ART : Double Vision : Doug and Mike Starn look to the Old Masters for the images that make their massive photo collages click

“Painting and sculpture have been explored from every conceivable angle, but photography’s been locked in a box for decades,” observes Doug Starn, who, along with his twin brother, Mike, is credited by some with ushering in a new era in photography.

“From the time we started taking pictures when we were 13, photography struck us as a stale medium that needed to be broken wide open, and that’s part of what our work is about. We want to show the guts of photography--mainly because we love it so much. Each step in the process has its own beauty and limitless potential.”

Identical twins from a small town in New Jersey, Doug and Mike Starn are just 29 years old, but they’ve taken the art world by storm with their radical approach to mechanical picture making. Creating massive collages--some as large as 14 by 18 feet--that combine up to 50 different prints, they undo the pristine, scientific look of photography and place it in a rumpled bed of creases, smudged fingerprints and cellophane tape. Appearing as if they’re cobbled together in an excited rush, the fractured photo-combines marry the fragmented perspective of Cubism to a pre-Raphaelite love of the sweepingly poetic; the results are at once audaciously avant-garde and reassuringly traditional.

On view for the first time in Los Angeles in an exhibition at the Fred Hoffman Gallery, the Starns’ work is also noteworthy for its espousal of an ideology refreshingly out of step with art world trends.

“Irony plays no part in our art at all,” Mike says during an interview at their studio in the warehouse district of Brooklyn, N.Y. Unabashed romantics who pay homage to art history rather than deconstruct it, the Starns often rework Old Master paintings as a way of expressing their belief in beauty and its potential to elevate human consciousness. The ecstasy of aesthetic experience is, in fact, their very grand central theme.

“Modernism is a very intellectual movement, and beauty’s been out of fashion in the art world for quite a while--it’s seen as corny,” Doug adds. “We don’t feel that way at all. We rework the Old Masters because they inspire us--and this is where we differ from Appropriationism (a Post-Modern school of artists who use pre-existing images to comment ironically on contemporary society). That movement is rooted in cynicism, but we truly love the images we rework. The whole idea of how art’s been affecting people for centuries and what beauty can do to people--this is an incredibly rich area of human experience.”

An exploration of the architecture and innuendo of framing is an important subtext of the Starns’ work, and it’s reflected in the unorthodox way they present their images. Early pieces were casually tacked to the wall, while more recent works are held in place with industrial clamps that stretch the prints like drum heads. Even as they tip their hat to history in their choice of subject matter, the Starns struggle to get photography out of the frame and off the wall, to get it moving.

The subjects of a recently published coffee-table book, with text by New York Times photography critic Andy Grundberg, as well as a traveling retrospective on view at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, the Starns seem to be making all the right career moves. Prominently featured in the taste-making Saatchi Collection, they have shown regularly in Europe for four years, and the price of their work has reached a level unprecedented for contemporary photography (a major work costs as much as $125,000).

Their progress has not been one smooth ascent, however. “We’ve encountered a good deal of hostility from the photography world,” Doug says, “and, in fact, most of the support for our work has come from painters and sculptors.” However, even critics who initially dismissed their work as a retread of turn-of-the-century pictorialism concede that the Starns have continued to push in surprising new directions with each show.

One would never guess the Starns are the hot new talents on the block on meeting them. Talking with them in their studio--a humming art factory that employs an office assistant, welder, carpenter, and darkroom assistant--they come across as modest, unassuming young men who regard their new role as media stars with considerable trepidation and embarrassment. Later that afternoon they are scheduled to appear in SoHo at a book signing for the Grundberg book, and at the mention of this task, the Starns--who keep their distance from the art world--grimace in unison.

In fact, the Starns do a lot in unison. They tend to finish each other’s sentences, rarely disagree, and if not for Mike’s wedding ring (last year he married Ann Pasternak, a curator at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Conn.), they would be indistinguishable. Each has the same gorgeous mane of hair, the same slouchy, cool-guy body language, the same soft, tentative manner of speaking.

The fact that the Starns look like young Byronic lords, conform to the enduringly popular archetype of the artist as romantic visionary, and are twins to boot has made them prime bait for the hype machine.

“We understand that there’s a cult of personality that goes along with a successful career as an artist, but we don’t enjoy that part at all,” Mike says. “Like with the Grundberg book--it’s embarrassing having our personal biographies in there, and we resisted having a book of this sort done for a long time. We’re trying to control the hype, but there’s not much we can do.”

Asked how all the acclaim has affected them personally, Mike concludes, “It’s given us more confidence. We used to be incredibly shy. Now we’re just shy.”

The Starns have traveled a long way in a remarkably short period of time. Born in Absecon, N.J., two children in a family of three, the Starns say they inherited their aptitude for art from their father, a co-owner of a of supermarket chain who had a creative bent.

“Our parents weren’t especially cultured, but they always encouraged our interest in art,” Doug says. “I remember them taking us to the Philadelphia Museum when we were 9, and seeing some Rauschenberg combines and Warhol’s ‘Electric Chair.’ Those pieces made a big impression on us. We loved to draw when we were kids, then when we were 13 we started doing photography.”

“We had a real media-saturated upbringing and movies, television and commercial art inspired us a lot,” Mike adds. “We were 16 when punk rock came along, so that was a big influence too--not the graphic style, so much as the attitude . . . that music and art are available to anybody who wants to take them up.”

In 1980, the Starns enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where a fellow student named Mark Morrisroe was an important early influence.

“Photography is a very uptight medium--basically it allows nothing beyond the image and the printing, which is a very craft-oriented thing,” Mike recalls. “Mark opened photography up tremendously. He’d scratch his negatives, leave dust on them--he put life into the process and made it about more than just shooting a picture and making a print.”

“We started experimenting along similar lines,” Doug says, “and while we were in school we avoided looking at fine art because we wanted to come up with something original and didn’t want to be seduced or confused by what other people were doing. You run the risk of spending years developing something that’s already been done, but I guess we lucked out.”

Asked if it gave them pause when they finally stumbled across Joel-Peter Witkin’s work, which bears strong similarities to that of the Starns, Doug concedes, “when we first saw his work in 1984 we were really disappointed because it did look a bit like ours. But we then realized that all his experimentation takes place in the darkroom and his final prints are as pristine as an Ansel Adams print. So in a sense he’s abiding by the traditional rules of photography. We actually break the surfaces of our prints and try to transform them into physical objects, and though we often work with the same image repeatedly, each piece is a one of a kind art object.”

Shortly after graduating from art school in 1985, the Starns had their first solo show at the Stux Gallery in Boston. A trip to Europe came next, during which they were enchanted by the artistic master works they encountered at every turn. They took many of the photographs--several of them at the Louvre--that have functioned as their raw materials for the past four years.

At this point their visual vocabulary--which previously centered on horses, roses, self-portraits and symmetrical compositions pairing identical “twin” imagery--expanded to include reworked versions of the Mona Lisa, a Rembrandt self-portrait, John Singleton Copley’s “Watson and the Shark,” and Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa,” among others.

They’ve also done several different reinterpretations of Flemish artist Philippe de Champaigne’s powerful portrait of Christ shortly after the Crucifixion. Asked what this image means to them, Doug says, “Wow, where should I start? It’s such a loaded picture. It’s an image of death and sorrow for some people, an image of triumph for others. As to what it means to us personally, we’re not terribly religious, but we do feel a bit religious about the history of art, and the image of Christ has played a central role in that history. In order for art to elevate the human spirit, it needs to be dealing with something that’s maybe a bit supernatural, and I think that’s one of the reasons the subject of Christ turns up so much.”

“Because we rework old paintings, a lot of people use the word nostalgia in conjunction with our work, but it’s not about that at all,” Mike says. “Physicality, decay, art history and beauty are recurring themes, and desire is also an important idea for us. What we want to say about desire is that whether we want it there or not, desire exists and should be embraced, because in a way, that’s all art is--it’s something people desire.”

In 1986, the Starns had their first New York solo show at the Stux Gallery in SoHo. The media buzz reached a crescendo two years later when they had dual shows at Stux and the prestigious Leo Castelli Gallery. The art world was clearly ready for them, but they continued to live in Boston until 1989, when they finally moved to SoHo and set up the Brooklyn studio. Asked to explain their collaborative method, Doug says, “we both work on every step of the process--and we disagree all the time. The way we settle our disagreements is, whichever of us is too tired to continue arguing gives in to the other. The biggest disadvantage to being a twin is that it’s like having a mirror in front of you everywhere you go, but as far as our work, being twins is a tremendous help. Each piece starts long before we actually get down to making it, and it’s great being able to talk our ideas through with each other every day.”

“Our work habits are structured in as much as we show up every day,” adds Mike, “but other than that we work in a completely intuitive way and are always making it up as we go along. I hate to admit this to myself, but we work better in chaos. We seem to thrive on it, but it means you don’t have a life. My getting married stabilized things a bit, but not as much as I’d hoped it would.” Inarguably innovative, the Starns didn’t spring fully formed from a vacuum. Man Ray did a great deal to free photography from the constraints of tradition; moreover, Joel-Peter Witkin’s Gothic, painterly photographs, David Hockney’s experiments with collaged Polaroids, and Frank Stella’s recent efforts to invest painting with the dynamic three-dimensionality of sculpture all helped pave the road the Starns travel. British art team Gilbert & George (formed in 1967) were making segmented photo pieces designed to achieve large-scale impact in the early ‘70s, and the Starns’ resurrection of the heroic works turf similar to that of Anselm Kiefer and Christian Boltanski.

Still, the Starns are unique in their ability to weave these threads into a tapestry that’s fresh, rapturously lovely and highly accessible. Newsweek critic Katrine Ames describes their pieces as having “a remarkable welcoming quality,” and people do seem to greet the Starns’ work--which embodies many of the values chucked out by the Post-Modern ‘80s--like an old, sorely missed friend.