockney has come to be regarded as the inventor of this form of art but in fact artists such as Jan Dibbets and John Stezaker were making ‘Joiners’ long before Hockney.

I would also add Gordon Matta-Clark to the list. Matta-Clark is refered to in the same breadth as Hockney by Zelnik-Manor and Perona,in 2008 in there discussion of automatic-joiners, produced through software.

Other key figures I think are important to mention are John Harper, Luo Yonglin, Thomas Kellner and Sohei Nishino.

There is also Doug and Mike Starn and image joiners like Christopher Marclay that may tie in here.

Further reading:

Hockney, D., & Joyce, P., Hockney on Photography: conversations with Paul Joyce, London: Jonathan Cape

Zelnik-Manor & Perona (2008) ”Automating Joiners”
http://webee.technion.ac.il/~lihi/Publications/ZelnikPerona.AutoJoiners.pdf

John Stezaker

John Stezaker once said “so much emerges from what I destroy” (Buck, L., 2011 p.36).  This could have come from the mouth of Gordon Matta-Clark. Stezaker’s collages seem to come out of the surrealist imagination: they are fragmentary and dream-like and created from found images. These dream-like and unsettling narratives drew from film stills, glamorous publicity shots from the golden age of Hollywood and postcards. 

  John Stezaker Untitled (For Angus) Film Still Collage II, 2009  

Old Mask IV 2006

Mask XXXV, 2007

Carla Sorell notes that “in the Mask series old portraits are mixed with found postcards, placed precisely over the face in such a way that the void created by the landscape become somehow representative of the subjects psyche” (Sorrell, C., 2011 p.21).

Sources:

Buck, L., (2011), “So much emerges from what I destroy” Art Newspaper 20 No220 Jan 2011 p.36

Sorrel, C (2011) “The Face Beneath” Crafts no228 Ja/F p.20-21