A Conversation With Jeff Wall (2000) (link)
A Shit Picture by Jeff Wall
JW: The aesthetic norm of fragmentation implies that the avant-garde movements made a fundamental and irreversible break with the past. The art of the past is defined as “organically unified,” art that does not want to recognize its own contingent character, its own fragile illusionism. It wants to revel in the illusionism, for its own sake and for the sake of its audience, and it wants to seem to be inevitable and complete, the creation of magicians. This is what is called the “genius ideology.” Tearing apart the organic work of art was the accomplishment of the avant-garde, which revealed the inner mechanics of traditional illusionistic art, the stagecraft of the masterpiece. To a great extent, I agree with that process, and I like a lot of avant-garde art very much; it’s very important to me. But I feel that it’s an unfree way of relating to it to erect it as an absolute standard, against the aspects of the unified work which I like.
This is all the very worst kind of bullshit. If I had to define what I do in the negative, I would say that it is whatever Jeff Wall and the art world he represents doesn’t.* I can’t believe these laughable, banal, empty reasons and the similarly bland pictures are considered at the apex of art photography at the moment (apparently his works are at least a million each). It is an unconvincing joke.
I wanted to really work hard to concentrate on what he was saying. To find at least a granule of depth. Nada. His main points in this interview (with a servile interviewer) seems to be that big is good because it shows you more detail (but now everyone’s doing it), a ‘unified’** picture has validity (if this needs to be defended the world is in a very bad way), and that black and white is good, because it’s different. Wtf? After reading this I want to kill myself.
You can check out how truly pedestrian his work is at the MOMA exhibition from 2007 here.
Click on the link in the title to feel like slashing your wrists.
* I understand that Wall is partly rejecting these claims, but that doesn’t change the fact that he has firmly put himself in this current in the past and profited from this ecosystem.
** I think what they mean here is a picture that is of a consistent whole, and which has the decency and care for itself and it’s viewer to hide the way it is made, so that the story can be told. So that the viewer can feel something or learn something about life. One of the infantile gestures of postmodern art is that it thinks it’s being clever by revealing that there is no god. They don’t understand Nietzche’s conception of the necessary lie.
It seems that at the heart of the postmodern urge is a Cartmenesque ‘screw you guys I’m going home’ because it is getting harder and harder to say something original. In our saturated times, it is easy to say fuck it, everything has already been done and said, and all of it is available on the Internet. But this is not true. Not everything has been said, we are constantly new, different. And in any case we should rise to face the new difficulties rather than wilt.
What the postmoderns term ‘fragile illusionism’ is actually the core drive by artists in the art that they create. The whole point was to be so convincing that the audience is carried away, entertained, taught, shown etc. So is Sophocles, or Byron, or Tolstoy, or Shakespeare’s work fragile illusionism? The more I think about the postmoderns the more I think of them as bad artists who didn’t or can’t put in the effort to create viable illusions, to write a transportive story, a transcendental poem, a movie so riveting that you are crying in the cinema hall. So the weak attacked the structure that was judging them and made it their own. And so now, bad art flourishes. But thankfully so does a lot of good art, good novels, good movies.
Maybe this has happened in other ages and we just don’t know about it because these empty people get driven from the very memory of an age.
Posted 2 years ago
