ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 – ‘The photography of modern life’ – examines Wall’s strategic response to the impasse of conceptual art and the demise of the modernist project. In order to move forward, Wall imagined an alternative lineage of modernism extending from a thread abandoned in modernism’s nineteenthth-century infancy – the ‘painting of modern life’ associated with the writings of Charles Baudelaire and the art of Édouard Manet. Baudelaire called for artists to regard the conditions and experiences of modern life as a worthy subject for art. By restituting the painting of modern life, Wall reconfigures the conditions of modernism, extending it past the implosion of conceptualism. This chapter closely examines Wall’s photographic reconfiguration of the concept of the ‘painting of modern life’ and considers the specific conditions that define the terrain of Wall’s ‘modernity’. This includes the nature of spectatorship in a late twentieth-century society consumed by media spectacle, and the impact of digital technologies on visual culture.
