ABSTRACT
The focus of Chapter 7 – ‘Restoration: the fugitive condition of representation’ – is Restoration (1993): an early digital montage presented in the lightbox format in which Wall stages the restoration of a nineteenth-century 360-degree painted panorama. This chapter begins by considering the multiple connotations of the photograph’s title – Restoration – including the notion of the work being emblematic of Wall’s attempts to restore the ‘Picture’ as a central category of art after the demise of modernism. Wall’s suggestion that it was the panorama’s ‘frameless’ 360-degree structure (which escapes from view) that inspired him to make the photograph serves as a springboard for a close analysis of the work. This discussion of the artwork is contextualised in relation to the innovations, popularity, and obsolescence of the panorama (within the context of nineteenth century visual culture) to uncover the paradoxical nature of Wall’s treatise on the essential condition of pictorial representation.
