Painting and photography – Stuck at the Intersection

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Ian Wallace: At the Intersection of Painting and Photography

By Jeff Derksen et al.

Ian Wallace: At the Intersection of Painting and Photographyaccompanied a major retrospective of Canadian artist Ian Wallace’s work at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Since the mid 1960s Wallace has been engaged in a heavily theoretical investigation into the possibilities of art in a world where the proliferation of imagery in mass culture seems to have robbed it of its specific function. The book will therefore be hard going for anyone who does not have a thorough grounding in the discourses of modernity and postmodernity in the visual arts (and sometimes for anyone who does).

Art’s identity issues stem from what Wallace refers to as a ‘crisis of representation’. This crisis erupted in the mid-to-late 19^th century when photographs began to circulate in the public sphere. The role of traditional modes of representation, such as painting, was compromised as they were superseded by the new medium and, eventually, by new ways of engaging with images (in the press and in advertisements). Wallace sees ‘modernism’ as a response to this crisis. It is an attempt to maintain the ‘autonomy’ of the artwork in the face of the oncoming tsunami. Because the function of the artwork is no longer straightforward it begins to engage in an increasingly insistent self-interrogation. Modernism is therefore characterized by formal experimentation and a self-reflexivity in which the work questions its very status as a means of representation – this is at least one function that mass-media have no desire to usurp.

The ultimate response of the artwork to this situation is pure abstraction. Abstract painting offers an obstinate silence as it refuses to play the game of representation, and puts itself forward either as a pure potential (a blank page) or an object in its own right (now it is stripped of any pictorial function). ‘Postmodernism’ is the moment that art relinquishes the fight. Having reached the ‘zero-point’ of abstraction there is literally nowhere left to go, so the artist crosses the line and enters into a self-knowing, ironic, game with the imagery of consumer society (this describes the precise moment when, in the USA, Abstract Expressionism gave way to Pop art).

Wallace is not happy about this move. He has an overarching desire to retain the ‘autonomy of the artwork’, continuing in this way the modernist project - so late modernism throws up the strange figure of the conservative modernist. In early work Wallace had produced a number of his own ‘colour field’ paintings (closely related to Abstract Expressionism), experiencing for himself the culminating moment. He also at this time produced photographs that came dangerously close to implicating him in the postmodern game. But he stepped back from the brink, installing himself in the interval where modernism collapses into postmodernism. And this becomes the site of his unique project: Ian Wallace at the intersection.

It is not, therefore, merely fortuitous that the curators of the exhibition made the ‘intersection’ the overriding theme of the retrospective. Firstly, we should note that a number of significant works, and series of works, took the concrete intersection – that is to say, the urban crossroads – as their manifest subject. Photographs show people and vehicles against a backdrop of high-rises, submitting to the logic of the city. Here we find a first intersection; the individual meets the supra-individual structures that organize and regulate his life. But secondly, these images are juxtaposed, as are so many others, with fields of abstract paintings: ‘ “slabs” of reality mounted on the “ideality” of the abstract field’, Wallace says.

This is the awkward solution that he seems to propose. Colour fields, we saw, stand for the high-watermark of the modernist project, and the photograph – particularly when it captures the banality of the everyday – is the emblem of postmodernity. Wallace literally captures the image, entrapping it in a composition with the abstract work. And this is the starting point for the dizzying theoretical flights elaborated in his essays in the volume.

This is perhaps above all the interest of this book. It tells the story through generously illustrated texts (by the artist and critics) of an artist struggling to play the difficult hand he has been dealt by the unique historical juncture in which he finds himself. Ian Wallace emerges as a figure hampered by his loyalty to the modernist project, which he refuses to relinquish in the overwhelming currents of late-20th-century consumer society. It is a project that appears at once tragic and heroic, and as always, Wallace occupies the interval between the two.

Ian Wallace: At the Intersection of Painting and Photography  by Jeff Derksen, Stan Douglas, Jessica Morgan, Daina Augaitis and Ian Wallace is published by Black Dog Publishing 2012. 351 pp.  ISBN: 978-1-907317-57-6