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. IJFrS 9 (2009) 94 O’BEIRNE

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. NO TIME FOR ART? 95

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. 96 O’BEIRNE

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 NO TIME FOR ART? 97

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 non- lieu — ‘la beauté de ce qui aurait pu être’ — to ‘ce qui, un jour peut- 98 O’BEIRNE

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, NO TIME FOR ART? 99

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. 100 O’BEIRNE

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 Lévi- Strauss. 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 NO TIME FOR ART? 101

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. 102 O’BEIRNE

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. NO TIME FOR ART? 103

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 104 O’BEIRNE

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). NO TIME FOR ART? 105

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). 106 O’BEIRNE

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 self-

12. 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 [access- ed 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. NO TIME FOR ART? 107

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). 108 O’BEIRNE

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. NO TIME FOR ART? 109

“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). 110 O’BEIRNE

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. NO TIME FOR ART? 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. 112 O’BEIRNE

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 NO TIME FOR ART? 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 self- reflexivity 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 114 O’BEIRNE

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