Slow Painting by Helen Westgeest

Author:Helen Westgeest
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Figure 3.2 Jeff Wall, Dead Troops Talk (A Vision after an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986), 1992, transparency in light box, 229 × 417 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

According to Kozol, contemporary artists often remained involved in the dominant visual regimes that they criticized. The artworks she discussed in Distant Wars Visible deal with historical witnessing by means of imaginary processes of remembering, retelling, and reconstructing traces of conflicts from the past.45 Although she does not mention Wall’s picture, her observation is well applicable to his work. In reflections on his artworks, Wall showed his awareness of the ambiguities associated with his work. In his art he has pursued a contemporary relationship with reportage quality—as assumed to be unique to photography—in the sense that his photographs may strongly remind people of snapshots without his pretending them to be snapshots.46 This implies that spectators may initially look at his photographs on the basis of expectations related to photojournalism, while closer reading of the pictures will subsequently reveal that in fact they were meticulously composed. An unwanted consequence of this shift in perception, according to Wall, is that the viewer might get the feeling “that the construction contains everything, that there is no ‘outside’ to it the way there is with photography in general.”47 In particular in photojournalism, the image is obviously a fragment of a greater whole which cannot be experienced directly, while awareness of an outer-frame presence may significantly contribute to the meaning of the image. Wall has expressed his worries that spectators who assume that his pictures lack such “outside” will miss the importance of it for understanding his work.48 Building on this observation, it is interesting to apply Wall’s thoughts on the supposed lack in constructed images of a relationship with the outer world in the form of outer frame to paintings. For example, the outer-frame reality of a painting can be seen as that which was left out by the artist, so as to widen the common focus on what is present.

Wall’s reflection on the loss of framing as drawn boundaries may also be approached from other perspectives. Victor Burgin, in “The Image in Pieces: Digital Photography and the Location of Cultural Experience” (1996), has argued that while photography in the nineteenth century emerged at a time when the West was drawing boundaries (e.g., the 1884 Berlin Conference, where Western nations divided Africa among themselves as their colonies), digital photography arose in a period of shifting or disappearing boundaries. In other words, not only geopolitical borders vanished but also borders within (and between) media.49 Most literally, this comment relates to Wall’s remark that computer technology mainly helped him to soften the boundaries between “the probable and the improbable.”50 More in general, the boundaries between the inner- and outer-frame worlds in pictures such as Dead Troops Talk and Last Riot 2, Tondo #22 are not just a matter of transcending a photographic frame. The issue is more complicated, and such boundaries call

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