Problems Sunday June 19, 2005
There has to be a dramatic mediation of the conceptual element in art. Without this mediation you have only concepts on the one hand and pictures on the other. Images become a decorative completion of an already fully evolved thought. They are just illustrations. So they are boring, there is no drama.
This remark is made by Jeff Wall, in Jeff Wall (2002, p 104). The intrigue of many, possibly all of his photos rests substantially on this sense, in which the compositions pose a question rather than offer an answer. In part they represent a typical or predictable scenario, but in such a way that they simultaneously arrest your attention and invite your curiosity. You thus look again, at a domestic or social scenario you would normally never consider in any deep way. In his Fight on the Sidewalk (1994) you see two men wrestling on the ground, watched by a third man standing above them. The fight doesn’t totally convince you, because despite being locked in a furious tangle, there is no muscular tension or strain. Similarly the onlooker appears passive, unconcerned, even serene, characteristic of a quiet reflective moment rather than drama, conflict and tension. It’s a staged photograph, with lighting that doesn’t quite convince, being too perfect and painterly. This image is poor quality but appears to be the only one available on the internet, and still serves as an illustration:
For me personally, such a photo makes me think of philosophical concerns about binary oppositions, polarities, disjunctions and a possible resolution that is neither one nor the other: if, that is, you read the way Wall justifies his work, and the conceptual content it has.
Carl Jung said a problem is never resolved on the same level. That is, the alchemical change occurs when you understand and operate from a synthetic rather than an analytic or antagonistic viewpoint. Nietzsche said historically, the most instructive epochs were those when masters and servants slept with each other. Pleasure is a means by which antagonists in a social struggle gain precise knowledge of each other. Both Freud and Reich also understood how sexuality is controlled and compartmentalised, in neurotic societies. These tensions then have their own inherent attractions, which were a hidden aspect of Victorian attitudes to primitive races – men towards the women – and between black and white people wherever we have seen slavery, exploitation and power relations. Lawrence portrayed this kind of idea in Lady Chatterly’s Lover, with its famous carnal moment when the high class Lady enjoys a bit of rough. Hugh Grant acted it out a few years ago, to the incredulity of the public. Why would he pay $50 for a sordid encounter with Divine Brown, when he enjoys a millionaire lifestyle and bedroom access to the beautiful Elizabeth Hurley? Presumably there were similar attractions between the most powerful man in the world and the intern, involving a cigar, a stained dress, and a disruption of political power worthy of an Ancient Greek drama. Desire is based on something you want, and unattainability catalyses that desire.
Wall is dialectic, cultural, argumentative and political, in the historical and critical-academic tradition. He’s obviously erudite and his theories and explanations for his work are sophisticated, distinguishing him from the more typical art-speak of the fatuous, contemporary art world. I like his work, and I like his learning, much of which derives from his Art History background. But I’m more psychological and resist the way in which that kind of learning, which is essentially Post-Marxism, claims to account for civilisation when it always traces back to merely material conditions. Thus, my interpretation of Fight on the Sidewalk is my own, and it doesn’t entirely correspond to Wall’s thesis.
Additionally, the notion that we must have drama in art, or a photograph, is completely arguable. It’s predicated on a notion that we have arrived at point of dialectical rationale as a necessary opposition – a critical reminder – against the evils of the past when grand narratives were imposed, and art was a political expression of bourgeois control. I accept the Revolution, and the vibrancy of contemporary theory that exposes the complacency and exploitations of the past, but what I don’t accept is the way this is presented as an imperative, as an assumption that there is no alternative to historical and dialectical materialism. ‘Religion is the opium of the people’, Marx famously declared. Yes, and sometimes intellect is the opium of the academic.
A ‘fully evolved thought’ has closure, in the sense that there is no argument or ‘drama’. In a psychological sense it operates at the Jungian third point of resolution, accommodating and resolving the opposites like Tao incorporates the yin yang dynamic, honouring and acknowledging both but being trapped by neither. This is a profoundly metaphysical strategy, unbound from the pedestrian operations of binary historicism and ordinary, normal cognition. In that respect Wall’s thesis operates in quite a shallow sense, and is derivative in the sense that it is firmly located in the intellectual trajectories of preceding decades. There’s no doubt his photographs are interesting, and the aesthetic context he articulates is learned and evolved. It’s a clever juxtaposition of contemporary postmodern ideas and the photographic image, but is ultimately predicated on a set of assumptions easily countered with reference to psychology, philosophy and even anthropology. It makes sense in a certain context, but that context is neither universal nor absolute.