Wall's Tableau Mort

Abstract

For how many contemporary artists besides Jeff Wall would a conference of papers dedicated to the analysis of individual works be so appropriate, perhaps even required? For who else would this approach fit, and so snugly, as the basis for a special issue of an art journal, let alone an academic one? Wall's practice is in many respects distinguished – one might well say isolated – by the production of a certain individuation or integration of the artwork, which encourages, often spectacularly, the kind of sustained if not altogether academic attention of this approach. Wall's art is an art of the single image, the picture or tableau. This is as much an anachronism as it is an achievement of his modernism. Wall's work is strikingly distinct from contemporary art-photography's preoccupation with the series, whether in the narrative forms practised by Allan Sekula derived from the photo-essay or book, or the non-narrative and more aggregative or archival forms of Bernd and Hilla Becher and their students, such as Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth. Andreas Gursky is an interesting exception among the latter, but the unity of his images is derived from the overallness of its subject matter, usually itself serial in nature, which is strictly subordinated to its decorative properties in generating a surface unity. This subordination of subject matter to its decorative coherence tends to make Gursky's pictures more stylised and comparable than, say, Wall's. The serial forms of contemporary art-photography register certain conditions of photographic modernism, despite frequent suggestions that this work is simply a technologically enhanced recovery of pictorialism. Photography's mass reproducibility is less determining here – especially insofar as this is repressed in art-photography's limited editions – than the fragmented kind of picture it produces as a result of its mechanized composition: its quality of being a snapshot rather than a tableau, which then requires montage as both the supplementation and the emphasis of its fragmentariness. The intensively composed, encompassingly scaled, images of much contemporary art-photography resist this, but its serial forms reveals a residual circumscription by this transformation of the idea of the picture. Once the picture is treated as a fragment, unity is sought in some ensemble of picture-units, and the task of composition essentially exceeds the individual image. Seriality is a peculiarly photographic form of unity in its endlessness or incompleteablity. It registers the extent to which a whole cannot be assembled out of fragments. An alternative form of the fragment would be the early German Romantic's apparently paradoxical idea of it as the finite presentation of unity, wholeness, indeed, absoluteness. This is a plural form – Friedrich Schlegel wrote ‘fragments’ – but it is not serial.1 These tensions of fragmentation, unity and seriality might well be considered decisive to the forms of contemporary art-photography.