Leah Modigliani - Engendering an Avant-Garde: The Unsettled Landscapes of Vancouver Photo-Conceptualism

Jeff Wall, Picture for Women, 1979, transparency in lightbox, 142.5 204.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

As this issue demonstrates we will publish writing grounded in presuppositions that are materialist, or at times idealist. Indeed the tensions between radical artistic practice and dominant ideology will be a major subject of inquiry.

The Editors of October

We are now five years from that beginning, and the crisis which soon brought Carter to Washington has intensified, installing corporate might and its imperatives even more firmly in power. There are few among us who do not read the immediate future as a demonstration of the naked brutal force of unrestrained corporate greed.

Annette Michelson

It seems that by 1981, only five years after October's launch, the idealism first espoused by its editors was in short supply when faced with the grim realities of Reagan's election, an increased military budget compensated for by financial cuts to public spending, continued overseas intervention, and new federal taxation laws that benefited wealthy individuals and corporations. The journal October was named after Sergei Eisenstein's film October (192728), which the founding editors claimed was paradigmatic of the utopian and unfulfilled promise of social transformation through modern art. The editors argued that October was needed as a location for intertextual critical discourse and charged themselves with the task of celebrating the unification of revolutionary practice, theoretical inquiry, and artistic innovation, through critical writing about visual arts, cinema, performance, and music that would be materially grounded without resorting to perpetuating the mythology or hagiography of [a] Revolution that was no longer possible.

Critics' focus on the political potential of contemporary photography to trigger public awareness about the ideological role representations play in social life, at the very start of the Neoliberal era of Reaganism and Thatcherism in the late 1970s, coincided exactly with the moment that Jeff Wall began making and exhibiting his first large photographs. 1979, the date of Wall's solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, is commonly identified as the start of his mature practice. The show was documented and circulated in the form of a gallery catalogue, which would prove influential in initiating the historical and theoretical terms of his work afterwards. Curator Willard Holmes is notably absent from the catalogue, despite signing his name to a very short acknowledgements section, and no curatorial text is included to introduce Wall (at that point a relatively unknown artist), the exhibition, or the reasons for curating his work into the gallery programming. Instead, Wall was able to choose the images published and write the catalogue text that would contextualize his exhibition, thus taking on the role(s) of curator, critic, and historian of his own work.

and a production still of Wall with his camera and studio lights on set during the making of The Destroyed Room (1978). The reproduction of Picture for Women is faced by Diego Velazquez's Las Meninas (1656), douard Manet's A Bar in the Folies-Bergre (1882), and a fashion portrait of socialite and model Penelope Tree (titled Penelope Tree) by Richard Avedon (1967). Young Workers is paired with Shen Yaoyi's Social Realist portrait Chou En-Lai (1978) from his Long March series, Thodore Gricault's Compulsive Gambler (c. 1822) and the Public Image album cover with John Lydon (1978).

These visual citations are crucial for showing how Wall has contextualized his work theoretically and historically in relation to European and American avant-gardes since he began making photographic transparencies. Collectively they invoke a number of specific histories: the romantic tradition of history painting, Surrealism's erotic spectacle and display of Parisian shop windows (and Walter Benjamin's discussions of the Parisian arcades in early twentieth-century modernity), the artist's self-conscious awareness of the act of looking and the attendant social and class constructs of such acts (i.e. Duchamp, Velasquez, and Manet), the legacy of Dada's readymades in recent conceptual and minimalist art, and the image of woman as muse and fetish. This list could be extended, but the point is that such references form the intellectual grounds for future writing about his work. While the catalogue text is addressed To the Spectator, the catalogue images more directly address the historically informed art critic, who would prove amenable to taking up the task of further elaborating Wall's self-stated position(s) within western art history.