Love in a Cold Climate

John Stezaker Love XI, 2006, collage. Private Collection, Switzerland. © The Artist.

I went to see John Stezaker whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/john-stezaker at the Whitechapel last week. Glamorous images - manipulated - altered - intervened; the visual language of surrealism, a central loneliness, and she remarked to me, as we stood looking at these images "How can he spend his whole life on one thing?" She's young, and we're talking about a retrospective that is pre-digital where the platinum print is iconographic and loses none of its mistique, stark in the contrast of today's expendable culture.

He must have been in love. I know I fall in and out of love with my own work, and go through times of disillusionment and times when it is so rapturously engaging. How can we fall in love with what we do? Part of it may be sublimation - to immerse and invest in one's personal dialogue. But, there are many kinds of love, as we know, but watching Michael Sandel talk about Kant and the Catagorical Imperative, it seems Reason is the one ulterior aspiration: what the "right" thing to do is; to see others, their welfare as the prime; to set an example. And so it is with love: to want the best for that person, to put that person as prime, to put them before oneself. That could be a mothers love, for some, or for a lover, a truly altruistic love; for others, it's giving to a purpose higher than themselves for the greater humanity.

The "right thing"  - these are simple rules we live by, mostly, maybe, but where was Reason when Love walked in the door? That's the gap between aspiration and motivation. By bringing the two together we become morally upstanding citizens, maybe, but where's the glamour, the romance, the loss of reason to make images as elusive and timeless as Stezakers?