Introduction

Introduction My interest in the Vancouver School began as a teenager aft er I enrolled in the Bachelor of Fine Arts program at the University of British Columbia in 1987 and signed up for two classes with Jeff Wall; a fi rst year studio class in photography and a required survey class in Art History. As a seventeen-year-old with very limited exposure to art history, criticism, or theory in high school I remember feeling surprised and challenged by Jeff Wall. At the beginning of the photography class he announced he would not be teaching us the mechanics of taking a photograph (camera, studio, or lab instruction); if we wanted to study fi lm processing and printing techniques we should join the camera club. Instead we would be discussing the ideas our photographs would evoke, and he didn ’ t care if we had the photographs printed by a commercial lab. Th is was the beginning of my decades-long engagement with what I might today characterize as ‘conceptual practices.’ With one exception, most of the Art History class transpired in a blur, some of it no doubt embedded in my memory to be unlocked one day in graduate school discussions, but superfi cially forgotten in the daily activities of my life then as a young studio artist. Th e exception was a lecture Wall presented on Freud ’ s psychoanalytic interpretation of Leonardo Da Vinci ’ s work, in particular Freud ’ s discussion of the latent maternal and homosexual desires he read as embedded in Da Vinci ’ s Madonna and Child with St Anne (1503). I found the possibility of this sort of analysis of a historic artwork strange and fascinating, and while I was conscious that I was then ill-equipped academically to understand the nuances of Wall ’ s lecture, I knew the importance of being exposed to a social critique of an artwork. I cite these formative experiences with Jeff Wall in my studio art education at the beginning of this book because in many ways they set the stage for the intellectual and creative struggle that has engaged me for most of my life: the attempt to reconcile the artist ’ s initial work (understood as a material and formal manifestation of his/her ideas born from particular social entanglements) with the discursive framing that supports it in the art market, commercial art world, and if an artist is lucky, in the evolving art-historical canon. I have understood this problem intellectually through three factors: my training as 00008-cintro-9781526101198.indd008-cintro-9781526101198.indd 1 11/16/2018/16/2018 110:21:130:21:13 AAMM 2 Engendering an avant-garde a social art historian, my experience as a working artist, and through my identity as an American and Canadian female citizen born in the United States and raised in British Columbia. I have witnessed the remarkable physical transformation of Vancouver; its evolution from a seemingly aff ordable ‘regional’ city in the 1970s to its current status as one of the most expensive global hubs of fi nance capital and real estate on the Pacifi c Rim. Th e emergence of the Vancouver School as a global brand has also occurred during my lifetime, and its growth in stature has paralleled the rise of condominiums in the business and commercial centre or ‘downtown core’ aft er the world ’ s fair, Expo 86. Th e ‘Vancouver School’ or ‘Vancouver School of Photo-conceptualism’ began to be applied to a number of artists in Vancouver around 1990, always including Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace, and sometimes including Ken Lum, Rodney Graham, Christos Dikeakos, Roy Arden, Arni Haraldsson, and Stan Douglas. It is diffi cult to pinpoint the exact origin and date of the use of the term(s), but it has since appeared in a number of catalogue essays and in relation to exhibitions curated around these Vancouver artists.1 Th e term oft en refers to a common critical sensibility towards subject matter, rather than one unifi ed through common formal attributes. While these artists also make video and sculpture, the Vancouver School as a contemporary brand is forever linked with Jeff Wall ’ s pioneering use of photographic transparencies: large hyper-realistic photographs that compete with the size and grandeur of historical paintings found in museums, mounted on the surface of shallow boxes and illuminated from behind. European curators Bart De Baere and Dieter Roelstrate ’ s 2005 char- acterization of Vancouver ’ s art production is fairly typical: ‘state-of-the-art brand name, denoting such (artistic) qualities as intellectual rigour, stringent conceptual refi nement and precision, and most of all perhaps, a deeply critical commitment towards the politics of the image and image production.’ Th e origins of this critical ‘school’ came from the artists themselves who knew each other through their institutional affi liations at Simon Fraser University (Jeff Wall taught Rodney Graham and Ken Lum), the University of British Columbia (Ian Wallace taught Jeff Wall and Rodney Graham), and at Emily Carr College of Art + Design (formerly the Vancouver School of Art; Ian Wallace taught Stan Douglas, Roy Arden, and hired Jeff Wall). In 1988 Ian Wallace inadvertently set the defi ning characteristics of the Vancouver School brand in an essay for a catalogue on Canadian photography that he titled ‘Photoconceptual Art in Vancouver.’ 2 He situated the genealogies of Vancouver photo-conceptualism in the intellectual and text-based practices of conceptual art and the late-modernist aesthetics of abstract painting and Minimalism, which Wallace said he and others adopted along with a ‘postmodern’ dose of scepticism towards the modernist hegemony associated with Greenberg in the centres of the art world. Th is scepticism was enabled by the marginal location of Vancouver, which had no signifi cant art market for artists to aspire to 00008-cintro-9781526101198.indd008-cintro-9781526101198.indd 2 11/16/2018/16/2018 110:21:130:21:13 AAMM Introduction 3 participate in during the 1960s and 1970s, and was manifest in Vancouver artists ’ commitment to engaging with regional themes and images while experimenting with a plurality of media. A few scholarly threads have prevailed in the growing historical narrative about Vancouver photo-conceptualism as it has developed since the late 1960s when Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace fi rst met: these artists ’ initial rejections of an image of an idealized local landscape in favour of an anti-theatrical image of Vancouver as a modern centre of industry in the late 1960s;3 artists ’ introduction of photography and cinematography into the waning dominance of conceptual practices in the late 1970s; the intellectualism of highly educated Vancouver artists; and artists ’ frequent references and writing about local and international history. Indeed, these discursive threads are nearly always repeated in relation to the historical context of the European and American avant-gardes, and Vancouver artists ’ vocal self-inclusion in that history beginning in the 1960s. Language supporting this self-conscious association can be found in much of their writing. In 1988, Jeff Wall spoke of his and Wallace ’ s work as a recovery of the radical possibilities of the twentieth-century avant-gardes, 4 and in 1991, he referred to Ken Lum ’ s work as a counter-tradition to the ‘British, romantic, lyrical tradition’ of landscape painting that dominated cultural production in British Columbia up to the 1960s.5 Voicing similar concerns in a review of the 1981 exhibition Westkunst: Contemporary Art Since 1939 , a survey of western art that included more than 800 artworks by 200 European and American artists organized by the city of Cologne, Wallace critiqued the organizers ’ omission of conceptual and language-based work made earlier in the 1970s (‘the missing 70s’) while focusing on market-friendly European and American neo-Expressionist paintings like those by Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, David Salle, and Julian Schnabel (‘the most brutally ugly work in the whole show’). 6 Wallace described the exhibition as evidence of ‘the fanatic indignation of a rejected and disappointed avant-garde,’ 7 referring to avant-gardes established prior to 1960 (he cites Warhol ’ s 1963 Disaster series as the symbolic apogee of its end), movements with histories no longer evident in the majority of com- mercially friendly contemporary works he saw on display in Westkunst . Wallace, however, begins and ends his review by discussing his friend Jeff Wall ’ s work Movie Audience (1979), which was included in the exhibition, and which for Wallace served as a rhetorical frame for the return of the avant-garde at the end of the 1970s. For Wallace, Wall ’ s series of photographic portraits of everyday individuals looking upwards included content that critically addressed the spectator ’ s engagement with vision itself, and thus emerged ‘out of the discourse of the avant-garde.’ 8 At stake in Wallace ’ s review was the recuperation of the avant-garde politics of the early twentieth century into the formal aspects of later twentieth-century modernism, a critical strategy he felt was needed in the context of rising 00008-cintro-9781526101198.indd008-cintro-9781526101198.indd 3 11/16/2018/16/2018 110:21:130:21:13 AAMM 4 Engendering an avant-garde consumerism and the increased infl uence on public life of capitalized visual spectacles. Th ese concerns, and the critical role photography as a medium is poised to play within them, has continued into the twenty-fi rst century, most recently and thoroughly argued in Michael Fried ’ s formalist valorization of photography, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before . Fried ’ s book identifi es Jeff Wall as one of several modern masters who have in recent decades rescued ‘issues of beholding’ and ‘anti-theatricality’ from the dustbin of art history aft er infl uential postmodern critiques of high modernism discredited such eff ects.

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