"I photograph my body. I generalize it by beheading myself to make my body more like any other man's. Nakedness removes the body from 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 images of manhood. revealing my hidden inner life is not without its comic aspects. I am both actor and spectator, creator and dupe, inquisitor ans 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 than 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 pleasures of memory.
My approach, however, is intuitive. I am not as concerned with meaning as I am with its expression, as it reveals me to myself. In a strict sense, I have no prior ideology. The gestures I make, and the images I capture must ring true even though they are the product of my fancies and thoughts, of my picturesque and amusing associations encoded into a personal sign language of non-verbal confessional.
The natural aging of 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 ideas of Jung and Freud—all of this demands my attention and recognition.
I began working as an artist more than half a century ago. Unfortunately, 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, and organized exhibitions of artists. I talked about art so much that I stopped making art. In 1980, I decided to become an artist again, and to forswear talking about art, including my own. Paradoxically, whether I liked it or not, I found I couldn't make art without talking about it.
When I photograph, I have to tell the assistant such things as what part of my body I want photographed, the scale of the image and is position in relation to space, for the photograph to be made. I also have to discuss control of the shadows thrown by the artificial lighting I use. Once the photo has been taken, I must explain the printing of the negative: how I want the image printed—soft, hard, dark, or light; what parts to burn or dodge; or, perhaps, to crop, and to try different sizes so I can find out which I think is best. After this, it gets somewhat simpler. I just have to tell the dry mounter how I want the image mounted and what kind of framing I need.
Once the artwork is finished, I have to decide on the title. All my images are called self-portraits, but each needs to be identified. I do this by naming the photographed body part, for example, "Self-Portrait: Finger," followed by the year that the image was taken. I communicate this to an assistant who writes the information on the back of the print.
You can deduce that I don't actually DO anything. Other than signing the print when it is finished, I make my art by telling other people what to do. I just talk it into being. JC
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