John Sparagana: What the Child Saw, What the Lover Saw, What the Killer Saw
Monique Meloche Gallery
- Leah DeVun -
A version of the following review originally appeared on Glasstire.com.
John Sparagana is known for his appropriation of images from fashion and cultural magazines, which he manipulates in such a way as to transform their surfaces and interrogate their meaning. In his Sleeping Beauty series, for example, Sparagana folded, crushed and otherwise distressed the pages of magazines until they deteriorated, their contents fading into ghostly shapes. The resulting scenes—fractured by fine lines—recall the craquelure finish of a Renaissance masterpiece. Through such handling, glossy clarity dissolves into a soft, ragged, almost clothlike texture. The series simultaneously revealed the medium’s ephemeral nature while persistently hinting at concerns about beauty and consumption. The artist often left a portion of each magazine undamaged. This juxtaposition suggested both gravity and a certain ethereality not immediately present in the original images.
For What the Child Saw, What the Lover Saw, What the Killer Saw at Monique Meloche Gallery, Sparagana addressed the same subject matter on a grander scale, enlarging magazine images and slicing them into minute unidirectional strips. He then reassembled strips into playful extensions, multiplications and hybridizations, interpolating sections from noncontiguous parts or mixing two or more images together. This process stretches and splits the subjects—mainly fashion models—until they vibrate, disintegrate and are reconstituted. Distortions in one piece, The Sixteen Foot Golden Body, render individuality and even gender indeterminate, distancing the images from their former, self-consciously gendered context.
Sparagana invests his pages with desperate, even comedic overtones. Full Fathom Five elongates an advertisement for sunglasses until models’ mouths distend in apparent horror. Another piece joins faces from a Benetton advertisement by means of alternating strips, referencing the company’s “United Colors” campaign while contorting models into grotesques. To his credit, this ironic stance is complicated by an obvious fascination with throwaway culture. Although omnipresent to the point of mundanity, these images reflect some of our society’s most visceral fantasies and fears.
However, some conclusions are too obvious, as in two works that integrate fashion spreads and photographs of what appears to be George W. Bush. One piece knits a Chanel advertisement and the president’s face, which is underscored by a snippet of text that reads “Death,” hence the work’s title, Chanel of Death. If more than a banal critique of the present political climate is intended, the predictability of Sparagana’s selections—as well as the transparency of his title—obscures it.
John Sparagana, The Sixteen Foot Golden Body, 2006
Graphite, magazine pages, archival adhesive on paper
47 x 30 inches
John Sparagana, The Recurrent End of the Unending, 2006
Graphite, magazine pages, archival adhesive on paper
31 x 47 inches
At its best, Sparagana’s work lends dimensionality to bodies that are idealized, airbrushed out of time and space. Man Is in Love and Loves What Burns functions as a bridge between earlier work and his present series, making use of a segmented and lightly distressed tableau. The original advertisement pictured a shirtless model as he leans forward to kiss a beautiful woman in a gold-sequined top. Sparagana’s manipulations suspend time. The artist escalates the drama of the narrative, foregrounding the beauty of the body and the richness of the scene, all the while raising the possibility that something is amiss, both in the image and in our attraction to it. While this show was not as successful or as lovely as some previous exhibitions, images such as this uphold the value and appeal of his work.
Sparagana is often discussed in the context of fair use; that is, the extent to which copyrighted items may be used without permission. The artist also challenges intellectual property law by photographing his hand-worked magazine pages, which he then brands with his own signature and copyright—an endeavor that echoes early work by Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine. Such provocations raise important and unsettled questions: how substantially must an artist alter an object to elevate it from commercial to fine art? What do artists owe to the original producers of mass culture? Given copyright infringement lawsuits leveled at Jeff Koons, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and others in recent years, Sparagana’s method represents a timely contribution to the debate.
The images in What the Child Saw… necessarily interrogate surfaces: the slick coating of magazine pages, the physiques of models, the products that consumers are persuaded to buy. Like Graham Little, whose luminous drawings also appropriate and reinvent fashion spreads, Sparagana is often understood as a subtle critic of high style. Yet in both cases, criticism is inseparable from the pleasures derived from the raw materials. Both artists question a culture of capitalism, consumerism and the beauty ideal, but for better or worse, their work cannot help but embody the same conceits. Even more unsettling, these artists implicate viewers in this dilemma. The viewer cannot escape the pleasures of beautiful surfaces and the impulse—whether physical or metaphorical—to grasp that beauty in our hands.