The liquid intelligence summarized by Jeff Wall is a "medium" — the vehicle by which the different stages of an image’s metamorphosis or transformation are preserved. This reference to an image’s liquid state, hence to its renewable mobility, introduces an incalculable or unforeseen element into the process of image making. In this liquidity, we grasp the often-indescribable "movement" that fuels the imagination like the hidden face of the still image. Behind this movement lies the symbolic power of water evoking the visuality and mobility of moods and visions; the unconscious, or that which can pass unseen or elude control; and a gaping space for memory. "In photography, the liquids study us, even from a great distance."7 Liquidity also relates to memory, the unconscious, the unspeakable, the bottomless depths. It may be superfluous to recall that one of the founding myths of representation, Narcissus observing himself, is intimately linked to a watery plane where an image is reflected — the double of the figure leaning over this mirrored surface, to which The Smoker (1986) seems to refer, the plane of water replaced here by the glass surface on a circular table.
7.
Jeff Wall, "Photography and Liquid Intelligence, 1989", Jeff
Wall, London: Phaidon Press, 1996, p. 93. The artist defines the
role of water on a technical level (references to stages in the development
of film, the developer, stop and fixer baths), and then in dialectical
opposition to what might be considered natural. He also makes a distinction
between the liquid intelligence and dry intelligence of photography
that he associates with mechanical and optical aspects (lens, iris,
shutter)
The vocabulary of optics is full of aquatic terms. For example, because
glass is liquid in its molten state and after, a defect in a lens glass
that has the effect or form of a ridge or bulge is called a "wave".
It is not surprising to find Jeff Wall fascinated by the mobility inherent in water — a paradoxical element if there is one, both transparent and reflective, a little like photography. We know he has scanned the mirrored surface of the photograph; he has made us believe in its transparency and he now investigates the very tenuousness of the photographic support. What interests me here is linking this presence of water in Jeff Wall’s work to a concern for- or an obsession with transparent and reflective surface, the invisible wall between image and observer.8 To manipulate the photograph is to come up against notions of the screen and the medium’s transparency. One of images that best reveals this confrontation of contradictory concepts is certainly Picture for Women (1979), in which the image occurs where gazes and planes intersect.9 Jeff Wall conceived this photograph so the mirror retains the image and is simultaneously transparent and reflective. This work exemplifies his practice in this meeting of planes affirming a flattening of pictorial space, worked around a network of gazes. His exploration of flatness continues to materialize in works where digital manipulations play a key role, and about which the artist remains extremely discreet regarding his working method.
8.
Water
is manifested in various ways in Wall’s work. I am not interested
in developing an inventory of the manifestations of liquid in his images
but in pointing out affinities between certain properties of water and
of photography. Watery surfaces are frequent, for example in The
Drain (1989), where one of the two girls seems literally to walk
on the surface of the water; in terms of subject, composition and in the
dull atmosphere of the site, this photograph is a startling allusion to
Porte
Dauphine. Les Fossés des Fortifications, XVle arrt.,
a photograph by Eugène Atget of 1913. In Coastal
Motifs (1989) or A
Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai) (1993), the plane of water
introduces horizontality, penetrating the image’s depth. On a more
metaphorical level, there is the mirror image of faces looking at each
other in The
Children's Pavilion (1989). Water is switched for another,
more opaque fluid: blood, in The
Vampires' Picnic or Dead
Troops Talk... or milk in Milk (1984), the liquid here
literally suspended in time..
9. Thierry de Duve brilliantly commented on the device in Picture for Women by indicating the compression of planes in this image, a principle Jeff Wall has explored for years. "It is the work with which Wall has once and for all made visible the invisibility of the picture plane in photography, while also respecting it. His solution is literally to have made a mirror capable of holding the image, a mirror which is never opaque (something photography cannot be), purpose is simultaneously transparent and reflective." Thierry de Duve, "The Mainstream and the Crooked Path", Jeff Wall, London: Phaidon Press, 1996, p. 30.
Here, it is not so much the liquid as the form the milk occupies in space that seems to concern the artist, who is attracted by the motion of the liquid, captured before it loses its shape — suspended animation, display and deformation. Jello (1995) shows liquid in another state, as does A Sunflower (1995) where the shape of a glass plate on a kitchen counter recalls a photograph by William Edgerton. Finally, we notice the manifest absence of water in the search for a spring in a desert environment, The Well (1989); or a sink, just as dry, in Diagonal Composition (1993). (References to photographs by Eugène Atget and William Edgerton in connection with Jeff Wall’s works were pointed out by Alain Depocas.)