b.1920 - d.2003
We only have available to us what he has been quoted to have said and no primary evidence that we could directly ask him of his work.
Source: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/john-coplans-2353
In 1971 he settled in New York as the editor of Artforum,
a position he held until 1977. A year later, under the influence of his
friend the photographer Lee Friedlander, he began once again to take
photographs.
In 1984 Coplans began taking the photographs of his own body
with which he established his international reputation as an artist.
These large-scale black-and-white images, enlarged from 4×5 inch
Polaroid photographs and often presented in groups, are candid and
sometimes humorous explorations of his own body. By cropping off the
head, Coplans presents these depersonalised images of the body as a
surprising, intriguing object, fascinating in detail and malleability.
His work also stands as a riposte to the cult of youth and beauty
represented by commercial photography and what he saw as the vanities of
the 1980s art world.
A Self-Portrait: John Coplans 1984–97 (exh. cat., Long Island City, NY, P.S.1, 1997)
John Coplans: A Self Portrait 1984–99 (exh. cat., Edinburgh, N.G. Mod. A., Dean Gal., 1999)
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| Self-Portrait (Frieze No.2 Four Panels) |
At first glance don't notice the images are slightly askew and don't match up, the eye compensates for this. Evokes camera moving up and down the body.
"I have the feeling that I’m alive, I have a body. I’m seventy years old, and generally bodies of seventy-year-old men look somewhat like my body ... I’m using my body and saying, even though it’s a seventy-year-old body, I can make it extremely interesting. That keeps me alive and gives me vitality. It’s a kind of process of energising myself." ---(Quoted in A Body: John Coplans, p.175.)\When he returned to art making in the early 1980s, he returned to the goals of that movement – the expression of universal, primordial feelings located in the psychic unconscious – using photography and his ageing body as his subject. He recounted a daydream and its result: ‘I travel down my genes and visit remote ancestors, both male and female. Inspired by these journeys to the past ... I begin directing an assistant as she takes photographs of my body. To remove all references to my current identity, I leave out my head.’ (Quoted in A Body: John Coplans, p.166.)
For Coplans, genetic memory is the locus for a collective unconscious, a means of getting in touch with universal feelings. He believes that perception is the only means to express the unconscious, but that this ‘expressiveness’ is ‘extra-linguistic’, something which cannot be communicated in a known language. (Chevrier, p.6.)
As his photographic self-portraits evolved in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Coplans became interested in the difference between what the eye sees and what the camera records. His photographs present the body as an object seen in a way which is impossible to the naked eye. In such early works as Self Portrait (Torso, Front) 1984 (Tate P11672) he had represented his ‘self’ as a section of flesh, depersonalised through its lack of an identifying face. He now went on to represent this self as multiple – a series of selves
READ MORE IN DEPTH WITH WORK TO ELABORATE
Further Reading:
A Body: John Coplans, New York 2001, reproduced pp.126-7
Jean-Francois Chevrier, John Coplans: Self Portraits, exhibition catalogue, Galerie Lelong, New York 1991
Stuart Morgan, Frances Morris, Rites of Passage: Art for the End of the Century, Tate Gallery, London 1995, pp.74-87, reproduced pp.82-3 no.17
BOOK: Provocations - http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/index/fyfe/fyfe8-17-01.asp [√]
27th Feb ---- further research into these self-portraits
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| Self-portrait (Back with arms above) 1984 |
Viewed from a distance, it has a sculptural, monolithic appearance. Up close, the silver gelatin print has the graphic quality of a charcoal drawing.
In 1979 he took up photography. He explained: ‘I decided to become a photographer because I wanted to go back to being an artist. I had had enough of art history, critics, museology ... I chose photography because I could not go back to painting ... photography ... is a medium to build an identity out of a composite personality, to find an artistic identity.’ (Quoted in John Coplans: Self Portrait: Hand/Foot, p.46.)
I was very interested in this idea of genetic memory.’ (Quoted in Morris, p.75.) He began to think about the body as being able to express a language originating in a collective unconscious, something universal, primordial and direct.
Coplans uses a video camera and monitor to view parts of his body. Once he has selected an area, an assistant takes a photograph using positive/negative Polaroid film
By photographing sections of his own body, but always excluding his face, he divests it of a sense of wholeness
Presenting an ageing male body as textured surface or surreal object rather than the locus of a thinking subject depersonalised rather than defined by his identity, Coplans subverts traditional self-portraiture and historical representation of the body in photography.
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| Self-portrait (Torso, front) 1984 |
same as the other images (rest of the details)
Simon Johnson www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk
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