the Remake
Installation above by Serkan Ozkaya
...Although referencing other artworks is perhaps most closely associated with the post-modern practices of the 1970s – think Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince in particular – it’s a practice widely used in contemporary art. Jeff Wall’s large-scale photographic tableaux, many made in the 1980s and ’90s, could perhaps be seen as a kind of bridge between work that uses appropriation as a way to explore ideas about authorship – a key concern in post-modernism – and work that draws on art history and reworks it, perhaps in an attempt to understand the present by looking at the past. These works – shown as large light-boxes, a form that references advertising but also feels related as closely to cinema as to still photography without actually taking on the expected form of any of these – are both visually stunning and fascinating to look at; the detail is extraordinary and the scale – A Sudden Gust of Wind is roughly 2.5m by 4x – makes it possible to examine even the tiniest details...
The completed work is a large back-lit photographic transparency depicting four figures frozen in attitudes as they respond to a gust of wind in a flat, open landscape. The sky above them is scattered with papers released from a folder held by the woman on the left side of the picture. Wall has used the sense of movement across the image from left to right, resulting from the dispersal of papers and other evidence of the wind’s direction, as a device to engage the viewer’s eye and move it over the photograph. To make the work, Wall photographed actors over a period of five months in a landscape outside his home town, Vancouver, at times when similar weather conditions prevailed. He then collaged elements of the photograph digitally in order to achieve the desired composition. The result is a tableau which appears staged in the manner of a classical painting. |
Katsushika Hokusai, Travelers Caught in a Sudden Breeze at Ejiri, 1832, from the portfolio The Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji.
Despite its verisimilitude, Wall’s image does not picture the world in a photographic way but rather in a symbolic or allegorical way. The period when Hokusai’s prints exerted the most profound influence on aesthetics in Europe and America, the mid and late nineteenth century, coincided with the invention and proliferation of photography. Both sources informed the evolving modernist taste for flatness, cropping, fragmentation, and distorted perspective. A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) depicts a moment in time as well as a moment in history that shares with the present a shift in the way the world is pictured. |
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