Searcher

A black widow spider the size of a motorcycle feeds on the head of a bathing beauty. From the nose up, the face of a high-ranking, pipe-smoking colonel dissolves in curdling clouds of smoke. The close-up of an elegant woman, her head resting in both hands, hides her gaze from the viewer; instead of hypnotic eyes and painted eyebrows, four human toes appear above her nose and curl inward to create a forehead of a different kind—of a callous and callus kind. Such images or apparitions are not totally unexpected. Anyone searching for knowledge in the dark forest of schizophrenia discovers enchanted ambiguities and vivid horrors there. But American artist Joseph Mills represents a notable exception to the rule.

Several decades ago, during a psychosis-ridden period in his life, Mills discovered something entirely different in the forest of his mind: an enduring sense of harmony. Whether because of or despite his lengthy hospitalisation period, he came to feel in harmony with himself—and with his art: a substantial body of photographic work that includes an acclaimed street-photography collection. This work reaches a second, aesthetic height with its collection of provocative photomontages. In the distant past, Mills arrived at one of his key realisations while creating his early photomontages: “Every object is meaningful, and every individual is a glorious creation.” This oddly inspiring idea (also a private credo) remains no less relevant when studying the photomontages that Mills creates today.

Basically, deeming all things meaningful and all people glorious creations was meant largely on a visual level, and within this double-notion lived and lives the riddle of form versus content, which Mills has regular artistic dealings with in the present. For certain art genres and artists, reacting to form and content can be far more inspiring than the most exciting subject matter. It can function as the Yin and Yang of the artistic moment or—to quote Mills: “As two sticks rubbed together and made to ignite into great art.” In any case, under Joseph Mills’ command, especially visible in his photomontages, his sensitivity towards form and content culminates in dreamlike spectacles as otherworldly as they are indescribable. His images dare the sanity-loving viewer to look too closely or too long. They epitomise Mills’ unique brand of humour, formerly considered a counter-humour in France, where it was first coined “humour noir” by Surrealist theoretician André Breton. In addition to his black humour, Mills offers viewers his brilliant archiving skills, which extract pertinent impulses from the worlds of art, culture, and history, and elegantly defile them for the sake of a greater psychological cause. His photomontages depict situations that cannot logically exit. Yet viewers find them vaguely familiar—while they generate unfamiliar questions: Can one’s eyes hear visions? Can one experience fear, anxiety, and dread to the fullest because of pasted together scraps? Can parts of photographs create complete mental realities?

Returning to Mills’ style-defining past for a moment—to the portrait of the artist as a young schizophrenic—he arrived at the previously mentioned harmony by way of countless real-life observations: keenly studied mounds of trash, street scenes, stray objects, people, and an inestimable number of photographic reproductions, all of which he came to appreciate as a “treasure of data.” Then like now, when so much information is stored, gathered together, arranged, and utilised in the scenarios of photomontages, Mills produces image-worlds in which the vaguely familiar is transformed into the exquisitely estranged and horrifying. That these images instigate a mental theatre of their own design qualifies as one of the principal achievements of his photomontages.

His visual constructions suggest the history of the photomontage, especially those periods championed by the likes of Max Ernst, Man Ray, Raoul Hausmann, and various Berlin Dadaists of the 1920s. (The word “suggest” is important here.) In addition, it helps to remember that the history of the photomontage is in and of itself a montage: a mix of influences added one to the other, dating back as far as the beginning of World War I, born of photographic manipulations popular in the Victorian era, and finally developed to an art by Berlin Dadaists of the 1920s and Parisian Surrealists. The slightest awareness of Mills’ collage-forefathers greatly strengthens the reception of his work. In addition, his expertise as a maker of photomontages inspires as much praise as envy. His images sleepwalk through Victorianism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and boldly take up residence in the here and now. They imply a chameleonic gift and superpower of the mind’s eye; they conduct experiments on and with the unknown, and they leave viewers moved and disturbed by what they see: visions as beautiful as they are terrifying. This is the famous “treachery of images” at work. Still, Mills’ photomontages combine qualities from the worlds of surrealism and dada without residing in either one. He refrains from calling himself a surrealist, and cryptically said once that he is “more of a realist”—a realist by default—for not being a nihilist, and for considering himself an existentialist in his youth. Mills evokes art periods and methods of the past and calmly surpasses them—by mounting completed artworks to found objects, by reworking their surface qualities, by using 20th-century scraps to shape timeless mental-scenarios, and by expressing modern fixations with the body, sexual cravings, and human suffering. Viewed in its entirety, his work suggests the past—it neither respects nor emulates it—and displays a seething view of modern life, which corresponds with Mills’ twofold private history, a history both distressing and creative.

It hardly surprises that Mills and his art thrive on the twofold or, more accurately, on a duality. His life and art have always been influenced by dualities: illness and health, disorder and harmony, visibility and invisibility, interiors and exteriors, as well as the real and the imagined. Even his medium, the photomontage, is a continuous pasting together of elements two at a time. Thinking along these lines turns the past and the present into two more of his indispensable tools. The effects of the past and the present exist in those photomontages whose surfaces show aging simulations—from their varnished coatings to the creative process through which they reach their conclusions using second and third-generation photographic materials. Also, for appearing so visually mute—as though stills from a silent (horror) movie—Mills’ creations are mentally boisterous enough to challenge any viewer’s peace of mind.

One last duality worth mentioning is the word and the image. In art history, wherever visions common to surrealist thinking are involved, a corresponding literature or writing tends to exist as well. In Mills’ case, this so-called “literature” is found in the titles of his photomontages. These represent interesting additions to his work. During the early 2000s, his images were frequently left untitled. Today, as with any (genuine or fake) Surrealist work of art, each photomontage is psychologically extended by a title that defines or entertains. Some of these evince the wit of Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This Is Not A Pipe) or Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog). Yet Mills could have easily written Photomontage Nr. X, and opted for a touch of Beckett, whose only film production was entitled Film. Instead, the titles of Mills’ photomontages are crass or affecting: The Daughter of Eve for the image of a praying girl-woman with a penis-like object protruding from her pantyhose; The Vase for a deconstructed and reassembled nude transformed to a spectacle of V-shapes topped with branches and blossoms; and The Battle for the Bulge for the still of a Hollywood dance number showing a Gene Kelly type being simultaneously yanked to the left and right by his two female dance partners, while an upside-down GI lights a cigarette on his head. Here, Mills declares himself a fan of subtlety: his title erotically mocks the correct title, “The Battle of the Bulge”—the infamous 1944/1945 German offensive whose goal was to split the British and American allied line in half—and the image repeats the other battle, the real battle, by having two women play at splitting a fake Gene Kelly in half.

For all intents and purposes, however, the strongest duality remains form and content. These two aspects of any Mills image appear to reign simultaneously (even tumultuously) in his photomontages. Still, under closer inspection, form is the more important of the two. This reveals itself no sooner the eye grows accustomed to the arrangement of pseudo-narrative elements: form is more of a tool, mouthpiece, and doorway. And the degree to which the doorway of form opens up always coincides with the photomontage’s effectiveness. In The Cross Dresser, where Mills’ usual constructed reality feels more like a portrait than it does an invented situation, the figure either dressing or undressing demonstrates a spectacle of forms. Based on the interplay of a human torso and its mismatched (criss-crossed or cross-dressed) lower half facing in the wrong direction, what could be a Chaplin-esque ordeal—how to escape from the clutches of a pesky long-sleeved shirt—becomes the statuesque depiction of a deformed creature with podgy human legs. This playfully, discomforting image conjures up a fear of suffocation along with the assorted mishaps awaiting anyone who dresses in private. Here too, as so often happens in Mills’ photomontages, form follows form alone. A greater display of this lurks in The Dance of Marsyas, where the artist’s slight of collage-hand goes so far as to rewrite Greek mythology. Marsyas, the satyr who challenged Apollo to a musical contest, is not shown to viewers in one of his better-known guises—as nude, bearded, hanging down, or holding a flute. Instead, Mills altogether denies him his maleness and turns the musical contest into a sombre after-dance. This particular Marsyas, formed by overlapping photo-segments and textures—an image created for EYEMAZING Editor, Susan Zadeh, who was a dancer before becoming an art director—epitomises an eerie sense of grace. Nevertheless, what we actually see is a melancholy, one-eyed ballerina whose elongated, unalike arms are held over a downward-tilting tutu. As usual, the careful arrangement of recognisable and unrecognisable elements effortlessly trumps content. But more than the power of form takes over. In a creative constellation of this kind only one thing is ever greater than form: the Surrealist staple of chance. Why is the skeletal structure of the ballerina’s left arm showing? Why does she wear a tilting wreath of thrones and not a diamond-studded Swan Lake tiara? These and other unanswerable questions contribute to the masterly ambiguity likewise the artist’s signature achievement.

By chance as well as deliberately, Mills creates at an artistic height in his photomontages. In the act, he feels brought in touch, he says, with a creativity not his own, and with a strongly religious or spiritual experience, which transpires outside himself. Allowing this “outside himself experience” to reach its own conclusion leaves Mills not only clueless, but also in a state that forces him to relinquish all control over the moment. Like someone subjected to a local anaesthesia, he remains aware of every visual impulse in his vicinity, but his thinking seems to be lost and wandering, forever in search of something. Most significantly, while this state robs him of his bearings, it never actually disturbs his grip on his methods, or lessens the satisfaction he receives during the creative process. This inner agreement (or disagreement) has remained unchanged throughout Joseph Mills’ more than four decades of creative work, documenting, as it were, highly believable but nonexistent facts. In the process, he constantly discovers and rediscovers a purity of expression, and repeatedly applies it to his work.

In turn, the vulnerability inherent in Mills’ methods and his indifference to any established market-mentality qualify as his greatest “art weapons.” They aid his fervent acts of selection and their impossible to anticipate outcome. They help him to ignore the conventional world in favour of exploring the boundaries of an alternative realm made up of changing densities. Ultimately, they allow him to put one of Max Ernst’s axioms to the test: “When an artist finds himself, he is lost.” Even today, Joseph Mills continues to give a face to the underlying suspense in the irrational and the purely imagined, and he remains a relentless searcher.

TEXT BY KARL E. JOHNSON

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