Corpus: The Work of John Coplans
An exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson ( John Coplans. La Vie des Formes [The Life of Forms], October 5th, 2021—January 16th, 2022), conceived by Jean-François Chevrier with Élia Pijollet, as well as the accompanying monograph, published by Le Point du Jour, in Cherbourg, where the exhibition will be shown from January 29th to May 15th, 2022, offer a rare opportunity to discover or reassess, in one movement, the photographs of the British photographer (1920-2003), who was active in the United States from the 1960s onwards, and his formidable critical essays, some of which have been translated into French.
John Coplans is a case in point. His photographic work, begun in the early 1980s, when he was sixty years old, quickly found its form—that of black and white self-portraits showing only his own body as an elderly man, without a face—and earned him almost immediate recognition, with exhibitions in galleries and then prestigious institutions (the SF MoMA and then the MoMA in 1988, the Centre Pompidou in 1994, PS1 in 1997), particularly in France, where his images entered public and private collections. On this side of the Atlantic, these photographs and their impact have partly masked his remarkable career as a critic, editor and curator over the previous twenty years.
The art historian, critic and curator JeanFrançois Chevrier, who met him in 1984 and was close to him, was best placed to bring together, with the art historian Élia Pijollet, the photographs available in France, in these times of health crisis, to present his plastic work—and to retrace his itinerary in a hybrid work. John Coplans. Un Corps (Le Point du jour, 240 p., 22 euros) thus juxtaposes an “artistic biography” by Jean-François Chevrier, works and documents, a brief anthology of Coplans’ writings and comments between 1965 and 1991, with introductions by Élia Pijollet, as well as a bibliography compiled by her.
LATE WORK
The Fondation HCB is showing in Paris forty photographs or sets of photographs by Coplans, from the first Torsos of 1984, gelatin silver prints in medium formats (for example Torso Front, 81 x 68 cm), to the final, larger format of Body Parts, No. 8 in 2001 (88.9 x 127 cm), via the series Body of Work (198486) and Self-Portrait (1984-88), Foot (198489) and Hand (1986-88), as well as the quasimonumental Frieze, No. 4 (1994, 198 x 260 cm). At the entrance, an introduction, a chronology and a documentary display case evoke Coplans’ career and his choice of photography.
In 1985 he said: “I am currently working on a series of self-portraits of my (aging) body, parts representing the whole. The face is excluded because I wish to universalize the image. In this process I am intrigued by the idea that my mind and my image become one. This way the dichotomy of the brain and the body is erased.” The terms of his production are defined in a short period of time, providing a stable framework that allows for a great deal of variation, as well as an evolution commensurate with his inventiveness, and perhaps a sense of urgency to create while he can.
In the same “Artist’s statement”, he writes: “Because of my previous experience as a painter, I made the decision to work large, wall size rather than book size.” The same “simple” motif is thus presented in five images on the same wall, in square formats measuring up to a metre—from the front, fingers folded in, or on the contrary, spread out, thumb between the middle and ring fingers, or in profile. A hand bigger than a face, as eloquent, stranger.Two small formats Upside Down (No. 2 and 5, 1992, 13 x 29 cm) shed light on the research carried out to arrive at larger images combining several elements, such as Upside Down (1992, 213 x 107 cm). Elsewhere it is the very black detail of a foot, Heel, Dark Sole (1989, 71,1 x
93,9 cm), as if from prehistory. Opposite, the rhythmic composition of Self-Portrait, Three Times (1987, 50,7 x 60,7 cm) becomes even more complex with the triptych Six Times (1987, 81 x 187 x 2 cm), as if the game had no end.
In an intermediate space, prints signal the influence of others, about whom he wrote or not: Watkins, Brancusi, Evans, Weegee, Friedlander. Display cases contain periodicals, books for which he wrote the text, and the artist’s books, catalogues or monographs of his photographs that he conceived, as well as the 1996 collection of his critical writings from 1963 to 1981 entitled Provocations.
CRITICAL POWER
Coplans had seven lives. As a child he moved between England and South Africa; as a volunteer at seventeen, he fought in Somalia, Ethiopia, India and Burma; as a painter in London after the war, until the revelation of the exhibition The New American Painting at the Tate, in 1959; voluntary exile in the United States at the age of forty, choosing California, where he lived as a teacher, cofounded the magazine Artforum in 1962, where he regularly published, and organised exhibitions, Jawlensky and the Serial Image (1966) and on Warhol (1970); critic in New York, editor-in-chief of Artforum from 1971 to 1977; director of the Art Institute in Akron, Ohio, from 1978 to 1980; finally, photographer in New York. He never ceased to be interested in other forms of creation - saying, in 1988: “I’ve never worn blinkers”.The wide range of subjects on which he wrote is proof of this. Moreover, he became more demanding, made his choices more precise. The eight critical texts translated into French appear uneven. Among the best is the one devoted, in April 1974 in Artforum, to Robert Smithson’s Amarillo Ramp, who had died six months earlier in a scouting flight for a work. Coplans evokes Smithson’s artistic project with a lucidity, but also a strength that reveals his esteem for, and attachment to, the figure of the deceased. In 1977, “Weegee the Famous” was the first essay Coplans wrote on a photographer, an exhibition of whose work he organized at the International Center of Photography in New York. The unexpurgated version, published in Art in America in September, is strikingly unabashed and far-reaching in its discussion of the photographer’s voyeurism. By this time it was clear that Coplans had encountered photography, a fact confirmed by his texts on “C. E. Watkins atYosemite” (1978) and “Brancusi photographer” (1979); with it, he found his medium.
Coplans excels in his interviews, as when he describes his modus operandi, in 1988, on the occasion of an exhibition at MoMA: “I no longer had to see, I only had to feel. Some of the photos are taken from the back […]. They’re taken according to my instructions by an assistant. So I was seeing myself from inside instead of just seeing me with my eyes. It really was a very atavistic activity, a different mode of perception, in the sense that I was going back to absolute instinct, instinct in which I suppressed intellectuality.” He acknowledges what he owes to Philip Guston, the subject of his “last review” in 1980: “It was he who gave me the clue: that in making the self the subject matter, I could touch upon universal themes. […] Inasmuch as my photographs describe me, they also deal with time and memory. It’s not only memory: they are memorials […]. My photos recall memories of mankind.” Further on he says: “I feel no pity about being old. It’s one of the best things that’s happened to me. For the first time, I’m free.”
So we see the same critical and plastic intelligence at work in Coplans’ photographs and texts. What Coplans writes or says about his photography attests to a capacity for analysis that results from the maturity of a professional who has accumulated a long experience, but who has also known how to radically renew himself. He says how Guston inspired him in his decision to start again, by turning his back on critic to become a photographer. But the painter, leaving the lyrical abstraction that guaranteed him success for a more dangerous figuration, had changed his way, not his medium.
Anne Bertrand is an art historian and critic and teaches at the Haute École des arts du Rhin, Strasbourg.