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. (John Coplans)
John Coplans was a British artist, curator, museum director, and critic. He was best known as a founding member and one-time editor-in-chief of Artforum magazine.
Coplans' most famed artworks consisted of a series of black-and-white photos depicting segments of his own naked body, but never his face. In an artist's stament Coplans explained:
"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."
Born John Rivers Coplans on June 24, 1920 in London, United Kingdom, he moved between Cape Town and London throughout his childhood. After serving in World War II, Coplans pursued painting and was largely influenced by Abstract Expressionists like Willem de Kooning and the movement known as Tachisme. He moved to the United States in 1960, settling in San Francisco where he met the other founding members of Artforum. It was not until the early 1980s that Coplans began producing his own visual art again, and today his works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.
Coplans died on August 21, 2003 in New York, NY.