ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 – ‘Photography after conceptualism’ – traces Wall’s difficult journey through the gauntlet of 1960s neo-avant-gardism, his disillusionment with conceptualism that lead to an artistic hiatus of seven years, the factors that led to the reinvention of his practice through large-scale, staged, lightbox photography and examines how this offered a means of critiquing the ‘Western Concept of the Picture’. x This chapter introduces the reader to Wall’s critique of conceptualism in his essay ‘Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel’ (1982). For Wall, the implosive tendencies of conceptual art (that is, the reductive and negating tactics that stripped art back to ‘non-art’ to protest the commodification of modern art) represented a great crisis in modernism. In his essay, Wall presents a second narrative that is intertwined with conceptualism’s failure: the significance of Dan Graham’s work Alteration to a Suburban House (1978). Wall locates the beginnings of Graham’s work (like his own photography project) within the failure of conceptualism’s critique of art. In this chapter, Graham’s ‘countermonument’ to conceptualism’s failure is contrasted with Wall’s first successful lightbox photograph The Destroyed Room (1978). A close analysis of The Destroyed Room draws on Graham’s writing to reveal Wall’s critique of the commodity status of the art object and media representations of eroticised violence, as well as to highlight the resonances between The Destroyed Room and Marcel Duchamp’s diorama Étant Donnés (1946–1966). The discussion of The Destroyed Room demonstrates the ways in which Wall strategically engages with a mythology that conceptualism sought to disavow – the Western pictorial tradition. This chapter establishes the factors that led Wall to draw upon historical artworks (such as Eugène Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827) in his early photographs. It examines how this artistic strategy facilitated Wall’s critique of the condition of the ‘Picture’ after the demise of modernism.
