'The photographer of modern life': Jeff Wall's photographic materialism

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 14, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 563-588

  Vasudevan, Alexander ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Jeff Wall; Landscape; Materiality; Representation; Spectacle

Indexed keywords

ART; CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY; IMAGE RESOLUTION; MATERIAL CULTURE; PHOTOGRAPHY; CULTURAL LANDSCAPE;

EID: 38749109264     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474474007082294     Document Type: Article

References (156)

1. T. Demand quoted in N. Wakefield, 'Sites unseen', Art Reriew (Feb. 2005), pp. 65-9, p. 69.
2. L. Lippard and J. Chandler, 'The dematerialization of art', in A. Alberto, B. Smithson, eds, Conceptual art: a critical anthology (Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1999), pp. 46-50, p. 46.
3. L. Lippard, 'Escape attempts', in L. Lippard, ed., Six years: the dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997 [19731), pp. vii-xii, p. vii.
4. S. LeWitt, 'Paragraphs on conceptual art', Artforum 5 (1967), pp. 79-83, p. 80.
5. B. Buchloh, 'Conceptual art 1962-1969: from the aesthetic of administration to die critique of institutions', October 55 (1990), pp. 105-43, p. 105
6. see also A. Alberto, Conceptual art and the polifics of publicity (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2004)
7. A. Alberro and R Novel, eds, Recording conceptual art: early interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, and Weiner by Patricia Norvel (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001)
8. M. Buskirk, The contingent object of contemporary art (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2003)
9. M. Corris, ed., Conceptual art: theory, myth, and practice (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003).
10. Lippard and Chandler, 'The dematerialization of art', p. 46.
11. B. Buchloh, 'Conceptual art 1962-1969', p. 107.
12. S. LeWitt, 'Serial project #1', Aspen magazine 5-6 (1967), n.p.
13. L. Lippard, 'Escape attempts', p. xi. See L. Lippard, ed., 955, 000 (Vancouver, Vancouver Art Gallery, 1970).
14. See A. Hochdörfer, 'Jeff Wall's historicizing confrontation with concept art', in E. Köb, ed., Jeff Wall: photographs, exhibition catalogue (Cologne, König, 2003), pp. 34-47.
15. For reviews of the exhibition 'Four artists: Tom Burrows, Duane Lunden, Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace', see C. Townsend, 'Four (young, Vancouver) artists at the University of B.C. Fine Arts Gallery', The Vancouver Sun, 13 February 1970, p. 9
16. and D. Wheeler, 'Me limits of the defeatured landscape. A review of "Four Artists", Fine Arts Gallery, University of B.C., Feb. 1970', Artscanada 27 (1970), pp. 51-2.
17. I. Wallace, 'Jeff Wall's transparencies', in Jeff Wall: transparencies (London, ICA, 1984), n.p.
18. see also Jeff Wall, 'Cine text (excerpt)', in Lippard, ed., Six years: the dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972, p. 213.
19. Wall, 'Cine text', p. 213.
20. See Wall's assessment of conceptualism in 'Dan Graham's Kammerspiel', in G. Dufour, Dan Graham, exhibition cat. (Perth, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, 1985) and reprinted in J. Wall, 'Dan Graham's Kammerspiel' (Toronto, Art Metropole, 1991), pp. 7-83.
21. See Hochdörfer, 'Jeff Wall's historicizing confrontation with concept art', p. 35.
22. J. Wall, "'Marks of indifference": aspects of photography in, or as, conceptual art', in A. Goldstein, A. Rorimer, eds, Reconsidering the object of art: 1965-1975 (Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995), pp. 247-67, p. 247, p. 266; emphasis added.
23. F. Orton and L. Joyce, "'Always elsewhere": an introduction to the art of Jeff Wall (A Ventriloquist at a Birthday Party in October, 1947)', in E. Köb, ed., Jeff Vall: photographs, exhibition catalogue, pp. 8-33, p. 19.
24. For examples of work on material geographies, see P. Jackson, 'Rematerialising social and cultural geography', Social and cultural geography 1 (2000), pp. 9-14
25. D.P. Tolia-Kelly and B. Anderson, 'Matter(s) in social and cultural geography', Geoforum 35 (2004), pp. 669-74
26. D.P. Tolia-Kelly, 'Materializing post-colonial geographies: examining the textural landscapes of migration in the South Asian home', Geoforum 35 (2004), pp. 675-88
27. also see W.J.T. Mitchell, 'Showing seeing: a critique of visual culture', Journal of visual culture 1 (2002), pp. 165-81
28. Daniel Miller, ed., Matetialio (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2006)
29. for further geographical work on the visual arts see M. Gandy, 'Landscapes of deliquescence in Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert', Transactions of the Institute of British Geograpbers 28 (2003), pp. 218-38
30. S. Rycroft, 'The nature of Op Art: Bridget Rilev and the art of nonrepresentation', Environment and planning d: society and space 23 (2005), pp. 351-71
31. R.M. San Juan and G. Pratt, 'Virtual cities: film and the urban mapping of virtual space', Screen 43 (2002), pp. 250-70.
32. J-E Chevrier, 'The metamorphosis of place', in Jeff Wall catalogue raisonné, 1978-2004 (Basel, Steid], 2005), p. 17.
33. Several writers have recognized the importance of photographs as both a source and artefact for cultural and historical geographers. See, for example, G. Rose, 'Engendering the slum: photography in east London in the 1930s', Gender, place, and culture 4 (1997), pp. 277-300
34. G. Rose, 'Practising photography: an archive, a study, some photographs and a researcher', Journal of historical geography 26 (2000), pp. 555-71
35. J. Ryan, Visualising empire: geography, empire, and photography (London, Reaktion, 1997)
36. J. Schwartz, 'The Geography Lesson: photographs and the construction of imaginative geographies', Journal of historical geography 22 (1996), pp. 16-45
37. U. Strohmayer, 'Pictorial symbolism in the age of innocence: material geographies at the Paris World's Fair of 1937', Ecumene 3 (1996), pp. 282-304
38. C.W.J. Withers, 'Picturing highland landscapes: George Washington Wilson and the photography of the Scottish Highlands', Landscape research 19 (1994), pp. 68-79. Important as these intercessions are, my own readings part company with approaches to photography which focus exclusively on the medium's debts to historically, culturally, and socially specific ways of seeing the world.
39. J. Roberts, 'Jeff Wall: the social pathology of everyday life', in The art of interruption: realism, photography and the evegday (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 184-98, p. 187.
40. An earlier lightbox image, Faking Death, was never publicly exhibited.
41. J. Wall, 'Typology, luminescence, freedom: conversation with Els Barents', in Jeff Wall transparencies (New York, Rizzoli, 1986), pp. 95-104, p. 99. It is worth noting that the use of back-lit Cibachrome transparencies mounted in lightboxes was already a feature of the work of Vancouver artists lain and Ingrid Baxter in the late 1960s. Founders of the parodic N.E. Thing Company, the Baxters opened and ran the first Cibachrome laboratory in Vancouver.
42. See S. Watson, 'Discovering the defeatured landscape', in S. Douglas, ed., Vancouver anthology: the institutional politics of art, a project of the Or Gallery (Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1991), pp. 246-65, p. 254
43. and N. Shaw, S. Watson and W. Wood, eds, i You are now in the middle of a N.E. Thing landscape (Vancouver, UBC Fine Arts Gallery, 1993).
44. J. Wall quoted in P. Vickers, 'Wall pieces, Art monthly 179 (1994), pp. 3-7.
45. Hochdörfer, 'Jeff Wall's historicizing confrontation with concept art', p. 34.
46. Hochdörfer, 'Jeff Wall's historicizing confrontation with concept art', p. 40. For further discussion of Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus, see E.A. Fraser, Delacroix, art and patrimony in post-revolulionary France (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004).
47. Hochdörfer, 'Jeff Wall's historicizing confrontation with concept art', p. 39. (emphasis added)
48. see also D. Kuspit, 'Looking up: Jeff Wall's modern Appassionamenio', Arfforum 20 (1992), pp. 52-6.
49. J. Wall quoted in A. Hochdörfer, 'Jeff Wall's historicizing confrontation with concept art', p. 39.
50. This is something of a recurring motif in many of Wall's images, whether it be the statist intervention of Etiction Struggle (1988) or the gestic rebellions of individuals as in Man with a Rifle (2000), Milk (1984), or Mimic (1982).
51. Hochdörfer, 'Jeff Wall's historicizing confrontation vith concept art', p. 39; Wall quoted in Ariefle Pelenc, interview: in correspondence with Jeff Wall', p. 17
52. N. Blomley, Unsettling the city: urban land and the politics of property (London and New York, Routledge, 2004), p. 34-5.
53. See Watson, 'Discovering the defeatured landscape'.
54. For a critical view of the new wave of Vancouver photographers, see J-J. Lee, 'Configuration: new art in Vancouver. Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver', C Magazine 56 (1997/1998), p. 39.
55. Hochdor̈fer, 'Jeff Wall's historicizing confrontation with concept art', p. 39.
56. See for example Wall's commentary on Manet, 'Unity and fragmentation in Manet', reprinted in Jeff Vall (2nd Edition) (New York, Phaidon, 2002), pp. 78-89; originally printed in Parachute 35 (1984), pp. 5-7.
57. This is a concern shared by a number of Canadian photographers; see P. Cousineau-Levine, Faking death: Canadian att pbolograpby and the Canadian imagination (Montreal & Kingston, McGill-Queens University Press, 2003).
58. Krauss, '"And then turn away?": an essay on James Coleman', October 81 (1997), pp. 5-33, p. 29.
59. See R. Krauss, 'Reinventing the medium', Crifical inquiry 25 (1999), pp. 289-305.
60. For a similar critique see J. Elkins, 'Critical response: what do we want photography to be? A response to Michael Fried', Critical inquiry 31 (2005), pp. 938-56.
61. A more nuanced appraisal of Walls use of pastiche can be found in W. Wood, 'Three theses on Jeff Wall', C Magazine 3 (1987), pp. 10-15.
62. For another perspective also see D. Kuspit, 'Looking up'.
63. T. Crow, 'Profane illuminations, social history and the art of Jeff Wall', Artforum 31 (1993), pp. 62-9, reproduced in Modern art in the common culture (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 151-69
64. M. Fried, 'Being there: Michael Fried on two pictures by Jeff Wall', Arfforum 43 (2004), pp. 53-4.
65. I have borrowed the phrase 'image-machine' from D. Païni, 'Should we put an end to projection?', October 110 (2004), pp. 23-48, trans. R. Krauss; the original was published in the exhibition catalogue to Projections: les transports de l'image at Le Fresnoy, Le Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing, France, Nov 1997-Jan. 1998 (Paris, Ëditions Hazan, 1997).
66. Wall, 'Typology, luminescence, freedom', p. 99.
67. ibid.
68. J. Wall, 'To the spectator', in Jeff Wall catalogue (Victoria, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, 1979), n.p.
69. Fried, 'Being there', p. 53, p. 54.
70. M. Fried, 'Art and objecthood', in G. Battcock, ed., Minimal art: a critical anthology (New York, Dutton, 1968), pp. 116-47, p. 120, 140; originally published in Arfforum 5 (1967).
71. Fried quoted in B. Fer, 'Bordering on blank: Eva Hesse and minimalism', in Mignon Nixon, ed., Era Hesse (Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 2002), pp. 57-85, p. 76.
72. Roberts, 'Jeff Wall: the social pathology of everyday life', p. 187.
73. As Wall goes on to suggest, 'In The Destroyed Room... I drew inspiration from the shop window displays in textile and furniture shops. For me, these are tableaux morts, in contrast, to tableaux vivants'. Wall quoted in 'Typology, luminescence, freedom', pp. 96-7.
74. See T.J. Clark, The painting of modern life: Paris in the art of Manet and his followers (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1984).
75. Ibid., p. 69, p. 63; original emphasis.
76. Orton and Joyce, 'Always elsewhere', p. 14.
77. Ibid., p. 19.
78. Hochdörfer, 'Jeff Walls historicizing confrontation with concept art', p. 44.
79. See T. Crow, 'Profane illuminations: social history and the art of Jeff Wall'.
80. D. Pinder, Visions of the ciy: utopianism, power, and politics in twenfieth-centug urbanism (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 131.
81. G. Debord, La sociëtë du spectacle (Paris, Buchet-Chastel, 1967), trans. D. Nicholson-Smith as The society of spectacle (New York, Zone Books, 1994), theses 4, 5; emphasis added.
82. J. Wall, 'To the spectator', n.p.
83. C. Burnett, Jeff Wall (London, Tate Publishing, 2005), p. 31.
84. K. Silverman, 'Total visibility', in E. Köb, ed., Jeff Wall: photographs, exhibition catalogue, pp. 60-4, 97-109; p. 61.
85. Silverman, 'Total visibility', p. 62. An avid reader of the film periodical Screen in the 1970s and 1980s, Wall draws heavily, in this context, on film studies and in particular the work of writers such as Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry and their re-working of Althusserian 'apparatus theory'.
86. See especially C. Metz, The imaginary signifier: psychoanalysis and the cinema, trans. C. Britton et al. (Bloomington, University of Indiana Press, 1982)
87. and J-L. Baudry, 'Ideological effects of the basic cinematographic apparatus', in P. Rosen, ed., Narrative, apparatus, ideology (New York, Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 286-98.
88. J. Wall, 'Gestus', in Jeff Vall (2nd Edition) (London, Phaidon, 2002), p. 76
89. originally published in A different climate: catalogue (Düsseldorf, Sädtisches Kunsthalle, 1984).
90. Orton and Joyce, 'Always elsewhere', p. 25.
91. Clark quoted in 'Representation, suspicions, and critical transparency: interview with T.J. Clark, Serge Guilbaut, and Anne Wagner', in Jeff Wall (2nd Edition) (London, Phaidon, 2002), pp. 112-24, p. 116
92. originally published in Parachute 59 (1990), pp. 4-10.
93. Orton and Joyce, 'Always elsewhere', p. 26.
94. Clark quoted in 'Representation, suspicions, and critical transparency', p. 114.
95. Wall in 'Representation, suspicions and critical transparency', p. 117.
96. Wall in 'Representation, suspicions and critical transparency', p. 118.
97. Wall in 'Representation, suspicions and critical transparency', p. 119.
98. See T. Holert, 'Interview with a vampire: subjectivity and visuality in the works of Jeff Wall', in E. Köb, ed., Jeff Wall photographs, exhibition catalogue, pp. 129-39.
99. Orton and Joyce, 'Always elsewhere', p. 27.
100. Wall, 'Jeff Wall', Transcript: a journal of visual culture 2 (1997), p. 13.
101. Orton and Joyce, 'Always elsewhere', p. 29.
102. Wall in Arielle Pelenc, interview: in correspondence with Jeff Wall', p. 17, p. 22.
103. Orton and Joyce, 'Always elsewhere', p. 27.
104. Wall in Burnett, Jeff Wall, p. 45.
105. S. Daniels and D. Cosgrove, 'Introduction: iconography and landscape', in D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels, eds, The iconography of landscape (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 1-10, p. 1.
106. See D. Cosgrove, The Palladian landscape: geographical change and its cultural representation in sixteenth-century Italy (Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1993)
107. S. Daniels, Fields of vision: landscape imagery and national identity in England and the United States (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1993)
108. D. Matless and G. Revill, 'A solo ecology: the erratic art of Andy Goldsworthy', Ecumene 2 (1995), pp. 423-48
109. C. Nash, 'Reclaiming vision: looking at landscape and the body, Gender, place and culture 3 (1996), pp. 149-69.
110. S. Daniels, 'Landscape and art', in J. Duncan et al., eds, A companion to cultural geography (Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, 2004), pp. 430-46, p. 437.
111. J. Wylie, 'A single day's walking: narrating self and landscape on the South West Coast Path', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (2005), pp. 234-47
112. see J. Wylie, 'An essay on ascending Glastonbury Tor', Geoforum 32 (2002), pp. 441-54.
113. de Duve, 'The mainstream and the crooked path', p. 44.
114. Fried, 'Being there', p. 54.
115. M. Fried, 'Jeff Wall's After 'Spring Snow' by Yukio Mishima, Chapter 34', talk at Tate Modern, London, 2 December 2005.
116. L. Marin, 'Depositing time in painted representation', in On representation, trans. C. Porter (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 285-305, p. 285; emphasis added.
117. For a more substantive discussion of these themes, see also Marin, Sublime Poussin (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999). Marin has himself addressed the work of Wall in at least one instance.
118. See Marin, 'Une Image D'Apollon à Dyonisos', in Passages de l'Image (Musée nationale d'art moderne/Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1990), pp. 182-5.
119. Marin, 'Depositing time', p. 295, p. 294. In many respects, Marin's comments recall Roland Barthes discussion in Camera Lucida of the photographic punctum that engages and (Barthes own words) 'pricks' or 'wounds' a beholder's subjectivity in a way that makes that very photograph singularly arresting to him or her. As Michael Fried has recently argued, Barthes's punctum escapes the intentionality of the photographer occurring only 'in the field of the photographed thing', which is to say that the punctum is itself a 'pure artefact of the photographic event.'
120. See R. Barthes, Camera Lucida: reflections on photography, trans. R. Howard (New York, Vintage, 1981 [2000]) p. 29-7, p. 47
121. M . Fried, 'Barthes's Puncturn', Critical inquiry 31 (2005), pp. 539-74, p. 539, p. 546.
122. Marin, 'Depositing time', p. 305.
123. See J. Lingwood, 'Different times', in The epic and the everyday: conteVorag photographic art (London, Hayward Gallery, 1994), pp. 8-20, p. 14.
124. Ironically, the majority of Walls 'landscapes' are straight photographs unlike his staged tableaux which have increasingly involved the technical capacities of digital processing. At the same time, it would be misleading to align Wall tout court with the digital technologies of 'postphotography'. For a recent appraisal of these developments see M.B.N. Hansen, 'Seeing with the body: the digital image in postphotography', Diacritics 31 (2001), pp. 54-84
125. M.B.N. Hansen, New philosophy for new media (Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 2004).
126. Lingwood, 'Different times', pp. 14-15.
127. Fried, 'Being-there', p. 54.
128. The Crooked Path also recalls, in this context, the environmental art of English artist Richard Long, especially A Line Made by Walking where the artist's photograph documents the path he had created by repeatedly walking on a patch of grass in a fine. I am indebted to David Matless for this observation.
129. 'Essais et entretiens', 1984-2001, conversation between J. Wall and J-E Chevrier, École Nationale Supérieur des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 2001', in Jeff Wall: tableaux, exhibition catalogue (Oslo, Astrup Fearley Musser for Moderne Kunst, 2003), p. 98.
130. S. Wagstaff, 'The labouring eye', in Jeff Wall: photographs, 1978-2004 (London, Tate Publishing), pp. 7-19, p. 14.
131. I have adapted this phrase from W. Wood, 'Jeff Wall at Ydessa Gallery', C Magazine 13 (1987), p. 70.
132. Wall quoted in Wagstaff, 'The labouring eye', p. 15.
133. J. Wall, 'About making landscapes', in Jeff Wall (2nd Edition) (London, Phaidon, 2002), pp. 140-5, p. 140.
134. Wagstaff, 'The labouring eye', p. 11.
135. Crow, 'Profane illuminations, social history and the art of Jeff Wall', p. 162.
136. Wall, 'About making landscapes', p. 145.
137. See K. Olwig, 'Representation and alienation in the political land-scape', Cultural geographies 12 (2005), pp. 19-40, p. 32.
138. J. Wall in 'A painter of modern life: an interview between Jeff Wall and Jean-François Chevrier', in Jeff Wall: figures and places (München, Prestel, 2004), pp. 168-85, p. 170.
139. The political stakes that are involved in a labouring landscape have been explored, see for example, D. Mitchell, The lie of the land: migrant workers and the Californian landscape (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
140. J. Wall in Pictures of architecture, exhibition catalogue (Bregenz, Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2004), p. 25
141. see also S. Watson, 'The generic city and its discontents. Vancouver accounts for itself', Arts magazine 65 (1991), pp. 60-4.
142. Wagstaff, 'The labouring eye', p. 18.
143. For a summary of these developments see S. Whatmore, 'Materialist returns: practicing cultural geography in and for a more-than-human world', Cultural geographies 13 (2006), pp. 600-9.
144. Wagstaff, 'The labouring eye', p. 16.
145. T.J. Clark, 'Phenomenality and materiality in Cézanne', in T Cohen et al., eds, Material events: Paul de Man and the afterlife of theory (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 93-113, p. 100.
146. Clark, 'Phenomenality and materiality in Cézanne', p. 100.
147. Ibid., p. 101
148. Fried, 'Being there', p. 54.
149. B. Fer, 'Jeff Wall's Night', talk at Tate Modern, London, 2 December 2005.
150. I have adapted the phrase 'temporal landscape' from Tim Ingold. See T. Ingold, 'The temporality of the landscape', World archaeology 25 (1993), pp. 152-71.
151. B. Fer, 'Jeff Walls Night'.
152. Wagstaff, 'The labouring eye', p. 18.
153. See also Burnett, Jeff Wall, p. 114.
154. Wagstaff, 'The labouring eye', p. 19.
155. Ibid.
156. J. Wall, 'Typology, luminescence, freedom', p. 102.