White Negro: Jeff Wall’s Uncle Tom on the Obscenity of Photopantomime / Michel, Régis

Michel, Régis, «White Negro: Jeff Wall’s Uncle Tom on the Obscenity of Photopantomime». Oxford Art Journal, 30,  1, (2007), pp. 57-68

Abstract
In Wall’s hands, the Invisible Man is too visible. He is no longer black. He tends to be white, through the artist’s brilliant, even luminous, betrayal of the novel, which turns Ellison into Margaret Mitchell. Photopantomime, which consists of replaying a scene, is no more than parodying a real event, so that the aesthetic effect eliminates the reality effect. Wall does not want to be a prisoner of reality, yet he becomes a prisoner of history – that is, art history, staging ideal scenes that might be politically correct, but finally endorse the social order of capitalism, division of labour, alienation of workers, etc. However, this is real, not virtual, political, not symbolic – and here the cult of style tends to become obscene or pornographic in Baudrillard’s sense: too much, too showy, too staged. Wall’s mimetic world is out of the world, a regressive no man’s land where there is no resistance and no revolution. Everyone is resigned to his own (inhuman) lot in a constant imagery of renunciation that diffuses a submissive ideology, turning the individual into subject in the passive meaning of Althusserian subjection. Wall reinvents the medium, but his art is less about photography than re-photography, or better, non-photography. A deferred medium without subjectivity, but with normativity, in which the referent becomes a reference and art becomes an artifice. This anti-photography is more interested in itself than anything else: narcissistic, even autistic art, that does not criticise, but aestheticises the world. A new form? Perhaps. But for sure, a new formalism.

Other data

ISSN: 0142-6540
DOI:
URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4500045
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key: K3YD6CFX