The Theatricality Of The Everyday: A Question Of Absorption In Contemporary Photography
By Annie Curtis. Art History 725: Concepts in Contemporary Art. Grade: A+
In the interest of portraying the utmost naturalism, immersion has long been employed by artists to suggest the unique quality of ‘being-in-the-world’ that defines our very existence.[1] Indeed Heidegger explains his conception of ‘dasein,’ or human beings, as inseparable from the sphere in which they live, permanently ‘in pursuit’ of meaning rather than simply ‘being present’ as mere ‘entities’ or objects.[2] It could even be suggested that absorption itself, as an interactive sensation of existence, is our baseline state of reality, far from placidly accepting what we think we know. In order to participate in our surroundings, we instigate a chiasm: an interlocking push and pull, striving for meaning, as meaning itself reaches back.[3] This is the element that defines immersive art, both now and in its naissance in the mid-eighteenth century, created in the hope that through seeing figures absorbed in their own world, we too could participate.
Although often used interchangeably, immersion and absorption carry slightly different meanings that are crucial to understand as we approach an artwork. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the former, immersion, suggests foremost a sense of ‘dipping into water,’ ‘immerging’ into a condition or interest,[4] whereas absorption goes one step further, ‘swallowing up’ or ‘assimilating’ into something else.[5] Crucially, the latter seems to suggest a far more permanent state of no return, a transformation into some augmented existence, rather than dipping our toes in at the water’s edge. This essentially forms the basis of Michael Fried’s concept of ‘absorption and theatricality,’ which he describes in relation to Diderot’s description of the growing trend of the French Salon from the mid 1750s.
Figure One. Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, The Draughtsman, 1737, (oil on canvas, 81 x 64cm), Berlin, Staatliche Museen.
It was noted that a plethora of eighteenth-century French artists depicted people, sometimes solitary, sometimes collective, in a state of wrapt concentration, so much so that they denied the very existence of the beholder as ‘the potential agent of distraction.’[6] Chardin’s The Draughtsman (1737) (fig. 1) encapsulates this effect, as the young boy stares studiously down at his drawing supplies, entirely unaware that he is being watched. Although we are effectively brought into his space, there is no hint of a shadow cast on his table; it is as though we are entirely invisible. The ‘paradox’ of achieving such an effect was that the painter required the viewer to pause long enough in front of the work and be held there, in order to ‘establish the fiction’ that no one was standing before the canvas.[7] In effect this suggested a ‘de-theatricalisation’ of the relationship between viewer and painting, no longer performing before us, but in fact so engrossed in their actions that we can’t help but try to peak over their shoulder. Though repeatedly suggesting that our lived reality and the world of the subject are entirely separate, Fried also makes reference to Diderot’s concept of projection, that if the painter was a master of her or his craft, we could picture ourselves in the composition, not only removed but actually inside the work, assimilating with it.[8] This was all too possible with the aggrandised narrative effect of painting, but what happens when this is transmuted to another medium?
Historically, photography has been considered the innocent means of representation, entrusted to translate lived experience purely because of its ability to accurately reproduce that which we see before us. Contemporary photography holds the initial appeal of the serial snapshot, rather than thought out composition, in spite of the vast theatrical nature of arranging the shot that we do not see. In this sense, it hints at the surface level, a moment in time rather than a bookend for temporality and narrative arc that we naturally gain from paintings. Returning to Heidegger, it could be suggested that the objective signifying nature of photography associated with photojournalism denotes the framing of ‘present-at-hand,’ disruptive to our reception of the image at the click of the shutter.[9] We see the image itself, rather than the event or object it depicts. However both Jeff Wall and Thomas Struth’s photography present themselves as immersive living tableaus, both in their massive scale that rivals the grandeur of the Old Masters and in Wall’s backlighting that suggests quite literally a window onto the world that we look through, rather than at. For both artists this is important, as Struth began his career as a painter, where Wall was steeped in art historical scholarship long before he began his photographic career. In this way, our immersion in the subject is largely unmediated, ‘ready-to-hand’ in that we barely notice its framing at all, transported like Diderot into a state of the constructed banal.[10] Indeed, both artists balance precariously on the threshold between absorption and theatricality, ready-to-hand and present-at-hand, perhaps even transcendence and immanence, exploring that tension in the two-dimensional avenue of immersive art.
Figure 2. Jeff Wall, A View from an Apartment, 2004-5, (cibachrome transparency on light box, 167 x 244cm), London, Tate.
As ‘contemplations’ of ‘near-documentary,’ Wall’s widescreen photographs present the familiar motions of everyday life, tinged with an almost panoptic sense of voyeurism that is more than slightly unnerving.[11] In most of his tableaus, the viewer is positioned in front of a would-be snapshot of reality, fleeting at first glance, as the subjects seem engrossed in their activity, so absorbed in fact that we can almost see the corners of that veneer of truth begin to peel away. It is almost as though the people within the glowing frames are purposefully avoiding the viewer’s gaze, rather than being entirely oblivious to it. Fried calls this ‘to-be-seenness,’ between a ‘scene of representation and the act of presentation.’[12] Wall’s A View From an Apartment (2004) (fig. 2) demonstrates this effect in the seemingly natural domestic scene that draws the eye in. As the title would suggest, we see a comfortable living space, cluttered and decidedly lived-in, giving way to a surprisingly unmediated view of the Vancouver port. Framing the vista are two women, one deeply engrossed in the contents of her magazine, the other involved in the mundane task of ironing handkerchiefs. She leaves the ironing board, clutching a yellow spotted edition, and proceeds to walk out of frame towards some unknown destination. It is the tinge of ambiguity that first alerts us to the heavily constructed nature of the scene before us.
In actuality, nearly everything about the image is staged like a scene in an elaborate film still. Wall hired his primary actress, the woman with the handkerchief, and gave her money to furnish the rented apartment and was encouraged to spend as much time there as possible so that it would feel familiar to her, bringing her friend along with her. When it came to the two weeks of shooting, they were told to repeat their actions over and over until they achieved ‘an effect of naturalness,’ striving for the perfectly quotidian image.[13] Equally, the final photograph is a product of montage of several shots blended together so as to capture the optimum view of both the subjects and the scene outside in the most favourable light. What would at first seem to be an excerpt from the humdrum of day-to-day existence is in actual fact highly measured and perfected to seem that way. And yet, we remain equally absorbed. It is the models’ direct indirectness that captivates the eye, both wrapt in their respective worlds and simultaneously avoiding ours. The constructed nature of the shot that would at first seem like an irrevocably present-at-hand barrier to our absorption seems to only aid in the photograph’s mesmerising effect.
Where A View from an Apartment seems to break Diderot’s notion of a synthesized absorption, Struth’s first series of museum photographs seeks largely to reinforce it. For grand history paintings, the art writer suggested ‘unified compositional structures’ swelling with the same passionately emotional tone, where all subjects were enraptured in the singular object of their pleasure or pain.[14] Thus the viewer is erased, assimilated even into the absorptive model of the sublime, too powerful to acknowledge the outside world. The ‘lesser genres’, however, displaced this, suggesting that the beholder instead physically enter the painting, projected among the pastoral mode and in fact nature itself.[15] Perhaps with this in mind we can view Wall’s work through the lens of a highly constructed genre painting, tying to his continual return to depicting the everyday. Struth’s museum photographs however suggest several layers of perception that hold the present-at-hand and ready-to-hand element of photography equally at arm’s length.
Figure 3. Thomas Struth, Art Institute of Chicago II, Chicago, 1990, (chromogenic print mounted on acrylic, 184.1 x 219cm), Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago.
In Art Institute of Chicago II, Chicago (1980) (fig. 3) we are presented with what appears to be a traditional museum snapshot, as a woman in a red check dress with a stroller approaches Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street, where a girl in a green coat stands close and surveys, apparently already enraptured. Initially the photograph confronts us with a sense of visual ellipses, joining the dots between the decidedly ambiguous couple in the rainy street with the sparse white walls of the gallery, the two worlds seem to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Equally there is a suggestion that the painted man and woman seem aware of their new visitor, regarding her as she approaches, her head highlighted by a halo of light that reflects off the puddled cobblestones. It would appear that even the warm brown tone of the painted woman’s dress and the green panel on the building behind her reflect onto the highly saturated outfit choices of the spectators that Struth would have timed purposefully. Belting initially describes the presence of the beholders as a hindrance, because it is ‘they who are looking at the picture instead of ourselves.’[16] We are confronted with our own mirror image viewing the photograph, viewing the painting, a form of ‘metacognition’ that marries ‘external perception’ and that of ‘one’s own body’ so that we are given an all-encompassing view.[17] Our sense of being-in-the-world before an artwork is recorded in the long exposure, the viewers as an ‘unstable’ element of a unified composition that lends the photographs a sense of temporality far from the tourist snapshot they at first suggest.[18] Initially the figures are present-at-hand, an obstruction to our view, but in due course we understand that they are an integral part of it.
In both the aforementioned photographs, we regard a ‘relationship’ that lies in the gaze that is impenetrable to our own, that would seemingly characterise the rhetoric of immersion.[19] The figures of both Wall’s illuminated apartment and Struth’s museum and indeed painted reality, all are resolute in avoiding eye contact with the viewer in the outside world, but it is impossible to suggest that they are innocently unaware of the photographer’s presence. In turning away, they offer a more opaque ‘absorptive effect,’ in the hopes that we will mimic their concentration.[20] Fried describes the notion of ‘facingness’ or the depiction of the full face of the subject as a precursor to theatricality, more often than not confronting us rather than erasing us.[21] Heffernan offers a counter reading to this treatment by referring to the editing process in motion picture, when a character onscreen looks out at us, we are reassured by a prior shot that they are not looking at us and breaking the fourth wall, but instead at something outside of the frame that is matched by an eyeline or point of view shot soon after.[22] Both painting and photography naturally lack this animated effect that answer the question of an out of frame gaze, but can be equally immersive in their almost-confrontation.
Figure 4. Jeff Wall, Movie Audience (detail), 1979, (cibachrome transparency on lightbox, 159 x 234cm), courtesy of Jeff Wall Studio.
Wall’s Movie Audience (1979) (fig. 4) however touches on this effect directly, staging cinema as the oscillating meeting point precisely between absorption and theatricality itself. The work captures this cognitive dissonance through depicting members of a ‘nominally’ immersed audience in pseudo-bust format. Turned at a three-quarter angle and intensely gazing into the middle distance, or letting a vague smile play about their features, they are cropped just before we are able to see the narrative in which they are immersed. Equally the photographs are hung at an abnormally high angle from the viewer so that we peer up at them rather than into the world they create.[23] Cut off precisely at the point where their absorption ends and ours begins, it begs the question of whether we are meant to gain the same engagement with the works through regarding our own mirror image. In the womb-like comfort of the darkness of a cinema, we are freely able to take the position of the voyeur, absorbed without fear of anyone seeing our reaction: the seats face forward, forbidding any interaction apart from a sideways glance. Wall attempts to estrange this all too familiar comfort self-reflexively, so that we are made aware of the totemic absorptive effect latent in art objects, tying to cinema with the light box on which they are displayed.[24] Fried describes the cinematic medium as ‘escaping theatre… a welcome refuge to the sensibilities at war with theatre and theatricality,’ yet motion picture here seems to theatricalise absorption itself.
Figure 5. Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656, (oil on canvas, 318 x 276cm), Madrid, Museo del Prado.
Equally this effect has early modern predecessors, reinforcing the absorptive power of Struth’s museum series. This is epitomised in Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) (fig. 5), where the small cast of the aristocratic tableau seem to quite literally meet our gaze. Paused as if in a collective gasp, the subjects depicted stand for a group portrait, and seem to peer round at us, almost as though we have stumbled in and disturbed their perfectly held poses. As they confront us with their active, almost accusatory glance, we cannot absorb ourselves out of existence, but feel as though we are equally vulnerable. On closer inspection however, it would appear that the painting is not a window onto the world that either party may look through, but instead a two way mirror. The painter himself stands at the easel behind the group, poised with brush in hand as he surveys the scene with a critical eye. The looking glass at the rear of the room reflects the faint suggestion of the king and queen, the Infanta’s parents, which solves the riddle of the unrequited gaze.[25] We can assume that what we are seeing is in fact their painted reflection, a ‘mirror of life’ showing precisely what the illustrated figures also see. Although they appear to look out and into our world, they are in fact irrefutably absorbed in their own.[26]
Figure 6. Jeff Wall, Picture for Women, 1979, (cibachrome transparency on light box, 204.5 x 142.5cm), Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou.
Wall and Struth also engage with this sense of meta-vision that in fact renders the camera obvious, shattering the illusion that our absorption is unmediated. The curiously titled Picture for Women (1979) (fig. 6) is cited by Wall as a photographic translation of Velázquez’ painting as the model and the artist himself seem to both be looking out into our world quite directly.[27] The photograph is separated out into a triptych by metal lighting stands that compartmentalises its three components of man, woman and camera, where behind them is the scattered chairs and desks of an empty, even abandoned classroom that immediately suggests an almost didactic function.[28] However, it remains unclear precisely what we are meant to learn from the slightly unnerving scene before us. The addition of the light bulbs, that descend diagonally into a kind of photographic one point perspective aid in the illusionism that make Wall’s lit-up tableaus so compelling, and yet, like the divisions, this absorptive quality is simultaneously countered by a seam in the centre of the cibachrome print that makes visceral its medium and signifying materiality, in turn creating a ‘dialectic between depth and flatness,’ absorption and theatricality.[29] As if this was not jarring enough for the viewer, the camera is represented centre stage, its round lens almost pupil-like, as our gaze falters between it and the two figures beside it. Rather than the unity of composition Fried cites as integral to the absorptive mode, the gaze of both viewer and subject seem to operate entirely independently. Like Éduoard Manet’s Un Bar aux Folies Bergère (1882) (fig. 7), another of Wall’s influences, the woman seems to directly meet our gaze, and yet we can only assume that this is through the aid of either a mirror or secondary camera, creating a self-referential endless loop.[30] With the appearance of ‘facingness’ the gaze is indeed still imperceptible but we can see the process of absorption itself broken down and facilitated by its own medium of photography.
Figure 7. Édouard Manet, Un Bar aux Folies Bergére, 1882 (oil on canvas, 96 x 130cm), London, Courtauld Gallery.
However it would be remiss to overlook Picture for Women’s dialectic of desire that engages the underlying erotic facet of absorption, simultaneously problematizing Fried’s model that seems to represent an inherently gendered relationship between object and subject. In 1984 the photographwas shown in Difference: On Representation and Sexuality in the New Museum of Contemporary Art alongside the likes of Barbara Kruger and Sylvia Kolbowski. This photo-based exhibition sought to reconstruct the depiction of ‘sexual difference’ through a medium that is often accepted as the arbiter of objective truth.[31] Herein we are able to view the gaze, or the central action in Wall’s work through the lens of contemporary feminist writer Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), in which she describes the quality of woman’s ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ or their ability to be ‘simultaneously looked at and displayed’ as both an object of desire and male anxiety.[32] The author portrays the pleasure of looking itself in terms of filmic voyeurism as ‘scopophilia,’ where equally she presumes there is pleasure in being looked at.[33] Wall’s female model seems to exude this quality, an object of the male gaze that is epitomised in Wall’s enigmatic stare. However if we can presume the presence of a mirror, this eyeline is rendered indirect, fractured by the glass that separates us from them and complicated by the unblinking gaze of the camera’s all-seeing eye. Furthermore, Campany describes the ‘doubling’ effect of photography that is only exacerbated by the suggestion that the image we see is in fact a reflection.[34] This appears to inhibit the identifying of the male gaze with that of the artist, and indeed the beholder in Fried’s eighteenth-century absorption. In a model that presumes active viewer and passive subject, Wall problematizes the facile means by which absorption is enforced. In a photograph that seems to reveal all, ‘visibility is blinding’ suggesting a newfound facet of immersive technique that revels in its failure to yield.[35]
Figure 8. Thomas Struth, Audience 3, Florence 2004, 2004, (chromogenic print mounted on acrylic, 179.5 x 289.5cm), courtesy of Thomas Struth Studio.
Where Wall’s work complicates absorption in its highly self-reflexive nature, flattening the picture plane to suggest his figures as icons of ambiguity, Struth’s audience series seems to embrace the individuality of bodily perception. The 2004 works do away with the inclusion of the artworks in which his viewers are so enrapt, effectively assimilating the world of the artwork and that of the observer. There is no obstructive mediator that takes our place in appraising the old masters, but instead they regard something that we cannot see, acting as its phenomenological foil. Struth’s Audience 3, Florence 2004 (fig. 8) depicts the visitors to the Galleria dell’Accademia looking up, past us, at what we can only assume to be the invisible Michelangelo’s David by the subconscious coding of their reaction. At first glance this photograph is the picture of naturalism, a documentary snapshot of a brief moment in time that is more banal than breathtaking. But on second look there is a striking similarity between their communally relaxed postures.
The audience here appears so absorbed that they seem to display ‘oubli de soi’ or ‘self-forgetting’ and mirror David’s contrapposto pose: putting their weight on one hip, head tilted upwards, hands held loosely at their sides.[36] Baxter describes this ‘spectacularisation of the viewer experience’ makes us aware of our own conditions in experiencing the work, whereby the beholder is not the ‘authority of these conditions’ but the ‘agent’ of them.[37] She goes on to explain the effect of absorption whereby the ‘I’ and the ‘eye’ become one, where we ‘absent ourselves in the act of viewing’ becoming absorbed into the mind.[38] Indeed Merleau-Ponty describes this phenomenological occurrence as ‘two sides of a single act,’ effectively erasing the mind and body dualism that informs much of our critical enjoyment of art.[39] Thus as the delineation between the viewer and the viewed become increasingly hazy as we indeed see perception itself mirrored in repose.
Figure 9. Thomas Struth, Audience 7, Florence 2004, 2004, (chromogenic print mounted on acrylic, 179.5 x 289.5cm), courtesy of Thomas Struth Studio.
Unlike Wall’s work in which we are constantly aware of the heavily constructed nature of the compositions, that even in confronting us seem negotiated by pictorial artifice, Struth’s audience seem to be by all accounts entirely absorbed. However, we cannot ignore that like Picture for Women, the presence of the camera would be quite unmistakable to the viewers before us. Although we do not see it, merely look through its lens, we can assume from the viewpoint that it is raised almost to the eye level of its subjects. All in the series seemingly avoid the camera’s gaze, until Audience 7 (2004) (fig. 9) where a man with a broad brimmed hat in the centre of the photograph directly meets our eye, looking slightly puzzled and out of place in the upward glance of the other tourists. This look is present-at-hand to our immersive gaze but instead of shattering the illusion, seems to reinforce all the more the absorption of those around the man, and indeed our own. This reinforces a liminal tension between absorption and theatricality that both artists repeatedly examine, forcing us into the chiasmic realisation of the suggestive power of artworks that not only supply meaning but also take it from us in return.
Figure 10. Jeff Wall, Untangling, 1994, (cibachrome transparency on light box, 207.1 x 241cm), Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria.
Where Struth’s hat-wearing tourist presents a present-at-hand gaze that complicates our notion of being-in-the-world of the artwork, Wall engages further in the world of the everyday. As previously noted in A View from an Apartment, the appearance of ‘naturalness’ has always been the artist’s primary concern, yet a resounding focus on practical tasks throughout his oeuvre seems to cement this interest. Heidegger discusses his notion of ‘aufgehen’ or absorption directly through these means, whereby our existence runs alongside nature that is always on a steadfast course, even if we may appear immersed in it.[40] Therefore the world in which we live is naturally ‘disclosed’ to us as a result of our absorption within it.[41] It is only when a tool used to complete a task presents a ‘deficiency’ that ‘the world announces itself.’[42] Perhaps most obvious in this awareness of this present-at-hand disruption to absorption is Untangling (1994) (fig. 10), its central action depicting a man in the throes of what seems like an entirely fruitless task. Dressed in a boiler suit amidst what would appear to be a mechanic’s stock room, the man confronts a knot of epic proportions. It is the presence of this modern day ‘ouroborus’ that seems to contradict the notion of Fried’s absorption, and yet we still see a man deeply consumed by the task before him, even if it appears to be an impossible one.[43] Could it be that he is absorbed precisely at the juncture at which we are thrown out of nature’s forward movement in perpetual frustration? As with most of Wall’s oeuvre, the artwork is swathed in ambiguity that augments the everyday into the almost mythical.
Equally however, both Wall and Struth’s work question this very contrived notion of normality, indeed whose ‘everyday’ are we regarding? Why are we privy to their most private moments? The innate alienation of capturing a moment in staged perpetuity, whether intimate or public, seems to suggest a present-at-hand theatrical concern in itself. Just as we see the near absurdity of Struth’s audiences clearly caught either in rapture or distraction on their summer holiday displayed centre stage in contemporary art galleries, Wall’s strange and uncanny scenes seem to draw attention to themselves precisely in their effort to deflect our gaze. Heffernan interrogates Fried’s assumed notion of the everyday, suggesting perhaps that it eclipses the ‘art of representing a private world’ or absorption within ‘a public space that contains but not theatricalise it.’[44] And yet by the very means of its grandeur as an art object it is naturally surrounded by a certain illusionistic magic, as it is not an everyday object in itself.
Figure 11. Jeff Wall, A Ventriloquist at a birthday party in October 1947, 1990, (cibachrome transparency on light box, 229 x 353cm), London, Tate.
Like Untangling, Wall’s A Ventriloquist at a birthday party in October 1947 (1990) (fig. 11) appears to capture a very specific moment in time of whose historic significance is never elucidated. The eerie scene shows a group of children collected around a woman and her ventriloquist doll, an enigma in itself when confronting Heideggerian notions of present-at-hand and ready-to-hand concerns. Indeed it is impossible to tell whether the ventriloquist has succeeded in sustaining the illusion, as the boy on the far left eyes the scene with a distinctly detached suspicion. Wall’s choice of scene resonates with absorptive concerns as ventriloquism itself rests precisely between these states of absorption and theatricality, as we look from the animator to the animated, sometimes unsure of which has breathed life into the other. Equally Struth’s Hermitage 1, St Petersburg (2005) (fig. 12) suggests a similarly Heideggerian ambiguity in terms of the subject’s interaction with practical tasks. Where the Uffizi audience stood at a measured distance from the camera, Struth here brings them into our space. As they regard Leonardo’s Madonna and Child, a woman in a mint green outfit looks into the middle distance, past us, as she listens to her audio phone in concentration. To her right, it appears the museum’s narration has not had such success. Two middle aged women share one handset, peering at the work, which again we cannot see, their expressions located somewhere between suspicion and confusion. Almost comical in its juxtaposition, Struth shows us two instances of absorption in which the present-at-hand and ready-to-hand stand side by side. He depicts a moment of the ‘everyday’ in which absorption itself becomes a problem.
Figure 12. Thomas Struth, Hermitage I, St Petersburg, 2005, (chromogenic print mounted on acrylic, 114 x 144.9cm), courtesy of Thomas Struth Studio.
Through Wall and Struth’s photographs we are forced into the awareness that the medium is no more innocent than the visual deceit of a painted tableau, and equally if not more immersive. Both artists’ oeuvres prove that Fried’s dichotomy of absorption and theatricality is too black and white to prove fruitful in how immersion is achieved within two-dimensional artwork. Our notion of being-in-the-world is in itself a conundrum which cannot be adequately replicated without first living it. The reality effect of these photographers acts as a mirror to our own gaze, so that in scrutinising the absorption of others, we too reflect on ourselves.
[1] Taylor Carman, ‘The Question of Being,’ The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s Being and Time, ed. Mark A Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 89.
[2] Ibid.
[3] “chiasma, n.”. OED Online. Accessed Oct. 14.http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/view/Entry/31501 (accessed October 17, 2017).
[4] ‘Immersion, n.’ OED Online. Accessed Oct. 14, 2017. http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/view/Entry/91885?redirectedFrom=immersion
[5] ‘Absorption, n.’ OED Online. Accessed Oct. 14, 2017.
http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/view/Entry/724?redirectedFrom=absorption (accessed October 13, 2017)
[6] Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 69.
[7] Ibid., 108.
[8] Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 156
[9] Ibid., 48.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Louisiana Channel. ‘Jeff Wall Interview: Pictures Like Poems.’ Youtube video, 37:58. Posted 8 April, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkVSEVlqYUw
[12] Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 42.
[13] Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 57.
[14] Ibid., 131.
[15] Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 131.
[16] Hans Belting, Thomas Struth: Museum Photographs (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1993), 7.
[17] Miranda Baxter, ‘Seeing for the First and Last Time in Thomas Struth’s Museum Photographs,’ Photographies 7, no. 2 (2014): 201.
[18] Hans Belting, Thomas Struth: Museum Photographs (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1993), 9.
[19] Belting, Thomas Struth, 16.
[20] Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 40.
[21] Ibid., 128.
[22] James A. W. Heffernan, ‘Staging Absorption and Transmuting the Everyday: A Response to Michael Fried,’ Critical Inquiry 34, no. 4 (2008): 822.
[23] Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 12.
[24] Ibid., 13.
[25] James A. W. Heffernan, ‘Staging Absorption and Transmuting the Everyday: A Response to Michael Fried,’ Critical Inquiry 34, no. 4 (2008): 823.
[26] Ibid., 823.
[27] David Campany, ‘‘A Theoretical Diagram in an Empty Classroom’: Jeff Wall’s Picture for Women,’ Oxford Art Journal, 30, no. 1 (2007): 11.
[28] Ibid, 14.
[29] David Campany, ‘‘A Theoretical Diagram in an Empty Classroom’: Jeff Wall’s Picture for Women,’ Oxford Art Journal, 30, no. 1 (2007): 14.
[30] Ibid., 12.
[31] Kate Mondloch, ‘The Difference Problem: Art History and the Critical Legacy of 1980s Theoretical Feminism,’ Art Journal 71, no. 2 (2012): 21.
[32] Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 837.
[33] Ibid,. 835.
[34] David Campany, ‘‘A Theoretical Diagram in an Empty Classroom’: Jeff Wall’s Picture for Women,’ Oxford Art Journal, 30, no. 1 (2007): 23.
[35] Ibid.
[36] Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 40.
[37] Miranda Baxter, ‘Seeing for the First and Last Time in Thomas Struth’s Museum Photographs,’ Photographies 7, no. 2 (2014): 207.
[38] Ibid., 205.
[39]Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomonology of Perception,trans. Donald A. Landes (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 211.
[40] Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 48.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Stefan Banz, Jeff Wall: With The Eye of the Mind (Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2014), 90.
[44] James A. W. Heffernan, ‘Staging Absorption and Transmuting the Everyday: A Response to Michael Fried,’ Critical Inquiry 34, no. 4 (2008): 830.
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About the Author:
Annie Curtis completed a BA (hons) double majoring in Art History and Screen Production and finished her MA Thesis at the end of February. Her favourite artists range from the seventeenth-century Flemish Michael Sweertz to contemporary collage artist Wangechi Mutu. She hopes to use art history to one day art-direct for film and theatre.
