Sei sulla pagina 1di 10

2/21/2014

Jeff Wall Tate Modern, 2005 Interview with Gordon MacDonald | Ideas and Ideals in Visual Culture

IdeasandIdealsinVisualCulture

New and past writing by Gordon MacDonald

JeffWallTateModern,2005Interviewwith GordonMacDonald

Posted on 04/05/2012 | Leave a comment

Followinghishighlysuccessfulexhibitionatthe Schaulager,inBasel,andlookingforwardtothe eagerlyanticipatedshowatTateModern, GordonMacDoanldtalkstoJeffWall,oneofthe worldsmostcelebratedphotographicartists, abouthiswork.

GM. I wonder what first made you choose the camera (as a tool for making art) over the brush or pencil?

JW. I began with drawing and painting. I drew and painted as a child and had my own studio at the age of 15. But I had always noticed photography, even without practicing it until around 1967. I dont know why I moved from one to the other. It had something to do with the mood of the times, the mid and later 60s, but maybe nothing essential. Its just something that happened to me and I feel it would be bad luck to go into it too deeply.

http://gordonmacdonald.org/2012/05/04/jeff-wall-tate-modern-2005-interview-with-gordon-macdonald/

1/10

2/21/2014

Jeff Wall Tate Modern, 2005 Interview with Gordon MacDonald | Ideas and Ideals in Visual Culture

GM. The history of art does like to put artists together in schools or periods or groups. Do you have any notion of whom you are likely to be associated with in the history of photography? I suppose I am asking whom you would consider your peers?

JW.Id like to be known as one of the good photographers, or good artists, or both.

GM.Recently you have said that you are keen to be seen as a photographer again. I wonder what this means? There are obvious differences between the ways in which people approach and regard the work of someone described as a photographer to that of someone described as an artist using photography- that the difference is something more than a mere matter of semantics.

JW.I spent quite a few years struggling with what the notion of what a photographer is supposed to be. I believed that photography, as a medium, or a mtier, was large enough to sustain a major art, equal to painting or sculpture. The examples of Atget or Walker Evans proved that on the level of quality, but not in terms of the physical presence of the work. Atget and Evans established the main terms of photography as art, but they did not explore its place in the world; they accepted the book page or the album leaf as the natural place of the photographic picture in our lives. They were perfectly right, but even so, that left other potentials undeveloped. This was not a question of the size of the picture as such, of size as a separate, essential quality. It was a question of potentials held within the medium, a question of what a photograph really looks like. I felt that photography had not completely revealed what it looked like within the classical tradition of art photography because it remained essentially within that book or album format. I felt that photography had the means to participate in the mainstream ofpictorial artmore intensely than I had seen it do when I began to work with it. I felt that there was another level of freedom in photography and I wanted to get in touch with that level. As I said, it wasnt about making big pictures; it was about opening a space for the medium. So I was obliged to subject photography to the model of painting to get that going for myself. That subjection had its positive side, in that it helped me feel my way toward a kind of picture I anticipated being able to make. But at the same time, it put me in a sort of adversarial relationship with photography, in a position where I felt I was struggling against photography in order to make my pictures. I found myself transposing values from painting into photography. Sometimes that worked well, sometimes not so well. At a certain point, around 1988 or 89, I just got tired of that approach. I felt my pictures had begun not to look enough like photographs. I felt Id gone off the path Id set out to take, gotten a bit too far from photography in the process of confronting it. So I let the handle slip out of my grasp, dropped it, and picked it up again with a different grip.

http://gordonmacdonald.org/2012/05/04/jeff-wall-tate-modern-2005-interview-with-gordon-macdonald/

2/10

2/21/2014

Jeff Wall Tate Modern, 2005 Interview with Gordon MacDonald | Ideas and Ideals in Visual Culture

GM.One of the most striking things for me about your work is that it often seems to include an interrogation of photography as a medium. I am thinking of works like Milk, which seems to consider the miracle of photography as described by scientific works such as Edgertons or even Mimic as a reconstruction of the decisive moment. Are you intentionally holding a mirror up to photography?

JW.I dont think so. But I dont proceed with a subject unless I feel it puts something specifically photographic in play, or in question. I see a lot of things, dont photograph them, and dont go back to them, either. Mostly because the event, the place, or whatever it was, doesnt bring forward anything challenging as photography. It might even be an interesting subject, but unless that strictly photographic aspect appears somehow, I will lose interest. But I dont necessarily see that doing that involves making reference to a genre or something like that, or to another picture. Many people keep saying my pictures are all done in reference to this or that 19th century painting. That clich might be starting to fade out now, after quite a few years. But its equally off to think that, say, Milk, was done in order to make some connection with a specific instantaneous photo, like the Edgerton. Thats not what happens to me. The splash of milk, all by itself, insists on the instantaneousness, and doesnt need Edgerton. The photographic problem or challenge is present in the subject, or at least, the way I experience the subject; it doesnt come to me as a reference. Or, if it does, I try to be very straight up explicit about it, like in A Sudden Gust of Wind.

http://gordonmacdonald.org/2012/05/04/jeff-wall-tate-modern-2005-interview-with-gordon-macdonald/

3/10

2/21/2014

Jeff Wall Tate Modern, 2005 Interview with Gordon MacDonald | Ideas and Ideals in Visual Culture

With Mimic, for example, I was obviously aware I was going to do street photography with a large format camera and performers. But, again, I saw the original encounter of the three people, and that made me need to do street photography. But again on top of that, in 1980 or 82, I wanted to work in the street, or at least in public places, and not so much in the studio, as Id been doing the few years previously. So I wanted to do street photography somehow, and the event that set off Mimic allowed that problem to appear to me in a concrete way, as a real opportunity.

GM.Why do you think these misconceptions about your work occur? People do seem to want to see Carravagio and Weegee in your photograph The Arrest.

JW.I am partly responsible for it because of things I said in print twenty years ago. In the 70s and early 80s I thought I was interested in the way meaning circulates and appears in works of art, so I talked about it. Some of what I said has gotten repeated and in being repeated got blurred, like the photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. I dont think my pictures are any more referential than anyone elses, and theyre less so than many other artists work. As I said, when I want to make a reference, I make it quite overt. People can see Weegee or whoever they want in my pictures. If they see it, it must be there somehow, at least for them. But that doesnt mean I planned to put it there. I like Weegee and I like Caravaggio, and so some trace of my liking for them could make itself felt somewhere. Thats different from me deliberately making it manifest.

GM.Dead Troops Talk (A Vision After an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986) which Sontag described in Regarding the Pain of Others as The antithesis of a document- seems like a one-off in terms of your work, in that it directly refers to a newsworthy event, rather than the more firstperson observations or constructions that seem to dominate your other works.

http://gordonmacdonald.org/2012/05/04/jeff-wall-tate-modern-2005-interview-with-gordon-macdonald/

4/10

2/21/2014

Jeff Wall Tate Modern, 2005 Interview with Gordon MacDonald | Ideas and Ideals in Visual Culture

JW. I didnt make Dead Troops Talk to comment on the Afghan war. I made it because I wanted to do a picture of dead men conversing, it was a theme or an image, or both, that occurred spontaneously, I have no idea why. So the picture had a personal, or inward, starting point. I felt that the dead men ought to have been killed in combat. That gave their death a certain potential for meaning. I needed to determine what combat. The Afghan war was current when I began thinking about the subject, sometime in the 80s, I dont remember exactly when. Then, as the war wound down and the Soviets withdrew, it all seemed to get forgotten. The collapse of the USSR overshadowed the Afghan conflict and Afghanistan disappeared from the worlds attention until the Taliban and so on in 2001. The sense that the war was forgotten attracted me, and gave me a concrete basis to develop the picture. I liked the idea that, when the picture was finished (which would be in 1991 or 92), the Afghan war would be the furthest thing from news. So I could play with elements of journalism and history quite freely, since I was in a near-forgotten playground. From that point on, the essentials were established and I could devote my attention to making the thing, not worrying about its literature or history. I dont think the picture says anything much about the issues of that war. It just depicts a hallucination I had that, through some process, attached itself to a historical circumstance. If it says anything, it will be through the mood and style. So, although it doesnt start from an immediate observation, it did start from a personal experiencea spontaneous, unexpected occurrence of the essential themeit just came to me one day. That is not so far from other pictures, where seeing something actually happen occurred to me, and it then also occurred to me that a might make a picture from that observation. Sometimes its something immediate and concrete, sometimes something intangible and unexpected, just different somethings, differing points of origin, but always something that occurs to me, happens to me. I think Sontag quite missed the point of the picture and I dont think she ever looked at it carefully, going from her published description. She just used it for some argument of her own, didnt encounter it in any artistically significant way. The picture was reproduced in the media quite a bit when her book came out. A
http://gordonmacdonald.org/2012/05/04/jeff-wall-tate-modern-2005-interview-with-gordon-macdonald/ 5/10

2/21/2014

Jeff Wall Tate Modern, 2005 Interview with Gordon MacDonald | Ideas and Ideals in Visual Culture

good example of how much people, at least media people, like a thing when it is explained, not encountered.

GM. It is hard though, to disassociate yourself from photo-documentary pictures of war when looking at this image. Not just from the Afghan war, but from each successive war played out on our TV screens or described to us by photographs in newspapers. It is hard to get away from this context for a viewer. As Duchamp says in The Creative Act (1957), All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

JW. Marcel Duchamp as an advocate of the empowerment of the viewer: I remember back in the 60s being disappointed at his sentimentality on this point. Viewers experience, enjoy and judge art, they dont make it. They experience it by encountering it personally, individually, in the world, and so they make their own associations. Just because I made a war picture doesnt mean that people automatically or necessarily have to associate it with media imagery. That presumes that media imagery is a total horizon of everyones experience. Those presumptions have now reached the stage of orthodoxy. That is an unfree way of conceiving how individuals experience works of art, unfree and unrealistic. Conformist, institutionalized, academic, textbook and suffocating.

GM.I had not meant to suggest that an association to news imagery was all that one would experience when encountering this piece just that (in the current climate) it is hard to disassociate the two. The first time I saw Dead Troops Talk was a charged experiences and of course any associations came after this initial experience.

JM.OK, sorry, I got you wrong. But that foregrounding of mass imagery as the mediator of our experience of art is a real problem, I think. Art, in any medium, is an independent form of experience of the world and need have no relation with mass imagery or mass media or mass ideas. It will be deadly if young people come to Follow think that it is normal (or obligatory) to make a connection between a picture and some rather similar image in a mass media context rather than something else, something either personal to them or something from
FollowIdeasand high culture or high art, which is maybe, noprobably, a richer association than one from the newspaper or IdealsinVisual TV. Young peoplebut not only young peoplenow need to know, or remember, that they are free to ignore Culture the mass media in their appreciation or experience of artand of other things, too.
Geteverynewpostdelivered

http://gordonmacdonald.org/2012/05/04/jeff-wall-tate-modern-2005-interview-with-gordon-macdonald/

toyourInbox.

6/10

2/21/2014

Jeff Wall Tate Modern, 2005 Interview with Gordon MacDonald | Ideas and Ideals in Visual Culture
toyourInbox.

GM. Do you think this is a problem with photography? I dont think we would be discussing this if you had painted the same scene.
Enteryouremailaddress

Sign me up
JW. I dont think it is specific to photography. The problem is that, in any of the visual arts, it has become normative to assume that it is the mass media that set the terms for what artists want to do. Its become agreed that art keeps a finger on the pulse of the times and that it does so by reflecting on the way our lives and consciousness are formed by our immersion in the media. So now it is normal that artists are more interested in Japanese manga, trash cinema, or pop music than they are in high art; they tend to know more and care more about these things than they know or care about Matisse, Pollock, and the other artists who did not relinquish the high art tradition. This is a huge problem in art school, in art education, now. Art education looks like a sub-category of cultural studies. And cultural studies is one of the primary ways that those who opposed the western canon have displaced it and substituted the canon of mass media immersion as the new artistic tradition. Its not a pretty sight and whats worst about it is the way it creates obstacles to the development of young artists. By encouraging those young people whose hearts are not with the idea of the independence, seriousness, and quality that are possible in art, it deeply discourages those who might still have hopes in that direction. Those whose preferences are for mass forms and effects are not wrong, but they are not really interested in what we have called high art for the last several centuries. They may in fact be the dominant trend now, and culture might be changing in the direction they perceive. Thats perfectly fine, but they should not therefore be so militantly opposed to the continuation and evolution of high art. We can afford to have our old fine arts or high art as a minority trend, we dont have to render it obsolete and express the hostility to it that is contained in the way things are talked about now.
Powered by WordPress.com

GM.That is an interesting point. I think maybe that this trend, towards the use and reference of new media, is partly driven by the conception that high art is inherently elitist and that new media and information technology are somehow a more democratic means of expression and the distribution of ideas. It is easy, I think, under those terms to see why young artists are drawn down this path.

JW. I dont believe theres any elitism in art, just as I dont believe such a thing as formalism exists. Art isnt for everyone, but it is for anyone. Individual-by-individual.
http://gordonmacdonald.org/2012/05/04/jeff-wall-tate-modern-2005-interview-with-gordon-macdonald/ 7/10

2/21/2014

Jeff Wall Tate Modern, 2005 Interview with Gordon MacDonald | Ideas and Ideals in Visual Culture

GM. You have described your works as being like big cats. How do you go about deciding what works will hang together? The Tate Modern is a series of small rooms, so you must have to make decisions about what images will make sense when hung in one room.

JW. Im not that good at hanging my pictures, at least at hanging more than a few. I depend on the good eye of the curator, Theodora Vischer in Basel and Sheena Wagstaff in London. We hung the Basel exhibition rather chronologically (with a few exceptions) and will do much the same at the Tate Modern. I dont work in series or groups. Each picture is singular. I try not to repeat myself. That means that two pictures made one right after the other might not resemble each other. They may have different scale effects, very different colour, space, and so on. For that reason, and because the pictures are quite largein scale if not always in sizethey tend to need a bit of isolation one from the other, so those differences in colour and so on dont get to clashing. Ive had many shows shows I thought were well selected and well-organized but in which the pictures had to be hung too close to each other. That does not really work for me, and so I think of them as bad presentations of good groups of works. Because the Schaulger is so big, I was permitted for the first time on a large scale to separate my pictures enough so that they became visible in a way that I think is very like the way I see them in my imagination. Happily, the rooms at the Tate are very similar in feeling to those in Basel. The same architects, Herzog and de Meuron, designed them both. They both have the nice, even top light I think is best for my work (and probably any work). I think much of the ambience of the Basel show will be repeated in London.

GM. The show at the Schaulager was very expansive and allowed you to show a large proportion of your works. This is, by necessity, being edited for the Tate show. Does this feel like a watering down? The photographs in Basel were obviously chosen because the curator and yourself agreed on the selection, so how did you decide what is unnecessary to that selection for the Tate Modern exhibition?

JW. The exhibition at Schaulager was very large indeed because there they have so much space. I doubt I will ever see so many of my pictures together again. That was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. We selected the works based on their quality first of all. Then we had to shape the selection so that it gave a good sense of the development of my work over the years. I like to think that some good pictures were not included.
http://gordonmacdonald.org/2012/05/04/jeff-wall-tate-modern-2005-interview-with-gordon-macdonald/ 8/10

2/21/2014

Jeff Wall Tate Modern, 2005 Interview with Gordon MacDonald | Ideas and Ideals in Visual Culture

Exhibitions are always limited in some way. We dont have as much room at the Tate, so there can only be around 45 pictures instead of more than 70 in Basel. We have eliminated pictures that are rather like other pictures. For example, in Basel we made a room of street pictures mainly from the 1980s; it included No (1983), Milk (1984), Doorpusher (1984), Tran Duc Van (1988), The Thinker (1986) and Man in Street (1995). Another work from this group, Mimic, from 1982, was hung elsewhere. In London we will present a room with a similar group, but it will include only Milk, Mimic, Doorpusher and Tran Duc Van. I feel that the pictures that are not going to be in London are still good ones, but that the category street pictures from the 80s is defined adequately by the others, which are generally better known. In Basel we had the room to show the better-known pictures along with others less often seen but worth seeing. That made the show broader, or deeper. In London we will present pictures that we think would be missed by anyone wanting to get the essence of what I am doing, pictures whose absence would obscure the nature of my work. Im pleased it has been a rather difficult process.

GM. How do you see your practice developing from here? These recent major shows and the Catalogue Raisonn 1978-2004 seem like a punctuation point in your career and maybe a point for a new departure for your work.

JW.I try not to see my practice developing in any direction. I really try.

SHARETHI S:

Twitter

Facebook

http://gordonmacdonald.org/2012/05/04/jeff-wall-tate-modern-2005-interview-with-gordon-macdonald/

9/10

2/21/2014

Jeff Wall Tate Modern, 2005 Interview with Gordon MacDonald | Ideas and Ideals in Visual Culture

Like
Be the first to like this.

This entry was posted in Past Writing and tagged Dead Troops Talk, Destroyed Room, gordon MacDonald, Jeff Wall, Milk, Mimic, Tate Modern. Bookmark the permalink.

BlogatWordPress.com.

CustomizedCoralineTheme.

http://gordonmacdonald.org/2012/05/04/jeff-wall-tate-modern-2005-interview-with-gordon-macdonald/

10/10

Potrebbero piacerti anche