63 LA MELANCOLIE DE LA RUE: IDYLL AND MONOCHROME IN THE WORK OF IAN WALLACE 1967-82 JEFF WALL lan Wallace's pictorial art displays a long historical relationship to two apparently antithetical forms of the radical art of the early 1970s. The polemical, Photographic, documenteristic practice of such artists as Hans Heacke, Victor Burgin, Steve Willats or Allan Sekula, and the monochromatic and reductivistic painting of Robert Ryman, Neile Toroni, or Brice Marden were recognized at that time as the antipodes of a radicality in which the possibilities of avant-garde art were recovered by a new generation. The contradictory solidarity between such works remains a central problem in the conceptualization of a possible vanguardist culture, one in which a transcendental poesis of the art object is interlaced with neo-productivism and a polemicist definition of art. Atthe beginning of the ’70s, the bond between reductivist, monochrome painting and polemical photography was legitimated theoretically in the argument that both practices constituted a critical reflection upon the process of institutionalization to which modernist art was being subjected by the “Ideological State Apparatuses”” and the Culture Industry. It was not difficult to defend in these terms figurative work employing photographs, since this work drew quite directly on the activist political traditions of the vanguard of the 1920s; the names of Lissitzky, Tretyakov, Heartfield, or Rodchenko were correctly invoked as pedigree. Figurative, polemical art could be readily justified from the viewpoint of radical productivism, since it openly aimed at a social utility. But the hermeticism of monochrome painting created a more complex situation, In his analysis of the work of Neile Toroni, Benjamin Buchloh describes a form ‘of modernist painting “which, in order to exist, must confront both the menace of photography and that of the mechanically-produced object”?, and which responds to this challenge by radically reducing its pictorial character. This reductivism expresses on the one hand a renunciation of the dubious effects of mechanical reproduction in capitalist society, and on the other, the desire to attain the status of the determinate antithesis of the photograph. The monochromatic canvas is for Buchloh this antithesis, the materially arrived-at negative form of the predominant culture. As such, it provides a silent, challenging emblem of a negation of the established logos. Commenting on Gerhard Richter’s Grey Paintings of 197375, Buchloh wrote: Contrary to appearances, these paintings are not related to the monochrome tradition whose great ambition was to incarnate for us the \ astral body in the salon. Their reality is totally original to them; itis that of the despair of painting. The fact that, for the first time, in the work of Richter, poetry and ideology, reunified, constitute a plausible, possible unity outside of the architectural dimension is conceivable only in the dimension of critical negation. Thus, by their radical refusal of any icone apna neo te sahee tte pre poe pining > the works become the refuge of pictorial practice itself. Their elements Preserve the final trace of an authentic aesthetic procedure, and the first trace of a reality which is possible and liberated, joined in a state which is unknowable? HonGerhard Richter, Grey Paintings, 1975 Collection of the Stadtisches Museum, Ménchengladbach ‘The Grey Paintings when photographed, reduce the image to aneutral grey rectangle like themselves, which however cannot adequately reproduce them. The "pictorial practice” of which Buchloh speaks, is here condensed to an intense contemplation of the historical fate of painting as it has been determined by the division of labour. Richter's paintings contemplate their own self-alienation into a historically-evolved form of reproduction, from within whose space their own image is returned as a kind of disappearance. For Buchloh, Richter’s paintings are a form of polemical historicism, an emblematic expression of the transformation of the status of the art of painting and the cognition traditionally identified with it, in the culture of capitalist technoscience. ‘The radical photography of the early '70s requires figuration for its exposures, deconstructions and pedagogics; its incriminations, its morality-plays; however, reductive painting must extinguish all such figuration for the projection of the “liberated possible realities” which its silence both announces and renounees in the name of a “state which is still unknowable”. Buchioh’s ‘materialist and productivist study of Richter concludes with these ines, which seem like an echo of Ernst Bloch: "tis like something which risks losing itself, or like something that has renounced its own project so as not to prematurely ‘engage in false reality. Like something which could only be born ina universality vaster than which reality can offer. Therefore the Grey Paintings stil reflect as autonomous pictorial realities the real conditions within which they were elaborated.’"*This language bears within it the inner dialectic of the monochrome, the problematic terms under which it participates in the radical productivist rhetoric of the left vanguardism whose spokesman Buchloh has become. In their universal subsumption of mechanical reproduction and the ideological processing implied by it, Richter’s grey rectangles form rational emblems of Concrete social and historical impasse. But, in their extreme self-emptying and reduction, they express also the longing to evolve into a completely new form of art, one unbounded by poetry or ideology, the pole stars of the bourgeois > 7 imagination. Thus, they arrive at a recovery of the conditions for transcendentalist aesthetics. The veering of Buchioh's prose into the language of transcendental yearning reflects this, and marks it as an authentic, contradictory aspect of the social interior of the monochrome genre. Buchioh has attempted to expel this “part maudit” of the monochrome, splitting it off as a reactionary neo-avantgarde tendency exemplified by Yves Klein, “The monochrome in the work of Klein is now turned backwards, in the direction of the systems of transcendental and symbolist faith of the end of the 19th century.”* No doubt Buchioh is correct to mark the ideological difference between Klein’s “spectacularization” and “fetishization” of the emblem of Universal negativity, and the programmatic interrogation of the concept of universality in the monochromes of Manzoni or Richter. However, atleast in 1877, when this text was written, Buchloh himself would implicitly, in the generic structure of his own writing, admit traces of transcendental aesthetics into the domain of negative productivism which he established for Richter. In the notion of “the despair of painting”, we can recognize that the radically emptied pictorial field of reductivist painting contains both productivist and ‘symbolist-transcendentalist impulses. The productivist current indeed derives from the example of early Soviet art, from the leftism of Puni, Ivanova, and Rodchenko, as Buchioh outlines in his study of Toroni.® This tendency developed as a response of the young intelligentsia of the period to militant Marxist futurism and the constructivist ethos of technologically-progressive “world-reconstruction” and the building of socialism through planned modernization. At the same time, transcendentalism, the utopian projection of a human evolutionary leap out of a dying culture, has ‘roots just as deeply embedded in the life-experience of the disempowered but. literate generation of 1900, out of which the 20th century political and artistic. vanguards sprung. The re-emergence in the 1960s of a wave of radical contestation within the reconstructed modernity of post-World War Il capitalism thus provided the conditions for a reprise of the vanguardist dialectic of the monochrome. The repetitions and ambiguities which Buchloh recognizes in the work of Klein, Manzoni, Fontana, Stella or Ryman, are sustained by the “social repetition” of capitalist culture, its survival without legitimation after the Holocaust, in Particular its vigour in the boom period of the 1950s and 1960s. Productivism and mysticism are the militant emblematic products of the survival of capitalism. ‘The monochrome may be the hieroglyph in which the two emblems are | “<< + y aly!lan Wallace, Untitled, 1967 In 1967, lan Wallace produced long, narrow, untitled, monochrome acrylic paintings as well as collages done in a manner reminiscent of Hausmann and ‘Schwitters. In The Collage Show held at the Fine Arts Gallery at UBC in 1971, he exhibited all the pages from an issue of Seventeen magazine taped sequentially to the gallery wall. Figurative polemicism and the ambiguities of the ‘monochrome are the foundation-stones upon which his practice is built, but the monochrome panel disappears from his work before 1970 and does not ‘re-appear until 1982. Its place is taken firstly by a subdued variant of polemical photographic work, exemplified in this exhibition by Pan Am Scan (1970) and La ‘Mélancolie de la rue (1973). In the former work, made in London, a corporate office and the street outside itis surveyed in a series of photos which reiterate the turning of the head across a short arc. The movement neither begins nor ends on any conventionally salient point of the architectural setting or the gestures of the figures included in the scene. Itis an itinerant glance, apparently without aim and to no avail, in the random routine of the city. It makes no accusations, deconstructs nothing, expresses no moral. It displays its purposelessness, withdrawing from participation, turning away from a generic ‘scene of modern life, and then possibly turning back to it. The office sells airline tickets. One is reminded of the lyrical backgrounds in the early films of Godard, of the immobile yearning for escape in Baudelaire’s Anywhere out of this world, or Mallarmé's “Le Ciel est mort. — Vers toi, 'accours!, in “Azur.Cy ‘The motif of fight and secession from the city forms a central motif of La Mélancolie de la rue (or, to use its original title, La Mélancolie de la rue + Barthes’ Third Meaning... . Early One Morning), the work which most closely approaches the norms of radical “photo-conceptualism’. The examination of characteristic phenomena of the boom period of the early 70s — runaway suburbanization and the profusion of modernistic “palaces of culture” is counterposed to the dropout “alternative” architecture of the already-defunct. Dollarton mud flats, which had been a semi-legal community of bohemians, marginals and old-timers until twas forcibly cleared for redevelopment in 1971. La Mélancolie de la rue established a structure for Wellace, that of the sequential grouping of large-scale, hand-tinted photographs, which became his primary medium throughout the 1970s, This provided a format for the literary grandiosity of works like An Attack on Literature, The Summer Script, Lookout, and Image’ Text, in which the affinity with strategies of polemical conceptualism is dissolved, and the implications of Wallace's Symbolist and secessionist interpretation of avant-gardism are worked out. During this period, the debate about photographic art centered on the ideological nature of representation, particularly sexual representation. The terms were set by the women’s movement, whose pictorial practice has been realized primarily in photography, video and performance, rather than painting or sculpture. The dramatization of social being was carried out in Brechtian-Freudian-Lacanian terms by the feminists and New Leftists identified with the Screen magazine group, including Mary Kelly and Victor Burgii Complex responses to this liberal-Left position were developed by other artists, (mostly male) who did not accept this fusion of Critical Theory and polemical psychoanalysis, and who consequently drew their inspiration from “dissenting” cultural sources, often openly anti-feminist and anti-liberal. Gilbert and George and perhaps Warhol are the most prominent figures in this direction, but there are a host of other artists whose positions reject or contest the feminist-New Left agenda. At the same time others, both male and female, did not contest feminism, but diverged from it in the name of a more traditionally poetic and Romantic concept of the image, which maintained a political component combined with an emphasis on memory, physical experience and an alchemical interpretation of the photographic process. Katharina Sieverding, Anselm Kiefer in his photographic work, Susan Hiller, Jochen Gerz and, locally, Marian Penner Bancroft are among many examples of this tendency. ‘The feminist, anti-feminist, and Romantic “centrist” currents all contested the ‘modes of dramatization, the mise-en-scdne of social and sexual life. This is the ideological content of '70s art, which produced so much discourse and so much discomfort, and which gave way to a counter-movement of affirmation around 1980. Itis important to recognize that throughout this period, Wellace, who was making large-scale works which reveal en ambition equal to that of any ‘contemporary figure, specifically withdraws in them from any polemical dramaties. In An Attack on Literature for example, Wallace attempts to stage an allegory of problematic, literary, visual art. Ambiguous figures, possibly anartist and his female muses, seem notto interact with the invasion into their space of an emblem of Literature, the blank sheets of paper which seem to have fallen out of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n‘abolira le hasard. The _>! characters are profoundly introverted, sexual tension is nearly annulled, the camera appears to freeze the human body as it sets in motion the inorganic So <*> figurae of the silence of Literature. The ambiguity and obliqueness of Wallace's mise-en-scéne reflects his renunciation of the front lines of the vanguardist. debate of the "70s, his secession from the emerging feminist agenda, and his drift toward a monumental art of high interiority rooted in a reprise of Symbolist, idealism centered in the aesthetics of Mallarmé. Itis not until 1879, with /mage/Text, thet Wallace is able to make an overt expression of his substitution of Mallarméan poetics for polemical drama. Here amural-sized montage of panelsis the form established for a statement of the pleasures of withdrawal into the artist's study, the arena of the solitary creative imagination. Here, the de-dramatization and involution of the photographic mise-en-scéne is complete: the artist remains, but the women with whom he interacts are only vestigially present as photographs on the walls of his chambers, The solitude ofthe artist figure, content to be alone amidst his imaginings, expresses Wallace’s radical interiorization and sublimation of the social conflicts which make up the vanguardist dramatics of the period. /mage/Textis 4a manifesto on the pleasures of inwardness which are the essence of art in ‘Symbolist terms, on the austere voluptuousness of the self-conscious autonomous imagination. The imagination exists in being beset by the crisis of speaking, ofthe dread and fascination of the empty white page, of the Institution of Literature and the Name of the Father, but atthe same time it luxuriates in its crisis and in the sensuousness of dispassionate reflection and technical expertise. Image’ Texts thus an erotic work, andis related to the essays in dreamy éroticiam Wallace produced in 1977, LAprés-Midi, Colours of the Afternoon, and Blue Sleep in particular. In those works, as in Image! Text, the hand-colouring of the photographs is restricted to a monochromistic suftusion of the whole image, rather than an articulation of local colouring defined by objects and figure-ground relationships. In a work like UAprés-Miai, the influence of Warhol is perhaps evident in the decomposition of the image into two parts: photograph or fim stil, and a chromatic field which is conceptuelly separable from it, The ground begins to show through the photograph, and the interior «structure ofthe workis altered. The erotic pictures were an oblique provocation within the ‘70s context, are-statement of a mode of sexual representation which the liberal-Left allied with feminism found unacceptable. Wallace has responded to this reception of these works by exhibiting them infrequently. In Image! Text he retreated from provocation to a highly-distantiated evocation of the feminine. “Intellectual eroticism’ was the term Wallace used in 1979 in discussing Image!Text.’ The Symbolist atmosphere of this work is most perfectly evoked in the purple panel in which a vase of roses sits on a table. On the wall behind itis.‘photograph of the Marquesa Casati by Baron de Meyer, a showpiece of nostalgia for the fin-de-siécle and its cult of aristocracy. Above that, a mirror reflects a poster reproducing another picture, this one from a distinguished collection of early 20th century photography. The image, under the heading ‘Ireland in 1913, is of a forthright young peasant woman. Another panel, in range, enlarges this picture, and makes the peasant woman the most prominent human figure in the work. Barefoot, ruddy, and extroverted, she forms a complete antithesis to the narcissistic egotism of the haut-bourgeois Marquesa. The conservative, even reactionary identification of soudo-aristocracy and peasantry in ImagelText procisely the anarchist, anti-urban, anti-bourgeois sentiments of the Symbolist cénacles in his banishment of bourgeois-progressive and proletarian women from his interior. In the 1970s, itis of course these classes of women who are the leading ideologues of the women’s movement and whose own pictorial practice is set on the radical deconstruction of peasant-aristocratic nostalgia for the Female as "Nature", seeing in that symptomatic iconography the kernel of repressive bourgeois and patriarchal culture, Wallace's restoration of this complex is anti-feminist in the context of the '70s debate; its anti-feminism is articulated by the strict and erudite elaboration of its Symbolist concept of art, which is focussed on the absence of women, who form the evanescent body of the introverted desire identified with artistic creation in general ‘ImagelText’s panels construct neither proto-cinematic sequences, asin The Summer Script or An Attack on Literature, nor a composite single space, asin Lookout. Wallace returns here to the polemical montage-character | of La Mélancolie de fa rue, to the abrupt juxtaposition of disparate elements. However, the formal disparity of the text-panels with the images is carefully circumscribed. Collision between antagonistic, alien fields of life or signification is rejected for an allusive, but discursive cohabitation of harmonized difference. Picture and text contemplate one another, they do not clash; a mirroric, symmetrical evocation on the level of content emerges from a blunt formal ‘confrontation of the physical parts of the work. /mage/Text concludes the period during which Wallace's work is dominated by a dramatic-pictorial structure, in which the photographic frame corresponds to the boundaries of the signification process. The panels of text in /mage/Text are the first instance of the recurrence of the “radically emptied field” which was expelled from his ‘work in 1970 in favour of the pictorial plenum of photographic space and the dramatic mode apparently corresponding toit. That a printed text on a page could constitute first and foremost an experience Cf absence, the blossoming of the conditionality of what is written, of a vanishing of language, was established by Mallarmé in his preface to Un coup de dés jamais n‘abolirale hasard, the structural model for Wallace's texts. A copy of the poem depicted in /mage/Text is open on the table in the studio. In Mallarmé’s poem, itis the “whites”, the spaces between the words, which must be stressed if there is tobe a simultaneous vision of the Page”, a dialectical recognition of the absence of writing which allows Literature to come into being. Similarly, in mage!Text, the panels of writing signify above all their own —still incipient — identity as “whites”, blank panels whose emptiness alters7 fundamentally the generic nature of the accompanying photograph. With Image'Text Wallace proposes that photography exists for him aesthetically by being bonded to a passage of non-representation. This passage is other than photography, and could be conceived of as the mode of disappearance of photography, the disappearance which validates photography within a ‘Symbolist aesthetic of high interiority. Since the 1960s, Wallace had been extremely aware of the methodological significance of Warhol's work, but a direct interest in it surfaced abruptly in 1981 ‘That year, during a visit to the Westkunst exhibition in Cologne which he reviewed for Vanguard, Wallace was struck by Warhol's two-panel disaster paintings, Silver Car Crash and Orange Car Crash, both of 1963. In these works, both panels are painted the same colour, but only one has been silkscreened with Warhol's characteristically repeated images. The other is blank. Amore precise formulation of the polarity between polemical imagery and the ambiguity of the monochrome could hardly be imagined. ‘The influence of Warhol's structural and technical approach marks the paintings Wallace did in the Poverty project, begun at that time. Poverty began as a short 16 mm film, conceived of as the source for a group of stills which would become photographic prints and silkscreens. Wallace made a photographic assembly of tight such stills; a small book from these images, photocopied onto coloured papers and hand-bound; a videotape of the original film, splitting up the shots with inserts of pure colour; and a group of 20 paintings. This “multi-media approach is characteristic of Wallace's work ofthe past 15 years; inthis context, ittoo acknowledges Warho''s problematic relation to painting as expressed in the integration of that artform into the continuum ef his “enterprises.” For Wallace, Warhol's example was important not only for the reconfirmation of his own intellectual relationship to the painted canvas, but also because, although Warhol's art indulges completely in the polemical mode, it does not participate in the liberal-Left consensus. Thus, in his work, the effects of polemical representation of the existing order are muted even as images which seem open to an interpretation sympathetic to Critical Theory are presented. Warhol's effect — that of stifling the implications of the social catastrophes he was compelled to depict —was well-known to Wallace, and at this moment it provided him with a structural model of the polemical anti-polemicism toward which his own work was developing. Like Warhol's work, Poverty exists in a state of tension with the liberal-progressive consensus of the art world, and brings forward the expression of a doubt about the nature of that progressive consensus which is evident in more veiled form in Image’ Text. In February 1987 Wallace published an essay in Vanguard which, although it post-dates the production of Poverty by several years, provides the outline of a Critical rationale for it. mage and Alter-Image il: Roy Arden, was the second half of a study of the work of Arden and Ken Lum, two of the younger Vancouver artists whose production is informed by issues closest to Wallace’s concerns. Thus, in writing about Arden, Wallace could contemplate some of the problems buried in his own earlier work.n Roy Arden, Rupture (detail) Collection of the Vancouver Art, Gallery Wallace characterizes Arden’s work as the expression of “an outlook that is essentially melancholic and skeptical.’® In his analysis of Arden’s Rupture (1985), a work in which archival photographs of the riots and arrests of unemployed workers in Vancouver in 1938 are mounted beneath colour photos of the empty blue sky, Wallace recognizes again the collaboration of polemic and monochrome. Linking Arden’s approach to the examples of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, Wallace writes: ‘The images in Rupture, then, point to two sides of politics: that of history, 4s an ideal of emancipation which is objectified as an archival tombstone, as documents of resistance and defeat; and that of the abstract, transcendent, ahistorical plenum of the “natural”, which is embodied in actual photographs of the sky, but which also mimics an ideal, abstract, reductive, formalist tradition of modernist art. This latter tradition, in its negation of the literary, narrative and discursive image, has attempted to install a transcendent history, an amnesia of politics and an erasure of opposition, an emptiness that occupies space.® Wallace emphasizes the unreconcilability of this dialectic, its introversion and rejection of a discursive and practical resolution. He traces this in part to the excerption— the “appropriation” — of the historical images from their informational and organizational context. The practical political value of the images is muted almost o the point of silence by this excerption. This muting of the discursive potential of the image which is an outcome of its method of display is the spectacle created by Arden. Itis a Warholian effect. The inclusion of the blank half of the diptych is therefore an allegorical display of the agent which silences a dissenting political expression.n Wallace recognizes that the defeatist nature of Arden’s work is expressed above all by the presence of the monochrome pane! The “melancholic” dialectics of these images is ultimately pathetic insofar as the viewer wants to fill in the emptiness of the images and bring some form of redemption to the interpretation. But when we turn to the title of the piece (Rupture), we can ultimately sense that no healing of the fissures, ‘emerges from the dialectic of the image, and perhaps there may be no redeeming suture in the political sphere either.” In the structure of Arden’s work the blank field, an emblem of transcendental negativity, is obliged to display its own socially questionable character in the starkness of its conflict with the partisan representation of oppression and revolt. By this means, Arden quite candidly makes perceptible his own sense of the socially questionable nature of his art. His situation is one of incurable disharmony and unrest which is unable to break from immobility, and which sees this distressed stasis as the only authentic position. Both art and the artist are incriminated in the structure of the work itself. Thus, a final and despairing phase of the avant-garde autocritique of artis formulated: the artist recognizes the insoluble nature of social contradictions and is mortified by that recognition. For Arden, it appears that the ethical world of art is crucified on the horns of the dilemma which mysticism and productivism oblige the artist to confront. Wallace places Arden in this position through a sympathetic critique, and delineates precisely the predicament which he himself wishes to avoid. For Wallace, artis in fact not a socially questionable institution, and this is a typically Symbolist position. For him, itis rather society itself, the root of polemical imagery, which is socially questionable. The creative, hermeneutic, hermetic process of this aesthetic, by its inner nature, is capable of realizing the harmoniousness which class society has repudiated and disavowed. From the ‘Symbolist point of view, artis objectively ideal and objectively valid and the social order is not. Art's validity is proven over and over again by its fe the creation of Language, and the image is, in Symbolist terms, a phenomenon of Language. Mallarmé's Objective Idealism was precisely the consequence of his unprecendented study of Hegel in the early 1860s, and his symbolism is Objective Idealism in which Hege''s Absolute Spirit is withdrawn from the public Imperium and identified with the private regime of poesis. Here stands the mirror of lgitur. The Symbolist aesthetic insists therefore that any contact with polemical figuration ruins the special nature of art. Its transcendent essence is precisely that which could not co-exist with the debased representations emitted by social conflict. But the indifference of escapism is contradicted in the utopian view of humanity implied in the notion of survivability of the artistic essence. The vision of the survival of what is most fragile and precious is, at bottom, a fate morgana of the transformation of the world. In this sense the Symbolist aesthetic is a weapon of the weak, and a form of ineffable refusal. For Wallace, the “mute ides!” of the blank surface, rather than arraigning itself, expresses the sublime refusal of the unwinnable struggle, a strategy essentialB for survival. Artis to be preserved as inwardness for the foreseeable future, and this future stretches back to the fin-de-siécle. Superficial critics (who are always agents of the Imperium in their apostasy in regard to Language) see this introversion as a social defeat for an artistic ideal. But, for the Symbolist, itis within the cells ofthis defeat that the ideal of art preserves itself as the cipher of human potential, unknowable, utopian and real. Symbolism is the sublimation of the introversion of those who recognize the objectivity of defeat but not its permanence. Sollittle do the monochrome grounds in Wallace's Poverty paintings function as incriminations of the supervening representations that the works have been looked at as cynical decorativism. This response tends to overestimate the affinity with Warhol, and misses the movement in which Wallace recovers the ideal potential of the radical monochrome with which his work began. In this process of recovery, Wallace moves to adjust the generic nature of the imagery. His problem is to construct an image, or an image-type, which does not incriminate or polomicize. Such an image permits the rescue of the “mute ideal of inwardness and the recovery of the radical ambiguity of the monochrome. Poverty extends the introversion of /mage/Text into the streets. Externalized introversion —the modern spectacle par excellence — here takes the generic form of the idyll. The idyllic, the dreamy, pastoral and placid depiction of social relations exists as an undercurrent in most of Wallace's work of the 1970s, reaching a conscious expression in the “grand machines" of 1979. The traditional setting of the idyll is rustic and picturesque, a bucolic nook far from the city, its conflicts and its “heroism of modern life”. Its drama is usually a love story. In Poverty, the idyllic mode is applied to the representation of the homeless vagrants whose image is conventionally registered in the polemical manner. This urbanized rusticity was elaborated first in /mage! Text, in the figure of the ‘monumentalized Irish peasant woman. Poverty’s indistinct, reprocessed film frames construct a Victorian city, and a view of things reminiscent of the work of an early photographer like Charles Négre, one of Wallace's favorites. Although the heartlessness of the environment is acknowledged in the typology of the setting, the behaviour of the figures conforms to the idyllic conventions, Bliss appears in the two images of the couple reclining in flowering weeds, in the serene browsing of the young girl on piles of trash, and the man in the overcoat, ‘engrossed in a book. These scenes contrast across the horizon of the work with others in which the characters seem more abruptly abandoned to their fates, but the contrast is muted because the abandonment is not resisted or lamented. Wallace's vagrants are arranged like the pastoral rustics who abide among the sedentary ruins of antique architecture in traditional treatments of the genre. ‘Thus, where Arden displays a speci moment of concrete social conflict, and thereby produces his dilemma, Wallace carefully extinguishes the specificity of his representational panels by means of an erudite and recondite methodology. The imageis cancelled as polemical construction and appears in the work as its determinate negation, its Other."a Wallace recognizes conceptually the dangers and attractions of this procedure: ‘The mood of defeat that pervades the archival photos becomes more acute in relation to the repeated image of the blue sky that overhangs them like an oppressive mockery of the suffering they depict. The cheerful indifference of the blue sky forms an antipode, a transcendental signifier accountable to nothing, and which the tragedy below will not change. It also offers an erasure, an amnesia of the historical image of social tragedy made possible by casting one's eye to the sky in an act of contemplation or despair. In either case, its a release from the contingencies of the world.”” ‘The presence of the image of “the tragedy below”’is the specific condition under which the image of the sky's emptiness becomes cruel, “a transcendental signifier accountable to nothing’. The brutality of actual social indifference and oppression which Arden exposes and broods over (even as he, following the lead of Bataille, mythologizes it into a force of nature) casts the shadow of remorse and powerless indignation over the sublime vastness and serenity of the heavens. We are obliged to perceive that the desire for sublimity may itself ‘emerge from real social indifference, and become its banner, a screen for repressive acquiescence which is always smoothed over with mollifluous evocations of “inevitability” and “just cause”. But where Arden brings the sublime to book, Wallace seems to wish to rescue it from the service of cruelty, to which polemical figuration has condemned it. In Poverty, by bonding his monochromes to the idyllic, Wallace proposes a kind of redemption for the transcendental hieroglyph. In this process, the Symbolist character of the monochrome ground is. preserved. The blank surfaces bearing the images cannot be perceived as. having annulled the political protest of the scenes because the scenes have been designed to contain no such protest. Wallace dissociates himself from the conventional imagery of protest in honour of a utopian cipher of introversion. ‘The montage in Poverty, having rejected the self-accusatory spectacle of Left-liberal vanguardism, appears as its inner antithesis, the spectacle of, reconciliation, inhabitation, and preservation. Poverty is the culmination of a long process in which Wallace seems to disconnect his art from social realism, and possibly even to a concept of social truth. The return of the monochrome as a structural element not only expresses the desire for “release from the contingencies of the world” and a restoration of transcendental and formalist aesthetics. Its manner of restoration is itself vanguardist; thatis, itis organized as acrisis, not a triumph; an experiment, not a homecoming. The social and historical content of the dialectic of the monochrome, its neo-productivist potential, also necessarily makes its re-appearance at the moment of happy synthesis, and it disturbs the moment. The monumental composure of Wallace's works of the past few years rests comfortably on the cushion of restoration. That composure is vexed by polemic, its memory.10, 0. Notes |. CF Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)", Lenin and Philasophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster {London: New Left Books, 1971): 127-186, . Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Neile Toroni: Lindex de la Peinture, translated by Claude Gintz (Brussels: Editions Daled, 1985): 36. . Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Ready-Made, photographie et peinture dans la peinture de Gerhard Richter”, exhibition catalogue for Gerhard Richter (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1977): $8. Ibid. 9. Buchloh, Neile Toroni, 44 Ibi +39, . Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, catalogue preface for /an Wallace: Work 1979 exhibition (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1979). . lan Wallace, “Image and Alter-Image ll: Ray Arden", Vanguard, Vol. 16, No. 1 (February/March 1987): 25. Ibid.: 25-26. Ibid: 26. Ibid: 25,76 BIOGRAPHY Jan Wallace was born in Shoreham, England, ‘August 25, 1943, of Canadian parents. He has been ‘a Canadian resident since 1944 and a resident of Vancouver, British Columbia since 1952. From 1965 on he has been active as an artist exhibiting painting and photographic murals, as well as writing on art. He received his Masters of ArtHistory from the University of British Columbia, in 1968 with a thesis on Piet Mondrian: The Evolution of Neo -Plasticism 1910-1920. He has held positions of instructor in Art History at the Fine Arts Department at the University of British Columbia from 1967-1970 and at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design from 1972 to the present. LIST OF WORKS ‘STREET PHOTOS 1970 three black and white photographs dimensions: 12.5% 9 cm each collection: the artist ‘SKETCH FOR STREET REFLECTIONS 1970 black and white photographs on cardboard dimensions: 41 x 16cm collection: the artist PAN-AM SCAN 1970 black and white photographs dimensions: 203 x 122m collection: the artist UNTITLED 1971 black and white photographic enlargements dimensions: 162 x 102m collection: the artist MAGAZINE PIECE 1971 photographic enlargements documenting the 1971 installation dimensions: 51 x 64 em each collection: the artist” LAMELANCOLIE DE LA RUE 1973 hand-coloured black and white photomurals dimensions: 119x515 cm collection: Vancouver Art Gallery ‘THE SUMMER SCRIPT & II 1974 hand-coloured black and white photomurals overall dimensions 119 x 20.4 m collection: Winnipeg Art Gallery, Canada Council Art Bank ‘AN ATTACK ON LITERATURE | & 1975 hand-coloured black and white photomurals overall dimensions 119 x 20.4 m collection: Canada Council Art Bank HYPNEROTOMACHIA (THE STAIRCASE) 1977 black and white photographs dimensions: 36 x 144.cm collection: the artist COLOURS OF THE AFTERNOON 1979 hand-coloured black and white photomural dimensions: 92 x730 cm collection: the artist LooKouT 1979 hand-coloured black and white photomural dimensions: .91 x 14.64m collection: Vancouver Art Gallery Lookout 1979 seven pencil tracings on paper dimensions: 51 x57.em each collection: the artist IMAGEITEXT 1979 hand-coloured black and white photomural dimensions: 274 x 548 cm collection: Vancouver Art Gallery POVERTY 1980 eight lithographic studies dimensions: 17 x25cm each collection: the artist POVERTY 1980 black and white photomural dimensions: 81 x8.9 m collection: Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa (notin exhibition) POVERTY 1981 Xerox book dimensions: 21 x 14em78 POVERTY 1982 eight canvases with acrylic and silkscreened image dimensions: 183 x 122cm each collection: the artist ‘AT WORK 1983 Kodalith collage ‘dimensions: 58 x 66 cm collection: the artist ATWORK 1983 cibachrome photograph imensions: 12.5 x 18cm collection: the artist AT WORK 1983 grease pencil on paper dimensions: 132x 178 cm collection: the artist PORTRAIT GALLERY 11984 twelve cibachrome photographs ‘dimensions: (1) 23 x 38 cm (11) 23 x 15 om overall length 9:14 m collection: The Art Gallery of Ontario FROM THE GLYPTOTHEK 1984 eight cibachrome photographs dimensions: 28 x 36 cm each collection: the artist FROM THE PINAKOTHEK 1984 eight cibachrome photographs jimensions: 28 x 36 cm each collection: the artist 1900 1984 eight cibachrome photographs and silkscreen dimensions: 112x 142 om collection: the artist INTHE STUDIO 1984 four lithographs dimensions: 66 x 102.cm each collection: the artist INTHE STUDIO ‘type dimensions: 62 x 63 cm collection: the artist INTHE STUDIO 1984 schema tracings dimensions: 36 x71 cm each 1984INTHE STUDIO. 11984 pencil drawing on vellum dimensions: 48 x 62cm collection: the artist, STUDIO/MUSEUM/STREET 1988 black and white photomurals with acrylic on canvas dimensions: 1§3 x 117 cm each collection: the artist, ‘STUDIO/MUSEUMISTREET 11986 three layout drawings dimensions: 28 x 43cm each collection: the artist ‘MY HEROES IN THE STREET 1986 ten lithographs with colour photographs dimensions: 38 x 56cm each courtesy: The Canadian Photographic Portfolio Society ‘THE IMPERIAL CITY 1986 black and white photomurals with plexiglass. panels: each 244 x61 cm private collection, Toronto. MY HEROES IN THE STREET 1987 colour photomurals with acrylic on canvas. three canvases dimensions: 183 x 360 cm each courtesy: The Ydessa Art Foundation (canvas #3) UNTITLED (HEAVENLY EMBRACE) 1987 two panels of colour photomurals. imensions: 244 x 101 cm each ‘two panels of black and white photomurals, dimensions: 244 x 61 cm each collection: the artist, ORANGE PAINTING WITH IMAGE 1987 black and white photomural with acrylic on canvas dimensions: 163 x 163 cm collection: Sandy Dennis, Vancouver OLYMPIA & IL 1987 black and white photographs dimensions: 43 x30 em each cibachrome photographs dimensions: 23 x 15 cm each collection: the artist (not in exhibition)80 ‘SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 1974 Fine Arts Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. Curated by Kathleen Byrne. 1975 Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario. Curated by Alvin Balkind and Roald Nasgaard. 1976 Pender Street Gallery, Vancouver, B.C. Curated by Willard Holmes and Kathleen Byrne. 1978 Nova Gallery, Vancouver, B.C. Curated by Claudia Beck and Andrew Grutt 1979 Nova Gallery, Vancouver, B.C., Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, B.C. Curated by Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker. 1980 Optica Gallery, Montreal, Quebec. Curated by Richard Buchanan. 1982 David Bellman Gallery, Toronto, Ontario. 1983 OR Gallery, Vancouver, B.C. 1984 OR Gallery, Vancouver, B.C. 1986 Cold City Gallery, Toronto, Ontario. 1987 Rudiger Schattle Gallery, Munich, West Germany. SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 1969 Photo Show: Art as Photography, S.U.B. Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. Curated by Christos Dikeakos. 1970 Four Artists: Tom Burrows, Duane Lunden, Jeff Wall, lan Wallace, Fine ‘Arts Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. ‘Sound Show, Fine Arts Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. 1971 80° N- 73° W: Recent Conceptual Art, Sit George Wiliams University, Montreal, Quebec, and the Saidye Bronfman Cultural Centre, Montreal, ‘Quebec. Curated by Gary Coward and William Vazen. Collage Show, Fine Arts Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 8.C. Curated by Christos Dikeakos, Videotape and photographs exhibited in conjunction with Poetry Must Be Made By All, Vancouver Art Gallery, ‘Vancouver, B.C. Curated by Ronald Hunt. 1972 Due West, Burnaby Art Gallery, Burnaby, B.C. Curated by Gary Lee-Nova, 1973 Trajectoires ‘73, Musoum of Modern Art of the City of Paris. Curated by Suzanne Pagé and Pierre Gaudibert. Pacific Vibrations, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, B.C. Curated by Willard Holmes. West Coast Kinesis, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria, B.C. Curated by Illyas Pagonis. 1975 Narrative in Contemporary Art, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Curated by Judith Nasby.1977 Australia Exchange, group show touring Australia. Organized by the Pender Street Gallery, Vancouver, B.C. From This Point of View, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, B.C. Curated by Alvin Balkind and Peter Malkin, 1978 Photoléxtended Dimensions (Winnipeg Perspective 1978), Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg, Manitoba. Curated by Karyn Allen. 1983 Photographic Sequences, Art Gallery of Peterborough, Peterborough, Ontario. Curated by Jann Bailey. 1984 Photo Expansions, Open Space Gallery, Victoria, B.C. Curated by Helga Pakasaar. Artand Photography, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, B.C. Curated by Scott Watson. 1985 Ken Lum, Rodney Graham, Jeff Wall, lan Wallace, 49th Perallel Center for Contemporary Canadian Art, New York, New York. Curated by lan Wallace. Visual Facts, Thitd Eye Centre, Glasgow, Scotland; Graves Gallery, Sheffield; Canada House, London, England. Curated by Michael Tooby. 1986 In The Tradition of Photography, Light Gallery, New York, New York. Curated by Patrice Schorr, Vikky Alexander & lan Wallace, Coburg Gallery, Vancouver, B.C. ‘Making History, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, B.C. Vancouver Now, Walter J. Phillips Gallery, Banff, Alberta. Curated by Manon Blanchette. Toured to London Regional Art Gallery, London, Ontario; Daribao Gallery, Montreal, Quebec; Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg, Manitoba Three Points: Twelve Views, Surrey Art Gallery, Surrey, B.C. Curated by Jane Young and Gordon Rice. Toured to Seattle Art Museum, Seattle Washington Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon. Barbara Ess, lan Wallace, James Welling, Johnen & Schéttle Gallery, Cologne, West Germany, Focus: Canada 1960-1985, Cologne International Art Fait, Cologne, West Germany. Curated by Willard Holmes. Camera Works, OR Gallery, Vancouver, B.C. Curated by Ellen Ramsay. 1987 Blow-up Zeltgeschichte, Warttembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, West Germany. Curated by Tilman Osterwold. Toured 10 Berlin, Hamburg, Hannover, Frankfurt, Lucerne, Bonn. Heavenly Embrace, Baskerville & Watson Gallery, New York, New York. Curated by Carole-Ann Klonarides, Toyama Now, Toyama Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, Japan. Curated by Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker. Stations, International Centre for Contemporary Art, Montreal, Quebec. Curated by Claude Gosselin, Gallery Artists, Cold City Gallery, Toronto, Ontario.a2 PUBLISHED WRITINGS BY IAN WALLACE “The Literature of Images", Free Media Bulletin, eds. Duane Lunden, Jeff Wall, lan Wallace. Vancouver: Intermedia Press, 1969. “Terry Reid: Recent Sculpture”, artscanada, Vol. 27, No. 4 (August 1970): 58-59, Glen Toppings Remembered", YVR, No. 2 (March 1978): 4-6. “Revisionism and its Discontents”, Vanguard, Vol. 10, No. 7 (September 1981): 12-9, The Era of Judgement: Tho 7th Documenta”, Vanguard, Vol. 11, No. 9/10 (December 1982/January 1983): 12-16, Literature — Transparent and Opaque’, catalogue essay for Concrete Poetry: An exhibition in four parts, The Fine Arts Gallery, U.B.C Vancouver, March 1968, Reprinted in Avant-Garde Tradition in Literature, ed. Richard Kostelanetz. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1982. “Jeff Wall”, exhibition catalogue for The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Chicago, January, 1983. “Canada: anyone, anywhere, anything’, Flash Art, No. Il (March 1983): 52-56. Reprinted in The International Trans-avantgarde, ed. Achille Bonito Oliva. Milan: Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1982. “David MacWilliam: Painting in Spite of Art”, catalogue essay for David MacWilliam exhibition. Victoria: Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, October 1983. (Reprinted in Vanguard, Vol. 12, No. 10, December 1983/January 1984): 22. “Dan Graham at the David Bellman Gallery, Toronto”, Vanguard, Vol. 12, No. 7 (September 1983): 56. “Geoffrey James at the Coburg Gallery, Vancouver”, Vanguard, Vol. 12, No.7 (September 1983): 50. “Jeff Wall's Transparencies”, catalogue essay for Jeff Wall — Transparencies exhibition. London: Institute of Contemporary Art; Kunsthalle: Basel, 1984 ‘Ricochet”, catalogue essay for an exhibition of Vancouver Art called Ricochet at Sala Uno, Rome, italy, June 1986. Image and Alter-Image: Ken Lum”, Vanguard, Vol. 15, No.6 (ecember 1986/January 1987): 22-25. “image and Alter-Image ll: Roy Arden”, Vanguard, Vol. 16, No. 1 (February/March 1987): 24-27 “The Megalopolis of Modern Art” catalogue essay for Artropolis exhibition, Vancouver: Vancouver Artists League and the Unit 306 Society, 1987, ‘A Vanitas in Motion’, catalogue essay for Robert Kleyn exhibition. Rome: Canadian Cultural Institute, 1987 ‘SELECTED PUBLISHED WRITINGS ON IAN WALLACE Art Gallery of Peterborough. Photographic Sequences, exhibition catalogue, curator, Jann LM. Bailey, March 1983. (repro.) Beck, Claudia. “Through the Looking Glass: Vancouver Photography in the Seventies” catalogue essay for Vancouver: Art and Artists 1931-1983 exhibition, Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1984. (repro.) Birnie Danzker, Jo-Anne. Catalogue preface for lan Wallace Work 1979, exhibition, Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1979,e———————— Burnett, David, and Schiff, Marilyn. Contemporary Canadian Art Earmonton: Hurtig, in co-operation with the Art Gallery of Ontario (1983): 209-210. Cameron, Eric. “Semiology, Sensuousness and lan Wallace”, Artforum, Vol. 17,No. 6 (February 1979): 30-33. repro.) Emery, Tony. “lan Wallace”, artscanada, lssue No. 232/233 (December 1979/January 1980): 73. (repro.) Gale, Peggy. “Outsiders in: West Coast Perspectives from Jeff Wall and lan Wallace’ Canadian Art, Vol. 4, No. 2(Summer 1987): 56-61. (repro.! Genereux, Linda. “lan Wallace at Cold City Gallery, Toronto”, Vanguard, Vol. 16, No. 1 (February/March 1987): 30-31. repro.) Gopnik, Irwin and Gopnik, Myrna. “The Semantics of Concept Art”, artscanada, Issue No. 154/155 (April May 1971): 61-63. (repro.) MacWilliams, David, “Allegorical Imperatives: lan Wallace at the Nova Gallery”, YVR, No.1 January 1978); 15-17 (repro.) Miller, Earl, “Ian Wallace”, C Magazine, No. 13 (April 1987): 65-66. (repro.) Osterwold, Tilman, ed. “Blow-upiZeitgeschichte”, catalogue essay for Blow-up exhibition. Stuttgart: Warttembergischer Kunstverein, 1987. (repro.) Pinney, Marguerite. “Duane Lunden and lan Wallace", artscanada, Issue No. 120/121 (august 1968): 34. (repro.) Rhodes, Richard, “lan Wallace”, Vanguard, Vol. 1, No.7 (September 1982): 26. (repro) Serafin, Bruce. “Glamour and Prose”, C Magazine, No. 10 (Summer 1986): 56-57. (repro Thompson, Ellen. “lan Wallace at the OR Gallery, Vancouver", Vanguard, Vol. 12, No.5 (Summer 1983): 48. (repro.) Town, Elke, “We Like to Imagine”, Photo Communique, Vol.8, No. 3 (Fall 1986): 8-13. Townsend, Charlotte. “Photo Show", artscanade, Issue No. 144/145 (June 1970): 48. Vazan, William, “Survey 69", Vie Des Arts, No. 56 (Autumn 1969): 60-61. repro.) Watson, Scott, Catalogue essay for Art and Photography exkibition. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1984. (repro) Wheeler, Dennis. “Limits of the Defeatured Landscape: A Review of Four Artists", artscanada, Issue No. 144/145 (June 1970): 5-52. Willams Fraser, Judy. “Collage Show”, artscanada, Issue No. 156/157 (June/July 1971): 80, PUBLIC COLLECTIONS Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg aCopyright © 1988 Vancouver Art Gallery Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby Street Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6Z2H7 Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Dikeakos, Christos. lan Wallace: selected works, 1970-1987 Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Vancouver ‘Art Gallery Feb. 5- Apr. 3, 1988. ISBN 0-920095-65-8 41. Wallace, lan, 1943 —— Exhibitions. |, Wallace, lan, 1843—Il Wall, Jeff, 1946 — li, Vancouver Art Gallery. IV. Title. TR47W34 1988 779',092'4 C88-091031-3 Photography credits by page number: lan Wallace: 29, 35, 47,52, 53, 59 Jim Jardine Vancouver Art Gallery: 21,23, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, Christos Dikeakos: 9 Tod Greenaway: 30, 31 Reinhard Triickenmiller for the Warttembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart: 41 . Courtesy of 49th Parallel Center for Contemporary Canadian Art: 45 Courtesy of David Bellman Gallery: 46 Courtesy of Winnipeg Art Gallery: 55 Courtesy of Baskerville & Watson Gallery: 58 Courtesy of Centre International d’Art Contemporain: 58 Jeff Wall: 64 Catalogue lay-out: lan Wallace Design consultants: Reinhard Derreth Graphics Lithopreparation: Reinhard Derreth Graphics ‘Typesetting: PolaGraphics Colour Separations: Tri-Scan Printing: Hemlock Printers, Binding: Coast Trade Bindery Printed in Canada