Jeff Wall and Wittgenstein
I don’t follow modern art, so I was unaware of Jeff Wall until I encountered him, by chance, at the Chicago Art Institute on Friday. That day was the first of a retrospective on his 30 year career. Later, I Googled him, to find out more about his work, since it was impressive to me, and stuck in my mind, like a puzzle. There was something I was missing.
Well, in the most recent issue of Critical Inqiury Michael Fried writes about "Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein and the Everyday." I don’t do aesthetic theory, so I’m out of my depth here. However, I thought that his main point (taken from a section of Wittgenstein’s notebooks) may have explained my fascination with him:
"Wall’s pursuit of the everyday and his commitment to an explicitly anti-theatrical aesthetic are, I want to say, inherently philosophical in the sense that certain philosophical texts…are particularly well-suited to the ask of articulating the fullest implications of his photographic vision."
The vision is (Fried believes) summed up in a passage from Wittgenstein’s 1930 notebooks, in which he imagines being able to observe another human being engaged in everyday activity, without them knowing that they’re being watched. This would be "seeing life itself"–but don’t we see that every day? No, he continues, because we don’t see it from that point of view (aware that we’re observing life).
Somehow, Wall’s photographs are so realistic and like a documentary that we become aware that we’re looking at a documentary. We feel like we’re eavesdroping, but at the same time, there are hints which make us aware that we’re watching something which is recreated. Yet this doesn’t make the image look any less real, and perhaps even makes it more plausible.
Image: Photograph of "Morning Cleaning" at the Chicago Art Institute (by ck).