No Time for Art? Marc Augé, Michael Fried, Jeff

No Time for Art? Marc Augé, Michael Fried, Jeff Wall
Emer O’Beirne
In the essay Le Temps en ruines published in 2003, Marc Augé turned
his attention to the place and role of art in the contemporary period he
calls supermodernity. His prescription is surprisingly specific: art
should address the passage of time and the discontinuities and loss it
involves: ‘Les artistes d’aujourd’hui […] pressentent […] que c’est à
l’art de sauver ce qu’il y a de plus précieux dans les ruines et dans les
œuvres du passé: un sens du temps d’autant plus provocant et
émouvant qu’il est irréductible à l’histoire, qu’il est conscience du
manque, expression de l’absence, pur désir’.1 The statement surprises
only for its narrow prescriptiveness; the outlook it articulates chimes
fully with the elegiac thrust of Augé’s diagnosis of life in today’s
western and western-style economies as he has elaborated it ever since
La Traversée du Luxembourg in 1985, the moment of his professional
transition to ‘l’anthropologie du proche’. Since then, Augé has
described a world exemplified by the ‘non-place’ and envisaged in
terms of loss (of cultural identities, histories, and relations) brought
about by paradoxical excess (of decontextualized snatches of world
events encountered in mass-mediated isolation rather than experienced
collectively). Lives dominated by the non-lieu are lives, as he
famously put it almost twenty years ago, ‘où l’on naît en clinique et
où l’on meurt à l’hôpital’; between these poles one navigates a world
‘promis à l’individualité solitaire, au passage, au provisoire et à
l’éphémère’.2 Of course, art need not be bound to an evocation of
1. Marc Augé, Le Temps en ruines (Paris: Galilée, 2003), p. 97. Hereafter TR in the
text.
2. Marc Augé, Non-lieux: introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité
(Paris: Seuil, 1991), pp. 100–01. Hereafter NL in the text.
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temporality; art historian Michael Fried has repeatedly argued
precisely the opposite in relation to Modernism.3 This essay will
consider how Fried’s alternative view of the place of temporality in
artistic practice and reception allows for a contemporary reflection (by
artist and viewer) that can be in sympathy with Augé’s social and
spatial critique without being entirely subsumed into it. An artist about
whom Fried has written admiringly, photographer Jeff Wall, offers, as
we shall see, an example of a practice that is attuned to a pervasive
contemporary experience of dispossession such as Augé’s work on the
non-place describes, even as it is shaped by elements of
supermodernity (image manipulation, blurring of fact and fiction) that
Augé decries.
Augé: Art, Fiction, and the Loss of Time
For Marc Augé, an increasingly fictional quality in our experience of
events is part and parcel of the lives we live (undergo might be a
better term) in spatial organizations deprived of meaning and therefore
unable to reinforce identity or community. The term non-lieu has
expanded to cover not only physical spaces and constructions but also
image-based technologies that replace direct experience of reality with
pastiches or fictions. Both La Guerre des rêves (1997) and Fictions fin
de siècle (2000) describe a crisis of meanings, symbols, and
institutions — and thus of society as a whole — and lay the blame for
this crisis at the door of the mass media, particularly the visual media,
and their ‘fictionalizations’ of real events: ‘la circulation d’images à
consommer passivement [est un] puissant facteur de désagrégation
collective et d’aliénation individuelle’.4
This ‘forme dévoyée d’imaginaire (la “mise en fiction”)’
threatens cultural disaster through the destruction of the imagination
(GR 124). Creativity (in the narrow case of fictional narrative and
3. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1998), passim, hereafter AO in the text.
4. Marc Augé, La Guerre des rêves: exercices d’ethno-fiction (Paris: Seuil, 1997),
p. 42. Hereafter GR in the text.
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presumably also in respect of artistic invention more broadly) is in
danger of disappearance in a world where ‘[la fiction] ne semble plus
constituer un genre particulier, mais épouser la réalité au point de se
confondre avec elle’ (GR 132). A cultural apocalypse beckons as
reality and fiction converge and the author disappears (GR 158–59).
The consequence of such extinction of creativity is social atomization:
as the author disappears, so too does the connection between a
singular subject communicating with other imaginations and thus
creating with his or her public ‘un lien virtuel de socialisation’ (GR
150). Instead, as dwellers in a technological environment ‘propice aux
évasions solitaires’, we are subject to ‘l’isolement relatif qu’entraîne
aujourd’hui le rapport à l’image’ (GR 173). This view of art as a tool
of social cohesion will be central to Le Temps en ruines and to the
prescriptiveness of its approach to artistic activity.
In 2000, midway between the cultural Armageddon foretold in
La Guerre des rêves and the call to artistic action of Le Temps en
ruines, Augé turned his attention to the question of how contemporary
art is to deal with the omnipresence of the image. The essay ‘De
l’espace au regard: qu’est-ce qu’un objet d’art?’ asked how the
artwork might combat this endlessly proliferating competitor that fails
to engage meaningfully with history, space, or alterity even as it
monopolizes their representation.5 In answer, Augé outlined a double
imperative for the creative artist which would be taken up again in Le
Temps en ruines: to imbue the present with the historicity excluded by
the simplifying image; and to subordinate the image to the social
relations that should be its origin and goal. The question of collective
reception is again crucial and even foundational: ‘l’interrogation sur le
réel que formule l’œuvre d’art n’a de sens que si elle est partagée, que
si l’œuvre est en même temps appel, acte social et création sociale’
(FFS 176).
As well as reprising the centrality of social intervention to art,
Le Temps en ruines elaborates on how Augé understands art’s second
5. Marc Augé, ‘Fictions fin de siècle’ suivi de ‘Que se passe-t-il? 29 février, 31
mars, 30 avril 2000’ (Paris: Fayard, 2000), p. 176. Hereafter FFS in the text.
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interconnective function, its operation as a vehicle for historicity. It
becomes clear that in emphasizing historicity, Augé is considering art
from the point of view of the collector, and even of the collector of
antiquities (he tells us about his baroque artefacts, TR 26). It is this
perspective that shapes his reflection on the function of art in the
present, and it illustrates the prominence in Augé’s thinking of a
Proustian notion of conservation of the past, a thread that recurs
throughout all his work. The ‘pastness’ of the artwork — ‘l’œuvre dit
son temps, mais elle ne le dit plus complètement’ (TR 27) — becomes
intrinsic to the artwork’s functioning as art in the present: ‘C’est ce
manque, ce vide, cet écart entre la perception disparue et la perception
actuelle qu’exprime aujourd’hui l’œuvre originale’ (TR 27). An
articulation of temporal loss by the artwork is thus an effect of the fact
that works become antiquarian objects.
However unpromisingly, this antiquarian view becomes the
criterion for the success of art produced in the present too, as Augé
spells out an aesthetic based on loss (and heavily tilted toward
narrative, the exemplar again being Proust). Thus literature is
traversed by ‘ce thème de l’impossible retour au passé, où se mêlent
les harmoniques du voyage, de la mémoire et de la narration’ (TR 65).
Suspension of narrative — an element of much narrative writing and
constitutive of much contemporary photography or figurative painting
— is cast by Augé in terms of the emotions that the passage of time
conjures in the artist and reader/viewer, as a ‘trêve entre le souvenir et
l’attente’ (TR 66). All art is seen as an anticipation of and attempt to
defeat its own destiny as relic uprooted from a continuous temporal
context (‘l’art lui-même, sous ses diverses formes, est une ruine, ou
une promesse de ruine’, TR 25), its author working to refine the
work’s form ‘pour la préserver des atteintes du temps et donner à ses
lecteurs futurs le sentiment d’un pur présent, d’un présent qui dure
sans passer’ (TR 66). The primary interest of the art object for Augé
seems to be to make manifest the gap between its creation and the
moment (for contemporary art, the anticipated moment) of its
reception, drawing attention to the passage of time in terms of an
impossible recuperation of the past: ‘La beauté de l’art tient à sa
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dimension historique: il faut que l’art soit de son temps, qu’il soit
historique aujourd’hui pour être beau demain. La beauté de l’art est
énigmatique parce que quelque chose nous échappera toujours de la
perception première dont les œuvres anciennes furent l’objet et parce
que, inversement, nous ne pouvons percevoir aujourd’hui dans l’art
contemporain le manque qui s’y creusera à la longue, historiquement,
éveillant la curiosité à jamais insatisfaite de nos successeurs dans le
temps’ (TR 134).
How does the contemporary environment of a technologically
manufactured ‘aplatissement du temps’, an environment in which the
simplifications of the on-screen image impose ‘la tyrannie du présent
perpétuel’ (TR 68), affect the attempt, which is for Augé constitutive
of art, to suspend the passage of time? Not only representation, but the
very landscape it inhabits and interprets, is reduced to a façade
deprived of a temporal dimension. How is art to articulate its temporal
aporia in an age from which the signs and thus the consciousness of
transience have been erased, an age emblematized by tourism: global,
superficial, instantaneous, homogenizing? ‘Dans ce présent perpétuel,
s’abolit la distance entre le passé et sa représentation’ (TR 75).
Creativity gives way to the instant snapshot; landscape, once
suburbanized, loses the evidence of human intervention across history.
In consequence, the humans involved are disconnected from their
historical and relational determinations: ‘Les non-lieux et les images
sont en un sens saturés d’humanité: produits par des hommes,
fréquentés par des hommes, mais des hommes coupés de leurs
relations réciproques, de leur existence symbolique. Ce sont des
espaces qui ne se conjuguent ni au passé ni au futur, sans nostalgie ni
espérance’ (TR 76).
In the landscape of the non-lieu, the artwork must continue to
articulate a ‘conscience du manque’, but one ‘[qui] s’est déplacée: elle
porte moins sur un sens perdu que sur un sens à retrouver’ (TR 134).
Augé makes no bones about calling for a socially engaged art, as an
understanding of art in terms of temporality and lack pivots to exhort
artists to a utopian project, to convert the negative beauty of the nonlieu — ‘la beauté de ce qui aurait pu être’ — to ‘ce qui, un jour peut-
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être, aura lieu’ (TR 135). The mission of the artist or author in
supermodernity must be to ‘s’approprier les espaces de la circulation,
de la communication et de la consommation, […] discerner dans les
espaces de solitude (ou d’interaction, ce sont les mêmes) une
promesse ou une exigence de rencontre’ (TR 77). Art, in other words,
must create a ‘lieu’ in the ‘non-lieu’ of contemporary space and in the
teeth of the omnipresent and all-fictionalizing image, by restoring
historicity and consequently cultural identity and a sense of the
collective.
There is a clear bias toward literature and specifically narrative
fiction in Augé’s reflection on the function of art in supermodernity
(Proust but also Stendhal, Balzac, Gracq are cited). It is easy to see
why Augé would privilege a form into whose fabric the passage of
time is written and to whose reception it is integral. But the
(theoretical, at least) instantaneity of reception of the two-dimensional
art image would seem to sit less comfortably with his ideas. We shall
look presently at an example of the work of one artist producing the
kind of periurban landscapes that characterize the non-lieu for Augé.
Jeff Wall’s photography (predominantly digital or digitally enhanced)
and his reflections on his own practice reveal a more nuanced and
sophisticated approach to the environments and modes of
representation that characterize a globalized present whose destructive
impact on lives and landscapes he, like Augé, laments. His works, I
shall suggest, offer a possible model for a creative practice where a
perceptible social criticism is inseparable from the shaping constraints
and expressive possibilities offered by contemporary media as well as
from a concern to nourish ambiguities of interpretation.6
6. In his writings on photography, Wall has identified instantaneity, in relation not
just to the reception but also to the production of the image, as a profoundly
modern characteristic that sets the medium apart from other visual art while
tying it to representation: ‘Photography constitutes a depiction not by the
accumulation of individual marks but by the instantaneous operation of an
integrated mechanism. All the rays permitted to pass through the lens form an
image immediately, and the lens, by definition, creates a focused image at its
correct focal length. Depiction is the only possible result of the camera system
[…].’ See Jeff Wall, ‘“Marks of Indifference”: Aspects of Photography in, or as,
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The only contemporary visual work Augé discusses in any
detail in Le Temps en ruines is a sculpture whose three-dimensionality
gives its reception a more explicit temporal element than is the case
for a two-dimensional composition. (In practice, of course, the initial
global grasp of an image is followed by extended attention to the
detail of the work.) The piece, a sculptural installation by Anne and
Patrick Poirier called Exegi monumentum aere perennius (1998),
resembles a classical ruin but in neat slices of stainless steel; the
tension between form and material (ancient column, modern steel)
makes what it represents unsituatable in time and undecidable as relic
or projection, radically unsettling the viewer. Initially, Augé
acknowledges this undecidability: ‘Qu’elle représente un faux passé
(une colonne romaine en acier) ou une utopie noire (une ruine à
venir), l’œuvre joue sur le temps, délibérément […]. La perception
qu’auraient ou qu’auront pu avoir les contemporains de l’état initial de
la ruine bâtie par l’artiste nous échappe d’autant plus que ces
contemporains n’ont jamais existé ou n’existeront jamais — pas plus
que cet état initial’ (TR 96–97). But the interpretative aporia is
contained when Augé reads this absence of a stable viewing position
as an exacerbation of temporal loss to the point of alienation: ‘Le
manque qu’exprime alors l’œuvre d’art n’est plus celui d’un regard
disparu, que nous n’arriverons jamais à restituer complètement, mais
celui d’un regard inexistant. Le manque se fait absence’ (TR 97). The
sculpture’s refusal to allow the viewer to place himself in a stable
temporal relationship to it, a refusal that retains its potential to
produce meanings while seeeming stubbornly to refuse to submit to
signification — as suggested by the shining surfaces impervious to the
elements — is whittled down by Augé into a statement of radical
alienation from the past.
Augé thus uses the Poirier sculpture to illustrate his conviction
both of an intrinsic relation between art and the spectator’s sense of
Conceptual Art’, in Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965–1975, ed. Ann
Goldstein and Anne Rorimer (Los Angeles and Cambridge, MA: Museum of
Contemporary Art and MIT Press, 1995), pp. 246–67 (p. 258). Hereafter MI in
the text.
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temporality, and of the destruction of that sense of temporality in
contemporary life. Specifically, temporality is experienced as lack, an
experience captured in the work of art (with art’s function defined in
terms of the reception of art of the past); and the deplorable
‘supermodern’ experience is of the loss of that lack and thus the loss
of the traditional function of art. The limitations of this view are
obvious: the reduction of aesthetic experience to that of temporality;
the encounter with contemporary media presented in entirely negative
terms as the suppression of authentic experience of reality, and not as
itself a potentially fruitful critical experience. Augé is of course an
anthropologist, not an art critic, and one, moreover, whose studies
foreground his own distaste for large swathes of contemporary life: ‘le
triomphe du capitalisme libéral, l’épuisement des États et la gloire de
l’Entreprise, la dénaturation du sport, la pollution de la planète,
l’irréversible appauvrissement des uns face à l’enrichissement des
autres, la renaissance du moralisme face à l’absence de morale’ (FFS
68). The recurring lament in his work for a lost, better society often
endorsed by his own childhood memories (the society of the city and
the metro rather than the suburb and the RER, for example),
foregrounds the anthropologist’s subjectivity after the model of LéviStrauss. But this emphasis produces an extraordinarily narrow
understanding of art that imposes a single critical response to the
experience of ‘supermodernity’. Envisaging a more open creative
dialogue with the globalized present might start by questioning
Augé’s casting of aesthetic experience as experience of the passage of
time, and in this respect the opposing argument of Michael Fried
offers a way forward.
Fried: Art, Theatre, and the Prison of Time
An emphasis on the spectator’s experience and specifically on the
temporality of that experience is central to a certain type of art,
according to art critic and historian Michael Fried, best known for his
much-anthologized 1967 essay ‘Art and Objecthood’ whose argument
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he has often reprised since (AO 148–72).7 However, for Fried, in what
seems the reverse of Augé’s position, it was newly emergent
postmodern art that most depended on arousing such a response. Fried
shares with Augé what one might term a ‘declinist’ view of
contemporary culture, but his understanding of the experience of art is
quite opposed to Augé’s. He associates the subjective experience of
temporality with forms of art that forgo meaningfulness in favour of a
kind of ‘stage presence’ or theatricality — in fact, a kind of
fictionality. As he sees it, a misreading of Modernism’s increasing
emphasis on the work’s literal support led in the 1960s to the mistaken
conclusion that ‘literalness as such is an artistic value of supreme
importance’ (AO 170). This emphasis on literal objecthood
foregrounds ‘theatrically’ the viewer’s experience in time (AO 160);
Modernism, by contrast, had sought to ‘defeat’ or ‘allay’ objecthood.
Thus if the viewer of a work experiences temporality, s/he is in the
domain not of art but of ‘literalism’. Art at its best, he argues, seeks in
the Modernist tradition to suspend temporality, its essence is to be
grasped instantaneously and ever anew, in a ‘perpetual present’ — the
very term that Augé uses to decry the tyrannical, time-erasing effect
of supermodernity. It is worth reprising Fried’s argument briefly here
in order to appreciate how his valorization of the aesthetic encounter
with a ‘perpetual present’, as opposed to an experience of duration
and loss, so thoroughly counters Augé’s understanding of art as ‘une
invitation à sentir le temps’ (TR 95), and to see what implications for
Augé’s thinking that clash might have. Fried’s writings more recently
include admiring analyses of the work of Jeff Wall, and I shall
conclude by considering how Wall’s work balances the aesthetic
principles Fried champions with an articulation of significant elements
of Augé’s social critique translated into a way of seeing.
As with Augé, Fried draws on sculpture to exemplify his
claim, in this case the work of Anthony Caro. The importance of
Caro’s work for Fried lies in its creation of a sculptural ‘syntax’: ‘the
7. Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, Artforum, 5 (June 1967), 12–23, reprinted
in AO 148–72.
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mutual and naked juxtaposition of the I-beams, girders, cylinders,
lengths of piping, sheet metal, and grill that it comprises rather than
[…] the compound object that they compose. The mutual inflection of
one element by another, rather than the identity of each, is what is
crucial. […] Everything in Caro’s art that is worth looking at is in its
syntax’ (AO 161–62). 8 Art like Caro’s manifests a ‘continuous and
entire presentness, amounting, as it were, to the perpetual creation of
itself, that one experiences as a kind of instantaneousness, as though if
only one were infinitely more acute, a single infinitely brief instant
would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all
its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it’ (AO 167). Art
aspires to evoke or constitute ‘a continuous and perpetual present’; ‘at
every moment the work itself is wholly manifest’ (AO 167). Exegi
monumentum… would no doubt qualify, its paradoxical relation
between form and material being grasped instantaneously and
perpetually reasserted. However, it is clear that this perpetual present
of the work’s structural articulation within the viewing experience has
little or nothing to do with the ‘purified present’, ‘qui dure sans
passer’, striven for by Augé’s artist (TR 66) but never to be
experienced as such by the time-travelling viewer, and even less of
course to do with the perpetual present of supermodern fictionality.
In contrast to such work that ‘essentialize[s] meaningfulness
as such’ rather than a particular meaning (AO 162), the art of a Robert
Morris or a Donald Judd, by emphasizing perceptual experience in a
given situation, turns presence into stage presence for Fried: ‘the
beholder knows himself to stand in an indeterminate, open-ended —
and unexacting — relation as subject to the impassive object on the
wall or floor’ (AO 155). The impassivity of the object encountered in
this situation means that involvement is inseparable from
estrangement; as Fried more recently commented, literalism’s staging
of the body as ‘uncanny’, ‘opaque to itself’, ‘vaguely monstrous’ has
consequences for its address to the viewer’s body too.9 Such
8. Emphasis belongs to the work cited unless otherwise indicated.
9. Michael Fried, ‘An Introduction to my Art Criticism’ (AO 1–75), p. 42.
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estrangement is inseparable from an experience of duration, as ‘the
beholder is made aware of the endlessness and inexhaustibility if not
of the object itself at any rate of his experience of it’ (AO 166), and
thus of ‘the endlessness not just of objecthood but of time’ (AO 167).
This estrangement from an impassive object recalls the
alienation Augé describes as experienced by the user of supermodern
spaces or installations: ‘Il y a des espaces où l’individu s’éprouve
comme spectateur sans que la nature du spectacle lui importe
vraiment. Comme si […] le spectateur en position de spectateur [était]
à lui-même son propre spectacle’ (NL 110). For Augé, though, this
experience evacuates duration rather than drawing attention to it; the
non-lieu denies us the sense of time passing: ‘Au total, tout se passe
comme si l’espace était rattrapé par le temps, comme s’il n’y avait pas
d’autre histoire que les nouvelles du jour ou de la veille, comme si
chaque histoire individuelle puisait ses motifs, ses mots et ses images
dans le stock inépuisable d’une intarissable histoire au présent’ (NL
131). Augé’s supermodern subject seems to lack the reflexivity that
the empty, impassive context arouses in the viewer of art à la Fried
and that allows the spectator to register the duration of experience.
(This lack of receptive reflexivity is the counterpart of the
disappearance of ‘authorship’ as ‘la fiction envahit tout et l’auteur
disparaît’, GR 155.) There is indeed something passive and
unreflective about the supermodern subject — the indifference that
Augé sees as eliminating interrelation (‘individualités distinctes,
semblables et indifférentes les unes aux autres’, NL 139) seems also to
eliminate all reflective relation to the self. Yet as we shall see in the
work of Jeff Wall, such reflexivity can enable modes of response to
the ‘fictions’ of contemporary life that include and valorize awareness
and articulation of dislocation or estrangement.
Before turning to Wall, it is worth looking at one of Michael
Fried’s key examples of literalist theatricality for the close similarities
it offers to Augé’s account of the experience of the non-lieu. Fried
cites Tony Smith’s 1966 account of driving in the artificial landscape
of the not-quite-finished New Jersey Turnpike, an experience that did
‘something for me that art had never done. […] There is no way you
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can frame it, you just have to experience it.’ Smith’s conclusion: ‘I
thought to myself, it ought to be clear that’s the end of art. Most
painting looks pretty pictorial after that’ (AO 158).10 Fried highlights
how, for Smith, once art is seen to be conventional (specifically,
pictorial in the case of painting — or presumably photography), it is
defunct; only the experience of a situation, and ideally an open-ended
situation, defeats the convention of the frame or other delimitation of
shape. Fried comments: ‘Being able to go on and on indefinitely is of
the essence. What replaces the object — what does the same job of
distancing or isolating the beholder, of making him a subject, that the
[literalist] object did in the closed room — is above all the
endlessness, or objectlessness, of the approach or onrush or
perspective. It is the explicitness, that is to say, the sheer persistence
with which the experience presents itself as directed at him from
outside (on the turnpike from outside the car) that simultaneously
makes him a subject — makes him subject — and establishes the
experience itself as something like that of an object, or rather, of
objecthood’ (AO 159). Ultimately, where the same effect is to be
produced by an artist through a construct, the more theatrical the
setting becomes, the more superfluous the work — the ideal for such
art, Fried points out, is the disappearance of the work. Its
inexhaustibility derives from its emptiness (AO 166).
This unending encounter with an empty, isolating
environment that makes one a disempowered subject has some
similarity to the experience of Augé’s supermodern hero, defined
repeatedly and stereotypically by his environment as a ‘user’ of space
rather than an inhabitant of place (NL 131). Yet there is a significant
difference. Augé’s consumer of space, caught in a web of images (NL
133), recognizes not so much himself as the brands that project onto
him an identikit subjectivity: ‘Le panonceau d’une marque d’essence
constitue pour lui un repère rassurant, et il retrouve avec soulagement
sur les rayons du supermarché [étranger] les produits sanitaires,
10. Smith’s comments first appeared in S. J. Wagstaff, Jr., ‘Talking with Tony
Smith’, Artforum, 5 (December 1966), 14–19 (p. 19).
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ménagers ou alimentaires consacrés par les firmes multinationales’
(NL 134). Again, the repository of continuity is more the non-place
and its attributes than the self who is deprived, as we have seen, of a
sense of temporality. The subject’s role is to recognize the signifiers
populating the non-place, not his own experience of time passing in
that space. This is a major distinction between Augé’s and Fried’s
analyses of the post- or supermodern subject position: duration in time
in Augé’s world appears more the preserve of items on a supermarket
shelf than of the history-deprived subject who repeatedly but only
momentarily encounters them, a subject to whom the Friedian
perception of ‘the endlessness not just of objecthood but of time’ (AO
167, my emphasis) is unavailable. That distinction is part of what
brings Augé to assign to art the role of restorer of temporality, Fried to
see it as reprieve from duration.
Wall: The Non-Place in and of Art
Fried has remained remarkably faithful to his 1960s analysis of the
threat posed by Minimalism’s ‘theatricality’ to the artistic principles
of Modernist art, returning to it and responding to criticisms of it
again and again over the years. Indeed, his subsequent surveys of
French painting since the eighteenth century cast the genre’s entire
evolution in terms of just such a tension between the attempt either to
neutralize the act of beholding the work or to emphasize that act, by
privileging a relation respectively of ‘absorption’ or of ‘theatricality’,
a choice which involves seeking either to counteract or to hypostasize
the work’s status as object.11 Fried continues to use this axis in his
recent admiring analysis of the work of a number of contemporary art
photographers, despite the way large-scale photography, in making
the transition from the book to the wall as support, acknowledges the
11. See Michael Fried’s trio of studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French
art: Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Courbet’s Realism (Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Manet’s Modernism (Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
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beholder — or rather he admires the work because of the critical,
reflexive way it does this. The works of Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth,
Andreas Gursky, Rineke Dijkstra and others seem to offer Fried a way
to move the debate beyond the opposition between ‘art’ and
‘objecthood’, ‘absorption’ and ‘theatricality’, by offering a
conjunction of what he calls ‘to-be-seenness’ and a Diderotian
thematics of absorption: ‘Once it became imaginable that a “world”
could be “contaminated” by the mere fact of being beheld, the
situation was ripe for the emergence of an aesthetic that would accept
such “contamination” as the basis of its procedures’.12 This aesthetic
finds its home, for Fried, in contemporary photography and most
intensely in the work of Jeff Wall. By considering Wall’s image The
Storyteller (Figure 1), with its pictorial mise-en-scène of narrative, its
portrayal of the ‘non-place’ as a locus of both theatricality and
absorption, and its concern with questions of community and cultural
transmission, we can perhaps find a way beyond Augé’s narrowly
prescriptive account of how art can respond to ‘supermodernity’, one
that accommodates contemporary media and non-narrative
expression.13
At first sight, Fried’s embrace of contemporary photography is
surprising, given his early conviction that art can only be rescued from
literalist theatricality through abstraction (‘Two sculptures by
Anthony Caro’, AO 181). Photography is inherently depictive —
indeed, Jeff Wall has argued that this quality not only prevented it
from becoming an entirely conceptual artform but saved figuration in
art by revolutionizing it. The evolution of conceptualism, according to
Wall, and especially the increasing displacement of the visual by the
linguistic, ‘takes art as close to the boundary of its own self12. Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 35. Hereafter WPM in the text.
13. This image, along with several others by Wall can be viewed online at
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/jeffwall/rooms/room4.shtm [accessed 30 June 2010]. Viewing the images onscreen has the advantage of
approximating the effect of the original lightbox mounting more closely than a
reproduction on paper can achieve.
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overcoming, or self-dissolution, as it is likely to get, leaving its
audience with only the task of rediscovering legitimations for works
of art as they had existed, and might continue to exist’ (MI 266). In
this revolutionary moment, art’s very right to exist ‘is rethought in the
place or moment traditionally reserved for the enjoyment of art’s
actual existence, in the encounter with a work of art’ (MI 266). Yet
photography, unable to cast off ‘its heavy burden of depiction’, could
not really embody this kind of reductivist project or ‘provide the
experience of the negation of experience’ (MI 266). The failure of
photoconceptualism to free the medium from its ties to the Western
Picture ended up, Wall claims, ‘revolutioniz[ing] our concept of the
picture and creat[ing] the conditions for the restoration of that concept
as a central category of contemporary art’ (MI 266).
Far from pursuing Fried’s 1960s prescription of radical
abstraction, what Wall’s work does, according to Fried today, is to
present absorption itself as a ‘mode of performance’ or theatricality,
for example in photographs like Adrian Walker, Artist… which project
a certain staged quality and where ‘the conspicuousness of the
apparatus of display suggests a comparable conspicuousness of the
photographic apparatus as such’ (WPM 41).14 Unlike in traditional
representations of absorption such as those by Chardin, for example,
the absorption of Wall’s figures does not dissimulate the fact that the
image is designed to be seen, while both the verism of photography
and its technological divergence from natural vision (evenness of
focus, depth of field) are exploited ‘to quietly but unmistakeably
acknowledge the posedness and constructedness of his compositions’
(WPM 341). This acknowledgement of photographic artifice makes of
the represented absorption something that ‘could be’, rather than
something that is, a fiction, in other words (WPM 66). It is, moreover,
an absorption in a world that is ‘technological to its core’, as Fried
comments in relation to A View from an Apartment (2004-5), a
photograph that for him reveals ‘the way in which technology in its
14. The image’s full title is Adrian Walker, Artist, Drawing from a Specimen in a
Laboratory in the Dept of Anatomy at the University of British Columbia,
Vancouver (1992, 119cm x 164cm).
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current globalized incarnation provides the framing structure for a
mode of being-in-the-world, of everydayness, toward which, at least
seen from “outside”, the artist feels positively drawn’ (WPM 62). This
‘outside’ occupied by the viewer allows for no theatrical situation to
take the place of the work; the import of the work of Wall as well as
of Struth, Dijkstra, Gursky, Candida Höfer, Beat Streuli and others
‘has been to insist with renewed force on the viewer’s absolute
outsideness from the works in question (no substitution of the
subject’s “experience” for the work itself)’ (WPM 344).
The ‘contaminated’ aesthetic that Fried sees embodied in
contemporary photography like Wall’s has always been acknowledged
by Wall himself who sees it as integral to photography throughout its
development as an artform. Even the reductivist work of Ed Ruscha is
for Wall a mimesis of anti-art, offering not instances but models of the
renunciation of artistic skill and tradition, of the ‘asocial cipher’ who
must have produced them, models that elicit not a sterile folding-in of
the viewer onto him- or herself but a critical reflexive engagement
with a performance at the threshold or vanishing-point of the aesthetic
(MI 265–66). Importantly, such teetering into the anaesthetic is not
without a socio-cultural critical dimension: ‘This mimesis [of limited
artistic ability] signified, or expressed, the vanishing of the great
traditions of Western art into the new cultural structures established
by the mass media, credit financing, suburbanization, and reflexive
bureaucracy’ (MI 265). Importantly, too, the experience of speed and
instantaneity central to modern life — ‘the jittery flow of events as
they unfold’ (MI 249) — is a fundamental characteristic of the
photograph, rooted as it is in the actual moment the shutter is released,
unlike painting which offers the illusion of such a moment.15
Conversely, however, and in contrast to the perception of digital
visual media evident in Augé, technology in Wall’s case reintroduces
an archaic dimension of time-consuming labour: ‘One paradox I have
found is that, the more you use computers in picture-making, the more
15. See Jeff Wall, ‘Restoration: Interview with Martin Schwander’ (1994), in Jeff
Wall, ed. Thierry De Duve et al., revised and expanded edition (London,
Phaidon, 2001), pp. 126–39 (p. 134). Hereafter R in the text.
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“handmade” the picture becomes. Oddly then, digital technology is
leading, in my work at least, towards a greater reliance on
handmaking because the assembly and montage of the various parts of
the picture is done very carefully by hand’ (R 134). Technological
visual media allow for more creative agency than Augé would have it.
Wall’s own work frequently addresses the effects of capitalism
on places and people, but never without an attention to the paradoxical
implication of the medium in what it describes, and by extension to
the viewer’s complex and distanced relationship to the image. That
relationship set in motion by the artist involves ‘a sequence of
identifications, recognitions, mis-recognitions, de-identifications and
re-identifications, in which the audience is continually decomposed,
fractured, reformed and re-identified with itself’.16 Wall sees this
process as existing in all experience, thus complicating both Augé’s
present-bound subject and Fried’s early opposition between endless
estrangement on the one hand and the state of grace offered by the
successful artistic encounter on the other. (The final sentence of ‘Art
and Objecthood’ is, notoriously, ‘Presentness is grace’, AO 168.) One
of Wall’s best-known periurban landscapes, The Storyteller, offers an
example of a cultivated complexity of reception that amplifies the
theme of displacement enacted in the picture.
The Storyteller (1986, 229cm x 437cm) depicts a grass verge
alongside a motorway bridge (one of many bridges in Wall’s work).
On the verge are seated six figures, one alone, the others in two small
groups, all clearly members of one of the indigenous peoples of
British Columbia. On the far left, in the foreground, one of the figures,
a woman, is speaking to two others around the ashes of a camp fire,
gesticulating as she talks. Mouth open, fingers outstretched, it is an
awkward modern gesture of the type Wall evokes in the essay
‘Gestus’ (1984) when he describes how ‘the ceremoniousness, the
energy, and the sensuousness of the gestures of baroque art are
replaced in modernity by mechanistic movements, reflex actions,
16. Jeff Wall, ‘Representation, Suspicions and Critical Transparency: Interview with
T. J. Clark, Serge Guilbaut and Anne Wagner’ (1990), in Jeff Wall, ed. Thierry
De Duve et al., pp. 112–24 (p. 118).
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involuntary, compulsive responses’.17 Yet the mechanized world that
has shrunken corporeal gesture into something closer to emissions of
bio-mechanical energy, ‘physically smaller than those of older art,
more condensed, meaner, more collapsed, more rigid, more violent’,
has simultaneously produced the means to magnify them: ‘The
contracted little actions, the involuntarily expressive body movements
[…] lend themselves so well to photography’ (G 76). The double
enlargement of the zoom and the commercially-derived lightbox
projection rescues ‘what has been made small and meagre’ while
drawing attention to ‘the objective misery of society and the
catastrophic operation of its law of value’ (G 76). Wall clearly
suggests here that the technology produced by the contemporary
world has a particular adequacy to that world’s representation and
even, if only aesthetically, to its amelioration.
The particular misery of the figures in The Storyteller —
probably homeless, crouched on the ground in one of the most
emblematic non-places of Augé’s supermodernity — is offset
somewhat, however, by the absence of any air of suffering: the
characters are neatly dressed and appear in good health. Although one
of them is alone, and sitting not on the grass with its backdrop of
golden foliage but under the concrete bridge, the others are absorbed
to varying degrees in the woman’s theatrical storytelling. The scene
was inspired by Walter Benjamin’s essay of the same name which
considered the storyteller as an embodiment of historical values
excluded and forgotten as a result of the progress of capitalism. When
Wall’s photograph was first shown in 1986, the artist cited the
Benjamin essay and explained the image’s significance as lying in its
evocation of ‘the process in which marginalized and oppressed groups
reappropriate and re-learn their own history. […] The Native peoples
of Canada are a typical case of the dispossession. [...] The image of
the storyteller can express their historical crisis.’18 In the image,
17. Jeff Wall, ‘Gestus’ (1984), in Jeff Wall, ed. Thierry De Duve et al., p. 76.
Hereafter G in the text.
18. Jeff Wall, ‘The Storyteller’ (1986), reprinted in Craig Burnett, Jeff Wall
(London: Tate, 2005), p. 38.
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111
however, such optimism is tempered: the distance from which the
characters are photographed, and the looming presence of the concrete
bridge, overshadowing especially the solitary figure on the right,
articulate the hostile socio-economic environment for such peoples as
well as capturing the community they form. Wall describes the genre
of landscape as requiring a certain distance so that ‘we can recognize
the communal life of the individual’; it is a distance that makes people
visible ‘as they vanish into their determinations, or emerge from
them’, and those determinations, in modernity’s landscapes, are
primarily property-related.19 Here the expropriated native Canadians
hover on the edge of self-assertion or disappearance in a landscape
that is no longer theirs and whose nature as public thoroughfare is
inseparable from the technological advances in speed and connectivity
of a global capitalism that leaves them behind.
This inconclusiveness that disrupts any instrumental political
reading of the image is borne out by Wall’s own subsequent
indecision regarding the extent to which it can be said to have a
message at all, and his (unsurprising) preference that it should not
have one. In 2005 he commented, ‘At the time [I made the picture], I
thought the act of holding a discussion in the midst of trouble and
deprivation was an image of the way to create some sort of alternative
space. But if you look at the picture there’s no sense of it being an
alternative to anything; it’s just what happens in a situation like that. I
interpreted it as an image of an alternative when I made the picture,
but now I think I was wrong; that meaning isn’t necessarily in the
picture. Nor is there any sense that the woman is conveying anything
of any importance, anything more important than something that
matters just to her. It’s ambiguous and I like that.’20
What is particularly striking about this remark is the way that
Wall presents himself as a reader, not only of the final image but also
of the scene from its initial conception, a reader enacting the
‘identifications, recognitions, misrecognitions, de-identifications and
19. Jeff Wall, ‘About Making Landscapes’, in Jeff Wall, ed. Thierry De Duve et al.,
pp. 140–45 (p. 145).
20. Quoted in Burnett, Jeff Wall, p. 39.
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re-identifications’ that he described to T. J. Clark and others as central
to experience and as something the artist is called on to set in motion.
Thus a social critique is both suggested by the picture but also
prevented from cohering entirely, through a sustained ambiguity that
allows authorial intention to melt into interpretative uncertainty, a
relativization figured in the storyteller’s marginal position on the edge
of the image and her failure to capture everyone’s attention (the lone
figure on the right is otherwise absorbed; the two in the background
seem to be listening, but their postures indicate a lack of total
involvement). No simple ‘story’ is to be imposed in this image;
narrative is suggested, only to be cast into doubt.
Interpretation without end and even without total
persuasiveness envelopes the image from creation to reception, while
a faint (Fried might say ‘contaminating’) echo of Manet’s Déjeuner
sur l’herbe ensures that we keep sight of the composition’s artifice
(the incongruously well-kept appearances of the figures work in the
same direction, while also endowing them with agency, resisting their
depiction as victims). The image’s inconclusiveness casts even its
author ‘outside’ through aligning him with a marginal figure ‘inside’,
this further contamination of the scene by a fictional explainer of
events evoking in formal terms the overturning of ownership
illustrated by its dispossessed characters and their setting. The degree
of instability of reference and the illustration of an interpretative act
(the story told) that neither convinces nor falls on entirely deaf ears
but hovers ambiguously between success and failure thus allows the
image to work as a mise en scène of displacement, where no-one —
artist, viewer, or characters — seems in possession of meaning. Set
against all this doubt is the presumption of factuality created by the
medium of photography, its instantaneity implying a truth-to-life at
odds with those elements of contamination that identify the scene as a
performance and that include the large format and lightbox
presentation evocative of the contrived imagery of advertisements.
It is clear from even this cursory engagement with Wall’s The
Storyteller that the picture offers an experience of displacement at all
levels, from the initial recognition of what seems both a record and an
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113
obvious thematization of dispossession, through the destabilization of
that theme (the Manet reference, the figures’ physical appearance) and
the inference of an artistic self-reflexivity (the storyteller), that selfreflexivity destabilized in turn through its failure to impose itself (the
non- or half-listeners). Radically unsettled, the image’s very status —
the photograph’s assumed authority as mechanical record — becomes
uncertain. The viewer is repeatedly forced to abandon apparently solid
interpretative ground, dispossessed of one element of understanding
after the next, up to and including the very status of the photograph as
document. Wall’s image is a model of how a contemporary medium
(photography, transparencies, lightboxes; more recently, digital
enhancement and image-making) can provide an aesthetically
satisfying engagement with contemporary experiences of
displacement and dispossession, experiences that for Marc Augé are
emblematic of western and western-influenced societies today.
Where Wall differs from Augé and follows on from Fried is in
acknowledging the capacity of the contemporary subject for reflexive
critical engagement with those experiences of dispossession — be
they material or aesthetic — even as they are undergone, a capacity
that rests on the temporal nature of the subject’s experience even of
supermodern alienation. Importantly, Wall also resists any idea of art
as a refutation of such experience, whether it be Augé’s desire that
artists offer a utopian unmaking of the present or Fried’s early account
of the work of art as transcending the experience of duration, offering
‘presentness [as] grace’. Instead his work exploits the common thread
that runs from the contemporary generalized estrangement from
public spaces and structures diagnosed by Augé back to the
experimental impassivity of 1960s conceptual art in which he was a
youthful participant. Not only does Wall articulate the experience of
dispossession thematically in works like The Storyteller; more
crucially, he transforms it into an aesthetic as he develops images that
initiate a reflexive, temporally extensive process of interpretation and
questioning, unresolvable other than compositionally. Harnessing the
photograph’s unreliable promise of authenticity, Wall forges (in
different senses) for contemporary visual media a hybrid creative role
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as both critic and accomplice of what Augé calls supermodernity, in
work that not only speaks of displacement but speaks of it from the
non-place.
University College Dublin