Jeff Wall: Picture for Women (Afterall Books / One Work)

61 Pages·2011·22.195 MB·English

by  David Campany

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Picture for Women
David Campany
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OCT 12 2011
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One Work Series Editor
One Work is a unique series of books published by Afterall, based
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at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London.
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Each book presents a single work of art considered in detail by
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a single author. The focus of the series is on contemporary art
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and its aim is to provoke debate about significant moments in
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art’s recent development.
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Over the course of more than one hundred books, important works
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will be presented in a meticulous and generous manner by writers
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who believe passionately in the originality and significance of the
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works about which they have chosen to write. Each book contains
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a comprehensive and detailed formal description of the work,
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followed by a critical mapping of the aesthetic and cultural context
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in which it was made and has gone on to shape. The changing
presentation and reception of the work throughout its existence
Other titles in the One Work series: is also discussed, and each writer stakes a claim on the influence
‘their’ work has on the making and understanding of other
Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous Alighiero e Boetti: Mappa
by Jan Vcrwoert by Luca Cerizza works of art.
Hollis Frampton: (nostal^a) Chris Marker: La Jetee
by Rachel Moore by Janet Harbord The books insist that a single contemporary work of art (in all
of its different manifestations), through a unique and radical
Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew Hanne Darboven: Cultural History
into Space from his Apartment 1880—1^83 aesthetic articulation or invention, can affect our understanding
by Boris Groys by Dan Adler
of art in general. More than that, these books suggest that a single
Richard Prince: Untitled (couple) Michael Snow: Wavelength work of art can literally transform, however modestly, the way
by Michael Newman by Elizabeth Le^e
we look at and understand the world. In this sense the One Work
Joan Jonas: I Want to Live in the Country Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel series, while by no means exhaustive, will eventually become
(And OtherR^mances) by Amna Malik
a veritable library of works of art that have made a difference.
by Susan Morgan
Richard Long: A Line Made by Walking
Mary Heilmann: Save the Last by Dieter Roelstraete
Dance for Me
by Terry R. Myers Marcel Duchamp: Etant donnes
by Julian Jason Haladyn
Marc Camille Chaimowicz;
Celebration? Realife General Idea: Imagevirus
by Tom Holcrt by Gregg Bordowitz
Yvonne Rainer: The Mind is a Muscle Dara Birnbaum:
by Catherine Wood Technology/ Transformation:
Wonder Woman
Fischli and Weiss: The Way Thirds Go by T.J. Demos
by Jeremy Millar
Gordon Matta-Clark:
Andy Warhol: Blow Job Conical Intersect
by Peter Gidal by Bruce Jenkins
Jeff Wall
First published in soil
by Afterall Books
Picture for Women
Afterall
Central Saint Martins
College of Art and Design,
University of the Arts London,
107— 109 Charing Cross Road,
London WC2HODU
www.aftcrall.org
David Campany
© Afterall, Central Saint Martins
College of Art and Design,
University of the Arts London,
the artists and the authors.
ISBN Paperback: 978—1-84638—071-6
ISBN Cloth: 978-1-84638-070-9
Distribution by The MIT Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts and London
www.initpress.mit.edu
Art Direction and Typeface Design
A2/SW/HK
Printed and bound by
Die Keure, Belgium
Ihe One Work series is printed
on FSC certified papers
Images of Picture for Women and other works by Jeff Wall
© the artist
Supported by
< ? ARTS COUNCIL
ENGLAND
My thanks to Michael Newman, Sophie Howarth, Steve Edwards,
John Hilliard, David Bate, Victor Burgin, Mark Bolland and
Polly Braden, Special thanks to Jeff Wall, who was gracious and
generous in the preparation of this book. The editors would also
like to thank Jeff Wall and his studio for their help and generosity,
David Campany is a writer and curator. His books include Art
and Photography (London; Phaidon, 2003), Photography and
Cinema {London: Reaktion Books, 2008) and Jeff Wall speaks
with David Campany (Madrid: La Fabrica, 2009). He is the
editor of the anthology The Cinematic (London and Cambridge,
MA: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press). In 2010 he
co-curated ‘Anonymes. L’Amerique sans nom: Photographic
et cinema’ at Le Bal, Paris. He is a Reader in Photography at
the University of Westminster.

One Photograph
A photographic transparency, 142.5 by 204.5 centimetres,
illuminated from behind, hangs on a gallery wall at eye level.
The image is of a room, perhaps a classroom, with scattered
chairs, lit by several bare electric bulbs hanging from the
ceiling. No daylight comes in through the large windows at
the rear of the space. In the foreground a low, makeshift wooden
shelf or counter extends across the width of the image. On the
left, a brightly lit woman stands with her hands before her,
resting on the counter. She is looking across and into the lens
of the camera that took the photograph. On the right, slightly
further away from the counter and slightly less illuminated,
stands a man in semi-profile. He is holding, perhaps squeezing,
the cable release of a large-format camera. The camera sits on
a tripod between the man and the woman, at the centre of the
image. The facial expressions of the pair are serious but not
stern. The woman, man and camera are all in focus, while the
rear of the room falls out of focus. Being a photograph there are
countless minor details that add to the overall reality effect.
Schematically, this is what is presented by Jeff Wall’s Picture
for Women, made in 1979 (fig.l). To venture anything more would
be to slide into inference, deduction and interpretation. Perhaps
my description has already done so.
In the decades since the late 1970s, Jeff Wall has become one
of the most influential contemporary artists. His compelling
re-engagement with art’s pictorial possibilities after the
aesthetic reductions of Conceptualism, combined with his testy
but affectionate relationship with the medium of photography,
has produced some of the most compelling and debated images of
cover (detail) and previous pages
our time. He has worked in all the established pictorial genres,
Jeff Wall,
as well as outside of them. He has made ‘straight’ documentary-
Picture for Women, 1979,
transparency in lightbox, looking images, highly fictional images and images in between
142.5 X 204.Scm
these two extremes, in a range of sizes and media, including
Picture for Women 11
backlit transparencies, black-and-white prints, colour prints, photography has become a staple of contemporary art, it is worth
publications and even tapestry. He has used large-format cameras remembering just how anomalous it was when Wall began to
and mobile-phone cameras. He has made stand-alone photographs, explore its possibilities, at that moment when the dissolution
diptychs and sequences. of Conceptualism was giving way to ‘postmodern art’, with its
critical interests in spectacle, quotation and appropriation. That
The form that Wall has explored most is the singular photograph, we are now so familiar with the form is due in large measure to
conceived as a pictorial tableau and presented in the space of Wall’s influence on audiences, other photographers, commenta-
the gallery at a scale that engages directly with the body of the tors and institutions of art. Despite this, his commitment to
spectator or beholder. The subject matter may vary, as may the the photographic picture conceived and presented outside of any
method of presentation, although for a long time he worked grouping continues to set his work apart. Few contemporary
with (and was identified with) colour transparencies presented artists working with photography make such singular artworks.
in lightboxes. Picture for Women is one of the earliest of these.
But his early work resulted from quite a different approach. Wall
No particular image by Wall is a good representative of his oeuvre started to exhibit around 1969, influenced by the Conceptualist
as a whole; none encapsulates it. So the selection of one work for ‘use’ of photographs as simple documents of actions or places.
close study will give a skewed view of his practice. Nevertheless, His most ambitious work from that time was the photo-text
Picture for Women does share many concerns with the rest of publication Landscape Manual (1970, fig.2), made in the spirit
Wall’s early work, such as relations between men and women, of magazine pieces such as Dan Graham’s ‘Homes for America’
photography’s relation to painting and cinema, the meaning of (1966) and Robert Smithson’s ‘A Tour of the Monuments of
light and illumination, realism and illusion, and the place of Passaic’ (1967), in which the conventions of photojournalism
the spectator/camera in the making and experience of an image. were adopted and subverted to describe eventless and alienated
This book will consider all of these concerns. At the same time. human environments. Landscape Manual recounts a drive
Picture for Women is unlike anything else Wall has made. No through a bleak suburban terrain. Casual photographs taken
other work is quite so rigorously reflexive, so confrontational, so from a car punctuate an aleatory text that reflects on the experi-
recalcitrant. It is upfront, stripped-down and uncompromising. ence of the monotonous, depressing place. At points the writing
But none of this makes for simple meaning. What, exactly, is also highlights the way our daily encounter with photographic
Picture for Women upfront about? To what is it stripped down? images en masse is at odds with the unique character of each one:
And what is not compromised? We will come to this soon enough,
but we must begin with the two qualities that have most clearly Drop your hands to your sides; they are heavy uieights
defined Wall’s oeuvre: scale and singularity.
now at the ends of your arms [...] reach out and grasp this
photograph — small indistinct city street damp black
Starting and Restarting
pavement — mounds of earth to the left, poles, long low
Few artists have asked quite so much of photography or pushed building, high bright spot from arc-lamp on its standard etc.
it so hard into unfamiliar territory. While large-scale tableau in the low flat landscape. The muscles in your arms are rigid.
2 I Jeff Wai I
Picture for Women | 3
the glossy photo surface crinkles in the clutching fingers shifted to the work of Marcel Duchamp. At the time, London’s
ofyour hand your hand the knuckles now gone white.... art scene was intensely engaged in the politically charged debates
(It’s the location of the camera which most often determines emerging from feminism, from a reconsideration of the avant-
the character of the particular space — physically you are garde art and theory of the 1920s and 3os, from semiotic and
transferred right there.) As you clutch the photograph the psychoanalytic theory as it surfaced in new art and film journals
image — a particular space — street curbstones, neat lawns (such as Screen) and from the recently translated writings of
etc., slips, vibrates, collapses under the pressure of your German and French theorists, notably Walter Benjamin, Theodor
desires. All other photographs clatter on the floor. Now you Adorno and Roland Barthes. Debates were heated and artists were
are left with a single valued section — a single construction expected to have clear positions. Wall was not making any art
— and does it admit others? This condition of attachment but was reading widely, attending public talks, exhibitions
will never admit of the ‘theory of sequences’.^ and even auctions.
Wall has often spoken of his torn to making art in the form of While in London his appreciation for the history of painting
the significant singular picture in the second half of the 1970s grew deeper, particularly the work of Diego Velazquez, Theodore
as an attempt to realise the hope that it was possible to do so. For Gericault, Francisco Goya, Eugene Delacroix, Nicolas Poussin,
him, the anti-aestheticism of Conceptual art and its deferrals, Edouard Manet, Georges Seurat and Paul Cezanne. At the
its antagonism toward the pictorial and its negations of visual Courtauld Gallery he encountered the painting that would later
pleasure seemed to be playing themselves out as increasingly inspire Picture for Women, Manet’s Un Bar aux Folies-Bergere
empty gestures. In this seemingly heartfelt passage it is clear (1881—82, fig.ll), which has been on show there since 1934.
he sensed that making alienated art about alienated life — a He was also exploring cinema and its history, noting how
kind of artistic mimesis of social incoherence — was bad faith, directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub & Daniele
unrewarding and without potential in the long run. For all its Huillet, Jean Eustache and Pier Paolo Pasolini were informed
formal difference from the pictures he would begin to make in by the insights of Sergei Eisenstein, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Alfred
the second half of the 1970s, there were certainly plenty of signs Hitchcock, Robert Bresson and Roberto Rossellini. Wall left
in Landscape Manual of the path he would not take. the fervour of London in 1978 to return to Vancouver, where
he initially worked on a number of film scripts that remain
Wall’s Conceptual work did achieve significant recognition undeveloped. In 1976 he took an art school studio-teaching
(Landscape Manual was included in ‘Information’, the interna- position, which prompted a stepping up of the process of
tional survey of Conceptual art organised by Kynaston McShine clarifying and synthesising his disparate interests and opened
for the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1970) but he soon the possibility of his finding a way back into making art.
rejected it. In 1970 he left Vancouver — where he was born and
has lived for most of his life — for London, to work on a doctoral Even today. Wall is unsure what it was about photography that
thesis at the Courtauld Institute of Art. It began as a study of
attracted him.^ Many photographers before him assumed their
Berlin Dada and the photo-montages of John Heartfield, but soon
own more-or-less specific relation to the medium and while
4 I Jeff Wai I
Picture for Women | 5
Wall was certainly interested in the idea of photography as a
of images made for the page or derived from it, with the models of
medium with particular qualities and potentials, he has kept a
assembly and dissemination made possible by page reproduction.®
remarkably open attitude to what they might be. In the 1960s he
Photography became ‘modern’ at the beginning of the 1920s, at a
was aware of the exceptional standards set by photographers of
time of great expansion in printed matter of all kinds, including
the high modern era — from Eugene Atget and Walker Evans to
mass media magazines, illustrated newspapers, avant-garde
Weegee, Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand — but he felt there
journals, popular art surveys, manifestos and artist’s and photog-
was little reason to continue in that vein.’ It seemed complete,
rapher’s books. Most artistically ambitious or independently
belonging to a time in which many ambitious photographers
minded photographers set their sights on producing monographic
were exploring the medium’s artistic potential in the guise of the
books or working for vanguard periodicals. These were not
hunter-photographer, engaging in reportage or applied document-
simply album-like spaces for the presentation of pictures.
making. That way of working seemed to have come to an end in
The book in particular was a specific form with possibilities
the US and Europe by the early 1960s. With the illustrated press
that articulated and shaped the making of the photographs
shrinking and taking far fewer artistic risks, television was
they carried.^
becoming the defining image-form of the era. The best photogra-
phy of the past was beginning to be championed by art historians,
In the late 1960s, Pop and Conceptualism were committed to
museums and new galleries specialising in photography.* In
serial, sequential and para-archival procedures. Meanwhile,
canonising it they also set up obstacles to continuity and develop-
photographers continuing to make art in the guise of photo-
ment, leading to a defensive ‘ghetto’ mentality among many
journalism or documentary tended to exhibit their work
photographers who isolated their practice from the concerns of
according to the conventions of the page-based photo-essay.
the experimental artists of the 1960s and 70s. At the same time,
When specialist photography galleries began to open in the early
the broad possibilities of photography had begun to permeate the
1970s, their architecture and scale were premised on exhibiting
vanguard in the work of artists keen to explore, or exploit, its
suites of prints not much larger than the page of a book. In
promiscuous, hybrid, automatic and amateur qualities, from
addition. Pop and Conceptualism had redefined the photographic
Andy Warhol, Ana Mendieta and Dan Graham to Gerhard Richter,
page, subverting the values of the crafted and precious lizire
Gordon Matta-Clark, Martha Rosier, Douglas Huebier and John
d’artiste. For example, there were Dan Graham’s and Robert
Baldessari.’ There was specialist art photography and there was
Smithson’s magazine pieces, Edward Ruscha’s so-dumb-they-
Pop, Conceptualism and their offshoots. At least, that is how it
might-be-smart photo-books (1963—78) and Andy Warhol’s
often seemed. But Wall was thinking hard about other directions
graphically inventive publications, such as the Pop compendium
that might meet the progressive attitudes of the 1970s while
Andy Warhol’s index (book) (±967').
reconnecting with the neglected ideals of picture-making.
When the practices hastily labelled ‘postmodern photography’
The One and the Many
emerged in the second half of the 1970s, it was with an explicit
From the 1840s until the mid-1970s, almost all of the key
desire to be exhibited in the gallery space. But, like those of their
moments in the history of photographic art involved bodies
immediate forebears, they were still fundamentally indebted to
6 I Jeff Wall
Picture for Women | 7