John Coplans (1920-2003) was born in the UK and later moved to New York in 1971. Coplans started out as an artist and then "...along the way I got interested in talking about art. Very soon I became a critic. I wrote books and articles about art, edited a well-known art magazine (Artforum), and organized exhibitions of artists." In 1980 Coplans decided to start making art again and the subject of his work was to be his own body. The following quotes are taken from the website of the John Coplans Trust (The John Coplans Trust)
"I photograph my body. I generalize it by beheading myself to make my body more like any other man's. Nakedness removes from the body the specificity of time: unclothed, it belongs to the past, present and future. It is classless, without country, unencumbered by language, and free to wander across cultures at will.
A compelling influence on me has been the feminist movement and the reexamination of men's roles in relationship to women. In response, it is not only necessary for me to deal with the historical surface of consciousness, but also to examine the deeper, unconscious drives and image of manhood, revealing my hidden inner life is not without its comic aspects. I am both actor and spectator, create and dupe, inquisitor and squealer. Farce and force combine to reveal the human comedy.
My body is actively male and I view the world through it. But this is the expression of an existential rather sexual outlet. It is a broader category. My maleness is chance, not choice, and my imagery is more concerned with the psychosexual than with identity and anxiety. I try to regard the body and mind as inseparable, a single field of human experience that encompasses the perceptual, the intellectual, and the pains and pleasure of memory.
The natural aging of the body and mind plays a role in my work. The body's response to age is personally felt and can be observed by all. The mind, however, is another story. Personal and hidden, subject to the quirks stored in my memory's attic and in my genetic cells, scrambling art, history, science, politics, anthropology, and especially important to me, the idea of Jung and Freud—all of this demands my attention and recognition."
It's interesting to me that Coplans calls this printed multiple a 'frieze' as there are many commonalities between the traditional frieze and the accordion - both are long horizontal bands of imagery & decoration with similar formal issues when it comes to the sequencing and narrative of its contents.
15 single-sided pages, individually 7.5" x 6" and when fully opened 7.5" length.
