Jeff Wall Everyday Life Essay

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7. Choose a contemporary photographer (someone who is written about) who makes work about everyday life. Address what you understand by ‘everyday life’ by researching the phrase. Is the photographer’s work documentary or constructed? Justify your answer. What ideas is he or she working with and how do these ideas address everyday life? THESIS: Jeff Wall creates fictionalised, highly constructed “everyday life” images. Jeff Walls pictures are cibachrome transparencies presented on fluorescent illuminated light boxes. Their large almost life size scale fascinates the viewer with the deliberately constructed world which seems familiar, to the spectator resembles everyday life. Walls art draws on structured masterpieces to demonstrate …show more content…

The architecture of performance and art in Wall’s pictures, through the presentation of the transparency medium, displayed on a light box affirming another world, projected. Suggesting a privacy from within to the outside. Opposing between the self and society. “Staking an art-into-life claim as a neo-avantgarde,”7 that art be reintegrated in the praxis of life. Wall’s works critique of that spectacle. The viewer experiences the event as a record of the restaged social situations to a level of spectacularity. Discussing his work Wall explains: ‘Slowly, I have come to feel that meaning is almost completely unimportant. Because of our education in art over the last 20 or 30 years, people expect to relate to art by understanding it, by apprehending what it means. But I may have returned to an older, simpler point of view, namely that we don’t need to understand art, we need only to fully experience it. Then we will live with the consequences of that experience, or those experiences, and that will be how art affects …show more content…

Joe Moran, Reading The Everyday (New York: Routledge, 2005),19 11. Thierry de Duve, Pelenc, and Boris Groys. Jeff Wall (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1996), 127. Bibliography Cotton, Charlotte. The Photograph As Contemporary Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2004. De Duve, Groys, and Arielle Pelenc. Jeff Wall. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1996. Herzog, Jacques, and Jeff Wall. Pictures of Architecture, Architecture of Pictures: A Conversation Between Jacques Herzog and Jeff Wall. New York: Springer, 2004. Martin, Stewart. “Wall’s Tableau Mort.” Oxford Art Journal 30, no.1 (2007): 117- 133. Accessed May 22, 2014. doi:10.1093/oxartj/kc1036. Michel, Regis. “White Negro: Jeff Wall’s Uncle Tom On the Obscenity of Photopantomine,” Oxford Art Journal 30, no.1 (2007): 55-68. doi 10.1093/oxartj/kc1032. Moran, Joe. Reading The Everyday. New York: Routledge, 2005. Oxford Art Online. “The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms,” http://www.oxfordartonline.com:80/subscriber/article/opr/t4/e774 Stimson, Blake. “The Artiste.” Oxford Art Journal 30, no.1 (2007): 101-115. Accessed May 22, 2014. doi:

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