Illuminating obscurity: An interpretation of the relationship between Jeff Wall and Édouard Manet

ABSTRACT

This article concerns the ‘tableau photography’ of the Canadian artist Jeff Wall (b. 1949), whose quotation from canonical paintings, especially of the nineteenth-century French painter Édouard Manet, has led interpreters to conclude that Wall is revitalizing Manet's peinture de la vie modern through the medium of photography. I propose, however, that the search for iconographical matches misses the real relationship between the two artists: a shared resistance to interpretation or ‘illegibility’. Wall's selection and manipulation of his sources blocks precisely the kind of interpretive work that ought to be enabled by identifying them, paradoxically illuminating an obscurity his work shares with them, which is obscured in turn by the very lucidity of the iconographical match. However, I argue that this illegibility is not equivalent to mere meaningless but is central to Wall's artistic enterprise, thereby restoring some substance to the cliché that Wall is a ‘photographer of modern life’.

KEYWORDS:

• Jeff Wall
• contemporary art
• photography
• tableau
• sources
• illegibility