Jeff Wall and the Concept of the Picture

Naomi Merritt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350137868
• eBook ISBN: 9781000182705
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

This book grapples with fundamental questions about the evolving nature of pictorial representation, and the role photography has played in this ongoing process.

These issues are explored through a close analysis of key themes that underpin the photography practice of Canadian artist Jeff Wall and through examining important works that have defined his oeuvre. Wall's strategic revival of 'the picture' has had a resounding influence on the development of contemporary art photography, by expanding the conceptual and technical frameworks of the medium and introducing a self-reflexive criticality. Naomi Merritt brings a new and original contribution to the scholarship on one of the most significant figures to have shaped the course of contemporary art photography since the 1970s and shines a light on the multilayered connections between photography and art.

This book will be of interest to scholars in the history of photography, art and visual culture, and contemporary art history.

Part I

Pictures ‘printed on the void’

1 The photographic condition

Photo-conceptualism’s ‘marks of indifference’

In an interview published in 2004 Jeff Wall stated:

My pictures never emerged from a simple sense of return to the past. I see them rather as a consequence of my experience of investigating whether what we call a picture in the West still had any life to it.¹

Wall’s investigation into the condition of the picture has, from the beginning, been intertwined with his exploration of the medium of photography, and its relationship of reciprocity with art. This relationship has a fraught history, as indicated much earlier by Walter Benjamin:

[M]uch futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question – whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art – was not raised.²

In an essay first published in 1995 – “‘Marks of Indifference”: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art’ – Wall writes a history of photo-conceptualism that also establishes the context from which his own photography practice emerged. Wall introduces this piece as an attempt to sketch and study the ways that photography occupied conceptual artists and decisively emerged as a modernist art through the neo-avant-garde experiments of the 1960s and 1970s. In order to do this, Wall traces the evolution of photography from post-pictorialism, through the development of photojournalism in the 1920s, and then to conceptualism’s role in the transformation of the terms and conditions through which art photography defined itself. Wall opens his study with a bold statement about the problematic condition of modern art:

Under the regime of depiction – that is, in the history of Western art before 1910 – a work of art was an object whose validity as art was constituted by its being, or bearing, a depiction. In the process of developing alternative proposals for art ‘beyond’ depiction, art had to reply to the suspicion that, without their depictive or representational function, art objects were art in name only, not in body, form, or function. Art projected itself forward bearing only its glamorous traditional name, thereby entering a troubled phase of restless searching for an alternate ground of validity. This phase continues, and must continue.³

Wall makes some contentious claims here that should be clarified. As suggested by the essay title, in ‘Unity and Fragmentation in Manet’ (1984) Wall identifies conflicting characteristics in the paintings of Édouard Manet that point to the end of the ‘regime of depiction’. In relation to paintings such as A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), Wall argues that Manet both challenges and upholds the ‘regime of depiction’. He concludes that Manet’s significance is in his inability to transcend this historical concept of the ‘picture as depiction’, which, he argues, was retained as a ‘ruined’ or ‘dead’ form in Manet’s paintings.⁴ Instead, Wall names the year 1910 as marking the end of the ‘regime of depiction’, for it was at this time that Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque developed the first true examples of Cubist art. In this early ‘analytical’ form of Cubism, an object was deconstructed into its known components, which then formed the basis of a ‘conceptual’ (rather than ‘perceptual’) self-reflexive image. In the excerpt from ‘Marks of Indifference’ above, Wall seems to suggest that in moving ‘beyond’ depiction (and therefore in requiring an alternative form of legitimation) modern art acquired a self-reflexive criticality. Here Wall sets the scene for the predicament that photography presented if it were to be considered a modernist art:

Photography cannot find alternatives to depiction, as could the other fine arts. It is in the physical nature of the medium to depict things. In order to participate in the kind of reflexivity made mandatory for modernist art, photography can put into play only its own necessary condition of being a depiction which constitutes an object.⁵

Although Wall suggests that ‘depiction’ is essential to photography, it must be noted that abstract photographs can indeed be created (the photogram experiments of László Moholy-Nagy are one such example). I would propose, then, that when Wall states that ‘it is in the physical nature of the medium to depict things’ he is referring to photography’s ‘indexicality’ – that is, the physical relationship between the object and the picture (the light reflected off the object, through the lens and onto the film, or digital sensor), even if the resulting image appears ‘abstract’. Therefore, unlike modern painting, which dispensed with a range of conventions associated with figuration or naturalism in an exploration of essential formal qualities, photography had fewer layers to shed before it reached its stalemate: the ‘necessary condition of being a depiction which constitutes an object’.⁶ Wall argues that conceptualism’s attempts to ‘make visible this condition’ by deconstructing and radicalising the medium resulted in several important directions for photography. In ‘Marks of Indifference’ he focuses on two particular possibilities. The first involved the rethinking and ‘refunctioning’ of the type of art photography that dominated at the beginning of the 1960s – that of reportage or photojournalism. The second direction that Wall describes (which is related to the first) is ‘the issue of the de-skilling and re-skilling of the artist in a context defined by the culture industry’: in other words, the de-aestheticisation of photography as the precondition for photography’s emergence as ‘art’.⁷ In order to establish the context for his argument, Wall turns back to a period of transition in art photography’s history – the development of photojournalism (as a ‘utilitarian picture’ and then as an ‘art’), in tandem with the growth of the mass media, publishing and communications industries, and the demise of pictorialism, during the 1920s.

Wall identifies the post-pictorialist exploration of ‘the border-territories of the utilitarian picture’ (a phase that began around 1920) as a turning point in the history of photography.⁸ The most important development in the work of those who rejected pictorialism, Wall observes, was the turn towards ‘immediacy, instantaneity, and the evanescent moment of the emergence of pictorial value out of a practice of reportage of one kind or another’.⁹ Photography came to be redefined by this new temporality, which was raised to a photo-ontology by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s notion of the ‘decisive moment’, and also found expression in amateur ‘snapshots’. Wall argues that it was through this new pictorial temporality that a new version of (what he terms) the ‘Western Concept of the Picture’ emerged.

The ‘Western Concept of the Picture’

What exactly is this ‘Western Concept of the Picture’ of which Wall speaks? What is its history and how did photography redefine it? These questions are central to this book, as is the issue of Wall’s own investment in this concept. In using this term, Wall refers to the unified classical type of picture governed by geometric perspective, with a lineage that can be traced to the re-birth of classicism during the Renaissance. The most fundamental convention that underpinned this pictorial paradigm was linear perspective: a system of spatial representation, governed by optics and mathematics, which created the illusion of depth in a two-dimensional image.¹⁰ A picture composed using this system would be characterised by a single fixed viewpoint and spatial and temporal unity, in order to produce a sense of harmony, proportion, balance, and consistency. The system of linear perspective had other implications: it represented a rational, scientific, mathematical, enlightened, and objective worldview, and a centered, singular, unified observer. This type of pictorial ‘model’ underpinned Western art from the Renaissance until the mid-nineteenth century, when the early modernist gestures of the likes of Édouard Manet signalled new pictorial values. The most significant trajectory to emerge was that of abstraction.

In the early decades of the twentieth century the ‘Concept of the Picture’ came under fire as the avant-garde sought to break new ground by pursuing increasingly abstract effects. Modern art became characterised by fragmentation and multiple points of view, as new pictorial territories were established by movements such as Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism, Constructivism, and Surrealism. In the post-Second World War period, Abstract Expressionism drew upon the anti-figurative aesthetic of the earlier modernist movements, combined with the emotional intensity of German Expressionism, to transform the picture into ‘an arena in which to act’.¹¹ Critic Harold Rosenberg, who originally coined the term ‘Action Painting’ to refer to Abstract Expressionist works, summed up the issue as follows: ‘What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event’.¹² The reductivism of minimalism and conceptualism in the 1960s subjected the ‘Picture’ to further crises, as the art object itself was deemed extraneous in a radical critique of commodification.

Technological developments presented other challenges to the ‘Concept of the Picture’. Photography’s remarkable mimesis and the dynamism of cinema’s moving image and mobile frame marked new pictorial thresholds, especially in regards to the representation and perception of time and space. Such developments heralded the inauguration of a new pictorial paradigm – that of the ‘technological picture’. The reproducibility of such technological pictures raised new questions about the ‘value’ attributed to artworks, as famously discussed by Walter Benjamin in his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936). More recently, the digitalisation of photography has changed the way pictures are created, disseminated, and consumed. Cameras have become a standard feature of mobile phones, digital cameras are relatively inexpensive, and the Internet has provided a highly efficient and instantaneous means of sharing pictures literally on a global scale. Such accessibility and ubiquity has resulted in the radical democratisation of the medium. However, the sheer proliferation of images has further undermined the notion of a singular, unified, and authoritative point of view, which is associated with the ‘traditional picture’.

From this brief summary of developments, one thing is clear: the ‘Concept of the Picture’ has ceased to be cohesive or stable. It is for this reason that a hint of ironic reverence can be detected as Wall conveys a sense of the esteem bestowed upon this form of representation:

The Western Picture is, of course, that tableau, that independently beautiful depiction and composition that derives from the institutionaliz...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: a chance encounter
• Introduction: Jeff Wall and the concept of the picture
• PART I: Pictures ‘printed on the void’
• PART II: The frame
• PART III: The photographic moment
• Epilogue: final encounters
• Bibliography – works cited
• Index