ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 – ‘Performative pictures’ – examines the significance of Wall’s exploration of the contemporary ‘condition of the picture’ through the platform of the illuminated lightbox, a medium borrowed from advertising. While the lightbox offered Wall a way to evoke the commanding presence of old master paintings and the luminosity and enveloping spectacle of the cinema screen, Wall was aware of other connotations: as an apparatus that could be ‘switched on’ or ‘switched off’, the lightbox highlighted the picture’s status as ‘representation’ and the lightbox’s status as ‘object’. This chapter examines the continuities between Wall’s ‘new pictorialism’ and the 1960s avant-garde through ideas proposed by Michael Fried in ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967). In this essay Fried criticises minimalist art’s failure to adequately distinguish between art and object. This chapter examines Wall’s engagement with Fried’s ideas, especially the problem of ‘beholding’ (that is, the relationship between the spectator and the work of art), which is further developed in Fried’s book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before.
