‘Poor Ass!’ (A Donkey in Blackpool, 1999)
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‘Poor Ass!’ (A Donkey in Blackpool, 1999) Steve Edwards
1. The exhibition ran from 14 June to September, 2000; it was accompanied by a catalogue: Richard Morphet (ed.), Encounters: New Art from Old (National Gallery: London, 2000). 2. In the late 1970s Wall made a series of highly original moves: (i) he combined the avant-garde film theory, current at the time, with attention to the morphology of art works. While other artists – Victor Burgin being a key example – were also preoccupied with debates on cinema and ideology, Wall shifted from the predominantly French model of theory that underpinned these concerns to a concern with the dialectics of reification in German Marxism; (ii) possibly under the impetus of Frederic Jameson’s ‘Reflections in Conclusion’ to the volume Aesthetics and Politics (Ernst Bloch et al., New Left Books: London, 1977), he inflected this avant-garde discourse through what might be called, a Luka´ csian mise en sce`ne. The effect was to generate a project based on a synthesis of avant-garde concerns, Adorno’s social philosophy, Luka´ cs’s idea of typification and Brecht’s characterology. The direct comparisons would seem to be with Peter Bu¨rger, Alexander Kluge and Allan Sekula. Probably, at some point in the mid or late 1990s, Wall began to take his leave of this constellation. Perhaps, I am forcing Wall’s Donkey back into the earlier configuration, but I see it as a late manifestation of the concerns that preoccupied him during the period at which his project first crystallised; in my view it is all the more intense for being late. Much of the current Wall literature seems intent on ‘forgetting’ the decisive role played by this left constellation. 3. Morphet’s catalogue essay notes that he did indeed intend to opt for the ‘naturalistic Baroque’ in the shape of Velaquez’s Christ after the Flagellation Contemplated by the Christian Soul (1628–9), but decided on the picture by Stubbs because it provided the opportunity to make a picture of a donkey, which he had long wanted to do. 4. Robin Blake, ‘A Different Form of Art: Stubbs and Rockingham’s Young Whigs in the 1760s’, Malcolm Warner and Robin Blake (eds), Stubbs and the Horse (Yale University Press: New Haven, CT, 2005), pp.43–63. See also Robin Blake, George Stubbs and the Wide Creation (Chatto & Windus: London, 2005).
Jeff Wall was one of twenty-four artists included in the exhibition Encounters: New Art from Old, held in 2000 at the National Gallery, London. In a rather academic conception of making, those selected were invited to produce an artwork in response to a picture in the Museum’s collection.1 Wall might seem like the ideal candidate for this project; he has a reputation for clothing old pictures in modern fashions. His practice can appear selfconsciously generated out of an ‘encounter’ with, what he has increasingly taken to calling, the ‘Masters’. If one prominent criticism suggests he figures as a puppet master who banishes contingency from his own spectacular performance, another view has his project as a series of lessons for the classroom. While I do not think these characterisations of Wall’s practice are entirely wrong, neither strikes me as sufficiently mediated. My essay considers Wall’s specific type of encounter – a photographer, looking and thinking about the history of painting, but also looking and thinking as a photographer; a photographer looking and thinking about the social world.2 This kind of vision entails a dialogic engagement with other images. Here, I take as my point of departure, the conjuncture suggested by Wall’s National Gallery encounter. In responding to the National Gallery’s invitation, Wall did not opt for those artists that are usually associated with his conception of the ‘Western Picture’ – Caravaggio, Velazquez or Manet. Instead, he chose a picture of a horse by George Stubbs.3 This painting – Whistlejacket – is one of the Museum’s most popular images (apparently, it is the best-selling National Gallery postcard) (Fig. 19). Whistlejacket appears to be an odd choice for Wall and it is a very odd image consisting of a rearing horse set on a plain ground. The merest shadow from the hind hooves prevents the life-size animal from floating in space and attaches it to some imaginative, absent earth. In confronting this picture Wall was prompted to produce A Donkey in Blackpool (Fig. 20). It is, among other things, a good joke. Before we come to Wall’s photograph we need to consider briefly Stubbs’s picture. In about 1762, when he painted the small palomino stallion Whistlejacket for its owner Charles Watson-Wentworth, the second Marquess of Rockingham, Stubbs was the horse painter of choice to the Whig aristocracy. In the 1760s a gang of powerful and vastly wealthy young Whigs coalesced around Rockingham.4 They were to form the British Government in 1765, with Rockingham as Prime Minister (a position he would hold again, briefly, in 1782). As the well known jibe has it, with the single exception of their inheritance, the English aristocracy care more for their horses than anything else. Nevertheless, the horse played an especially significant role in the imagination of the young Whig notables. I want to suggest that the selective breeding of racehorses stood, for these men, as a synecdoche for agrarian capitalism, in which improving intervention in nature conveyed ideas of progress and profit.5 The selective breeding of Arab, or ‘Barb’, stallions with English brood mares (themselves the product of selective breeding)
# The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcl026
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5. I follow the perspective in Marxist historiography that suggests that capitalism took root in England as an agrarian formation. This is a complex debate, but we can say that the market and patterns of credit dependency, rather than ‘machinofacture’, provided the impetus for English capitalism. Whig improving land owners – no less than London merchants or Manchester factory men – played a key role in this process. See E.P. Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (Merlin: London, 1978), pp. 35– 91; T.H. Ashton (ed.), The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1987); Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: a Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (Verso: London, 1991); Origins of Capitalism: a Longer View (Verso: London, 2002). The common point of departure is Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1963). The literature is now vast. For selective breeding and agricultural capital in a later period see: Morris Berman, Social Change and Scientific Organisation: The Royal Institution 1799–1844 (Heinemann: London, 1978).
Fig. 19. George Stubbs, Whistlejacket, oil on canvas, 292 246.4 cm, c.1762, Photo # The National Gallery, London.
produced a line of racehorses that were faster over short distances than anything previously known. While no spectacular racer, Whistlejacket exemplified this process: he was only two generations from what are termed the ‘foundation sires’ – in his case the Godolphin Arabian. Alex Potts has argued that the ‘distinctive period trope’ of neo-classical animal painting entailed making ‘animals into visual signs of their owners’.6 It matters, in this context, that Whistlejacket is not just a horse belonging to an aristocrat, but also an aristocratic horse. For an elite that made so much of breedin’ (an ancestral line extending back to the Norman dukes being the ultimate status attribute), this animal represents its owner.7 There is some dispute about the unusual cut-out character of Whistlejacket, it is probable, though, that what has come down to us as an equine image was originally conceived as an equestrian portrait.8 In 1795 Ozias Humphry, artist, friend and biographer of Stubbs, recorded that Rockingham: intended that his present majesty should have been represented [mounted on Whistlejacket] by the best portrait painter, and the Landscape back ground by the best artist in that branch of painting: hoping by an union of talents to possess a picture of the highest excellence as a companion to one of a similar subject of the late King by Moriere, to hang in the great Hall at Wentworth House, the Marquis’s seat in Yorkshire.9
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6. Alex Potts, ‘Natural Order and the Call of the Wild: the Politics of Animal Picturing’, The Oxford Art Journal, vol. 13, no. 1, 1990, p. 15. 7. Wall’s anthropology, which positions the animal as absolute Other, outside any form of human solidarity or social order, may present a barrier to this kind of reading, but as Potts demonstrates, this is a modern conception: Whistlejacket belongs to a different conceptual ordering of the natural and social (Potts, ‘Natural Order and the Call of the Wild . . .’). Wall’s argument is cited in Theodora Vischer and Heidi Naef (eds), Jeff Wall, Catalogue Raisonne´ (Schaulager: Basel/Steidl Verlag: Go¨ttingen, 2005), p. 336. One impetus for my account comes from Caroline Arscott’s ‘Sentimentality in Victorian Paintings’ in G. Waterfield (ed.), Art for the People (Dulwich Picture Gallery: London, 1994), pp. 64– 81. 8. The most prominent dissenter from this view is Judy Egerton, George Stubbs 1724–1806 (Tate Gallery: London, 1984), p. 60. Her argument that this is an aesthetic decision is gaining credence, but I find it unconvincing. 9. Ozias Humphry, ‘Particulars of the Life of Mr Stubbs’, manuscript (c.1795), transcribed with notes by Helen Macintyre in Nicholas H.J. Hall, Fearful Symmetry: George Stubbs. Painter of the English Enlightenment (Hall and Knight: New York, 2000), p. 205.
‘Poor Ass!’
Fig. 20. Jeff Wall, A Donkey in Blackpool, transparency in lightbox, 195 244 cm, 1999.
Fig. 21. David Morier, George II on horseback, oil on canvas, 288.3 240 cm, c.1745, The Royal Collection # 2006, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
This makes sense. Whistlejacket is almost identical in size and proportion to the equestrian portrait of King George II, painted by the Swiss artist David Morier in around 1745 – a picture that was also in Rockingham’s possession (Fig. 21). As the premier painter of nags, Stubbs was probably commissioned to play his part in ‘an union of talents’ by contributing the horse for a composite equestrian portrait of George III.10 By mounting the King on Whistlejacket, Rockingham would have proclaimed an important social connection. (If we follow the logic of Potts’s argument, Rockingham would have carried the King on his own back.) Humphry’s suggestion also adds up thematically and formally. The horse depicted rearing to command is a key trope in the equestrian portrait, signifying the rider’s control over the forces of nature. Inspection of the painting reveals that the ground was applied first: paint drips and splatter from the subsequent work appear all over its surface. Stubbs, then, did not paint out previously completed areas. It also seems unlikely that he would have worked up an equine portrait to this level of finish, prior to adding a landscape, or whatever – there is nothing in his practice to suggest a procedure of this kind. Humphry famously proffered a Zeuxis mytheme as an explanation for the peculiar OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.1 2007 43
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appearance of this work; he suggested that Rockingham decided to leave the picture in its ‘unfinished’ state when Whistlejacket had tried to attack his own likeness.11 It is much more likely, as the gothic novelist Horace Walpole noted, that Rockingham abandoned his plan for a portrait of George III because the young Whigs had moved into political opposition, adopting an anti-court stance.12 (Isolating the animal certainly has the effect of a metonymically centring Rockingham, rather than the King.) We can imagine that this cut-out or composite construction of a picture from fragments and details would appeal to Wall. Stubbs’s procedure of making studies from horses that would then be placed, somewhat ambiguously, in the landscape, or his tendency to combine and reuse studies from previous works, prefigures Wall’s own digitally assembled tableaux. Fragmentation and the awkward relation of parts are common to both practices. A reading could be made to turn on this parallel, but I want to focus on the patterns of class figuration suggested by Wall’s encounter with Stubbs: in the process, I touch on procedures and ways of thinking that have implications for the standard accounts of Wall’s photographs. Any reading of social class, in this context, requires at least a minimal detour through the ‘philosophical comedy’ of The Vampires’ Picnic produced in 1991 (Fig. 22). Bloodsuckers have drawn quite a lot of attention of late; partly, this focus has been generated out of renewed interest in the language of Marx’s Capital – his characterisation of capital as a vampire sucking the blood of the working class, and the distinction between ‘living’ and ‘dead labour’. In Marx’s work, the vampire is one character in a broader demonology of capital; the gothic figuration of his texts shift this way and that, but more recent writing has tried to pin down the undead, to give them a fixed social position.13 Wall has had some significant things of his own to say about modern vampirism: about the way the vampire represents the unwillingness of the old order to die, or the inheritance of ‘something corrupted and evil’ at the heart of capitalist modernity (particularly, the shaping of psychic life by ‘calculation and rationality’); he has noted the relation of vampires to the bourgeois family; their representations in mass culture, and so on.14 Wall’s account suggests a brilliant conjuncture of Dialectic of Enlightenment with the horror movie, but the picture itself contradicts much of this, because The Vampires’ Picnic seems to problematise attempts to establish a fixed social identity for vampires in late capitalism.15 Wall’s vampires are rich and poor; men and women, old and young, black and white. In fact, all the characters in this work seem interchangeable or reversible: we can easily imagine blood-suckers and their victims switching places. Vampires now come in all forms and they no longer discriminate; you cannot know in advance who the vampires are; they no longer even seem particularly drawn to virgins. In contrast to Wall’s own comments, The Vampires’ Picnic seems to unhinge, or disfigure, class accounts of culture. There is a ‘lesson’ here for those forms of art history that want to pin down figuration too determinately: attention to this picture moves us from content to, what psychoanalytically inclined film theorists call, ‘the mise en sce`ne of desire’, or to symptomatic reading. Nevertheless, the point can be overstated. Wall well knows that social class still shapes life chances and choices. Many of his photographs are structured by the logic of class – he is incredibly attentive to the over-looked appearance of working-class places, and to relations of class power played out at the micro-level. This is unfashionable stuff, but it is at least as important as ‘beauty’ in 44 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.1 2007
10. For a discussion see Malcolm Warner, ‘Ecce Equus: Stubbs and the Horse of Feeling’, Warner and Blake (eds), Stubbs and the Horse, p. 11 11. Humphry, ‘Particulars of the Life of Mr Stubbs’, p. 205. It should be noted that this point seems to contradict his account of the picture as a companion to the portrait of George III. 12. Walpole visited Rockingham’s country seat Wentworth Woodhouse in 1772. Like Humphry, he reported that Whistlejacket had been destined to become an equestrian portrait of the King. Horace Walpole, cited Warner, ‘Ecce Equus: Stubbs and the Horse of Feeling’, p. 14. Stubbs must have liked the effect, because he used this same blank ground in two further works in 1762: Mares and Foals and Whistlejacket and Two other Stallions, with the Groom Simon Cobb. 13. Prominent examples include: Franco Moretti, ‘Dialectic of Fear’, Signs Taken for Wonders (Verso: London, 1983); and Robin Wood, ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film’, in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods II (University of California Press: Berkeley, CA, 1985). 14. Jeff Wall, Dan Graham’s Kammerspeil (Art Metropole: Toronto, 1991), pp. 59– 66. He does note that ‘the vampire’s ‘symbolic identity is complex and goes beyond its function in this analysis’ (p. 61). 15. The pictures seem to me to be closer to the position advanced in Thomas Elsaesser’s account of German silent cinema or to that of the modern fantasy writer China Mie´ville, than to Moretti, Wood or even to Wall. See Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Social Mobility and the Fantastic: German Silent Cinema’, James Donald (ed.), Fantasy and the Cinema (BFI: London, 1989), pp. 23–38. The other key reference is Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: a Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1973). Despite the Bacchanalian reference at its heart, The Vampires’ Picnic is probably best viewed as a version of Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte (1884–86); more precisely it is a picture that takes its point of departure from the discourse in the Social History of Art on the Grande Jatte. Let me just say that in Wall’s picture, it is vampires rather than drapers’ assistants who are not quite what they seem, or where they ought, to be. Schapiro’s great 1937 essay ‘On the Nature of Abstract Art’ is, I suspect, a key text for Wall. Schapiro’s dialectic of informality and formality, spontaneity and isolation provides him with an important account of modernity and the donkey is very much in its orbit. Meyer Schapiro, ‘On the Nature of Abstract Art’ (1937), in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (Chatto & Windus: London, 1978), pp. 185–211; John House, ‘Meaning in Seurat’s
‘Poor Ass!’
Fig. 22. Jeff Wall, The Vampires’ Picnic, transparency in lightbox, 229 335 cm, 1991.
Figure Paintings’, Art History, vol. 3, no. 3, 1980, pp. 345–56; Tom Crow, Seurat (The Open University, TV 7, A315: Modern Art and Modernism, 1982); T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (Thames & Hudson: London, 1985); Paul Smith, Seurat and the Avant-Garde (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1997). 16. Tom Harrison, ‘The Fifty-Second Week: Impressions of Blackpool’, The Geographical Magazine, April 1938, pp. 387–404. The Mass Observation project was, in significant ways, a product of the British (Surrealist) left, and the published work on Blackpool is resonant with popular energy, but the conjunction of ‘Work Town’/‘Fun Town’ strikes me as an Adornian bad dream. Morphet notes that Wall visited, and ruled out, several other seaside locations before settling on Blackpool, ‘Jeff Wall’, in Encounters, p. 327. 17. Morphet, Encounters, p. 328.
accounting for Wall’s project. I want to insist on the point and suggest that A Donkey in Blackpool should be read as the necessary other pole to The Vampires’ Picnic: taken together they constitute a ‘dialectical image’ for modern experience. (The vampire picture provides us with a critical third term between Whistlejacket and A Donkey. . ..) One way to view Wall’s Donkey is as a comic debunking or ‘uncrowning’ of Stubbs’s neo-classical aesthetic. In an important sense, A Donkey in Blackpool is a negative version of Whistlejacket. Whereas Whistlejacket is aristocratic – kingly even – the donkey is popular. The ostensible setting in Blackpool is, in this sense, as significant as the choice of animal. Blackpool is a site of working-class pleasures: from the 1880s, working people on vacation from the north-western mill towns predominated. Symptomatically, the Mass Observers of the 1930s called Blackpool ‘Fun Town’, in contrast to ‘Work Town’ (a.k.a. Bolton).16 Social figuration saturates Wall’s image as, at every turn, high-flown values are redone in low mode. The animation and energy of the thoroughbred is contrasted to the solidness and passivity of the donkey; the rearing horse is recast as grounded, plodding and ordinary. Aristocratic passion is replayed as working-class amusement. The ostentatious, or theatrical, recognition of the viewer – embodied in Whistlejacket’s wild eye – becomes a shy, or resigned, withdrawal. The horse is a stallion, but the donkey is, as we learn from the Encounters catalogue, a mare called Champion.17 Stubbs’s picture calls up associations OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.1 2007 45
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of exotic Orientalism, Wall’s image drips with Christian allusions; Stubbs fills the frame, Wall situates his donkey. The odd, inner light that seems to emanate from Whistlejacket is replaced by illuminated mise en sce`ne; infinite space gives way to grotty place; the vertical is turned to the horizontal, portrait to landscape. The donkey is a beast of burden and it is identified with the ‘motley proletariat’. Wall’s image seems to constitute, what Bakhtin called, one of those ‘parodic doubles and laughing reflections’, which, he claimed, accompanied every high genre.18 Put another way, the donkey appears like a character from the pages of Bertolt Brecht, or perhaps Jaroslav Hasˇ ek. These characters are dumb, stubborn and recalcitrant survivors. They are ordinary figures who pit low, plebeian knowledge against the proprieties and normative ‘common sense’ of the ruling class. Invariably, they combine sly laughter with wisdom. We could say that, if Whistelejacket is an aristocratic horse, Wall’s donkey is a working class ‘ass’. In this period, at least, Wall appears close to the Brechtian values of ‘crude’ or ‘blunt thinking’. (In part, my reading involves putting some of the dumb humour back into Wall’s project of ‘near documentary’ – combining gestus with jest.) As with his earlier The Thinker (1986) (Fig. 23) or Diatribe (1985), Wall offers us here the inverse of a ‘monument to barbarism’; he gives us a memorial to the defeated. In an exemplary Brechtian gesture, the donkey, mouth open, just carries on chewing. Commentators may place less emphasis on Bakhtin or Brecht, class or comedy, than I have, but when all is said and done my argument so far remains close to the way Wall’s dispositif is usually discussed.19 These existing accounts seem appropriate insofar as they cast his practice as a
Fig. 23. Jeff Wall, The Thinker, transparency in lightbox, 211 229 cm, 1986.
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18. M. M. Bakhtin, ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (University of Texas Press: Austin, TX, 1981), p. 53. 19. Morphet’s catalogue essay notes, if somewhat in passing, that Whistlejacket is associated with class and breeding. Encounters, p. 328.
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20. For an exemplary reading of Wall’s work in these terms see: Lisa Joyce/Fred Orton, ‘“Always Elsewhere”: An Introduction to the Art of Jeff Wall (A Ventriloquist at a Birthday Party in October, 1947)’, in Jeff Wall: Photographs (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Ko¨nig: Cologne, 2003), pp. 8–33. On allegory, see Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Verso: London, 1985); Paul de Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minnesota University Press: Minneapolis, MN, 1983); Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory. Defining the Genre (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY, 1979). My understanding of allegory owes a great deal to discussions with Fred Orton and Gail Day. See Fred Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns (Reaktion: London, 1994); Gail Day, ‘Allegory: Between Deconstruction and Dialectics’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 22, no. 1, 1999, pp. 103–18. 21. Whereas simple metonyms exist at one stage of remove from the object or person they substitute for (think of ‘blue collar’ and ‘white collar’), they can operate through complex chains of contiguity or substitution. According to Orton metonyms are: ‘[t]he record of a lacuna, of a move or displacement from cause to effect, container to contained, goal to auxiliary tool, whole to part. The metonymic processes are reduction, expansion and association, and these represent historical contiguities and remote relations of experience in particular exempla’, Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns, p. 27. My essay is indebted to Orton’s vision of modern art. 22. It is worth noting in this context that if, as Wall suggests, he is primarily interested in picture types, and not recreating specific images, A Donkey in Blackpool should be viewed as his attempt at the ‘sporting picture’, rather than a one-to-one remodelling of Stubbs’s painting. Jeff Wall, ‘I’m Not Necessarily Interested in Different Subject Matter, But Rather in Different Types of Picture: Jeff Wall Interviewed by Martin Schwander’, Restoration, Kunstmuseum Luzern and Kunsthalle Du¨sseldorf: Du¨sseldorf, 1994, p. 29.
twice-told tale. However, allegory is considerably more unstable than the standard classroom models acknowledge.20 I will return to some of the figurative patterns I have touched on, but, as stated, this structure of opposition, or simple negation, provides an inadequate characterization of Wall’s infernal Picture-engine. The gap between the two tales, between allegory’s ‘pretext’ and ‘text’, already means that the values of A Donkey in Blackpool are displaced, or dislocated, in time and space. In this sense, Wall’s picture is radically incomplete. In addition, I think Wall’s encounters with pictures revolve around a practice of ‘metonymic spacing’: his works obey the expanded logic of substitution, ‘displacement’, ‘reduction’, ‘expansion’ and ‘association’.21 His research and his attention to pictorial modes draw in multiple points of reference; as they stack up, the ostensible model, or pretext, is inevitably shuttled from its central position. This is to say that there is no one-to-one relation of text to pretext in Wall’s images – not even in Picture for Women (Fig. 1) or A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) (Fig. 14), or in the images modelled on literary works.22 We could follow the trail of the Donkey elsewhere. Given Wall’s stated interest in the cinema of Robert Bresson, the film Au hasard Balthazar (1966) must be a significant pointer, but a few examples from Stubbs will have to do to make the point. Firstly, it is worth noting the way that Stubbs’s pictorial ground – which has been described as sandy in colour, but which I think is better seen as a drab sandy-green-gold – is transmogrified into the literal ‘ground’, or floor, in Wall’s image; here ‘bad infinity’ gives way to the all-too-particular urine-soaked straw. The connection is just a field of colour, but the effect is to shift the ideal to the real and move high to low. (Wall’s picture reverses the magic of Rumpelstiltskin, who spins straw into gold.) Secondly, neo-classical horse painting becomes generative for Wall. Look, for instance, at Stubbs’s Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath, with a Trainer, a Stable-Lad, and a Jockey, of 1765 (Fig. 24). This is one of those peculiar works of art that simultaneously encapsulates different moments in time: in the background the legendry Gimcrack romps home; whereas in the foreground he is attended after the event. The setting is Newmarket racecourse and the foreground building is one of its four rubbing-down houses, where horses were groomed, usually with straw, after a race. I take it that the basic pictorial organisation of A Donkey in Blackpool is
Fig. 24. George Stubbs, Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath, with a Trainer, a Stable-Lad, and a Jockey, oil on canvas, 101.6 193.2 cm, 1765, # The Woolavington Collection.
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23. Jeff Wall, ‘Photography and Liquid Intelligence’, Jeff Wall, 2nd edn (Phaidon: London, 1996), pp. 90 –93.
Fig. 25. George Stubbs, Dungannon, engraved by George Townley Stubbs, etching, 40.4 50.5 cm, published 1794, Yale Centre for British Art/Paul Mellon/The Bridgeman Art Library.
produced out of this foreground fragment, or, at least, something like it. The straw again provides one significant metonymic connection. Stubbs often placed his horses against an architectural structure – introducing a frame within the frame – and while he occasionally depicted his noble patrons, the buildings featured in his horse portraits are rarely the grand seats of the wealthy, more often they are barns, stables, covering and rubbing-down houses. Frequently in these arrangements, the horse is set, as if in a classical frieze, along the picture plane, while the building is rotated axially so that it recedes, as it were, from a leading corner. This conception was evidently something of a feature of the equine portrait of the period: in 1723, John Wootton, the premier horse painter before Stubbs, depicted Lamprey similarly positioned against a rubbing-down house. Stubbs was to repeat the motif on several occasions, moving a horse forwards or backwards a few feet (a quick count indicates that at least nine of his works share this compositional feature). In Dungannon, of 1793 (Fig. 25), he retains the basic pictorial organisation from the Gimcrack fragment, but turns it about. As much as Wall substitutes a donkey for a thoroughbred, his encounter also involves isolating a fragment from another image and inverting the relation of animal and architecture, internal and external space. The basic organising features of A Donkey in Blackpool are here, but this puts us at least a couple of links from Whistlejacket. In the process, Wall produced another version of the space that appears in so many of his works: those characteristic holes and pits, recesses and cavities that are, I suspect, echoes of the camera’s ‘dry’ interior architecture.23 These chains of contiguity suggest less a simple pattern of opposition than a process of sublation. No doubt, profanation, or the Bakhtinian ‘turnabout’, is at work here – that, after all, is at the heart of the joke – but Wall also draws out features implicit in Stubbs’s pictorial vision. In brief, I think, this has to 48 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.1 2007
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24. See George Stubbs, Anatomy of the Horse: Including a Particular Description of the Bones, Cartilages, Muscles, Fascias, Ligaments, Nerves, Arteries, Veins and Glands. In Eighteen TABLES, all done after Nature (London, 1766). 25. Els Barants, ‘Typology, Luminescence, Freedom: Selections from a conversation with Jeff Wall’, Jeff Wall: Transparencies (Scrimer/ Mosel: Munich, 1986), p. 10. Rather than the obvious source in Foucault, this idea probably stems from Wall’s peculiar crossing of the Frankfurt School with Brecht, or from a reading of Schapiro.
do with the constraint, or containment, of force and energy. Stubbs’s horses are strangely bounded and yet bursting: it is as though the interior parts of their body – ‘Bones, Cartilages, Muscles, Fascias, Ligaments, Nerves, Arteries, Veins and Glands’ – are barely covered by the animal’s taught skin.24 His work for The Anatomy of the Horse, in which he peeled back horse cadavers, was evidently important in shaping this vision. Interior and exterior, hard and soft, are held in a dynamic tension. As I have noted, in Whistlejacket light seems to issue from inside the horse’s body – a body that appears translucent and, at the same time, hard and burnished. (Stubbs made a living from giving the colour chestnut a peculiar fetishistic gleam.) His pictures draw together the tame and the wild, restriction and freedom. This basic structure evidently also underpins his celebrated horse and lion paintings (while the boots of his riders again echo and reinforce this conception: again, a fleshy interior is tightly constrained by a tough hide). Looking at these paintings the defining metaphors that spring to mind are ‘breeding’ and ‘bearing’, ‘rearing’ and ‘training’. These are all, simultaneously, images of discipline and improvement or, perhaps better, improvement as discipline. This pattern of figuration is what makes Stubbs, rather than any number of landscape painters, the paradigmatic artist of English agrarian capitalism. Jeff Wall frequently emerges from much of the interpretative apparatus that now circulates around his photographs as a pictorial genius who encodes into his pictures ever-more-complex allusions or rhetorical gambits. The critical ‘game’ increasingly played out in relation to his work involves projecting improbable forms of pictorial self-consciousness onto the artist. He must find much of this amusing, even as it feeds his mythology. The ‘Wall’ in my text differs slightly, but significantly, from this Wall; here pictorial intelligence turns on effecting conjunctures or constellations. In so doing, the artist sets in play interpretive openings that run beyond what any agent might, or even could, intend. Wall’s dispositif generates possible readings. For instance, an allegorical picture like A Donkey in Blackpool operates as a kind of lens that allows us to bring its twinned image into focus. Whistlejeacket becomes available to be seen in the terms I have employed through its relation to Wall’s picture. This is to say, the relation of text and pretext in the allegorical work is a reversible one, and each text or image reflects the other in its beam. My reading of freedom and restraint exists between them; it is generated, or at least revealed, by moving from one to the other. In viewing the one picture through the other, we learn to look differently; in the process, both appear less final and more open, and also more historically resonant. (Perhaps, the Benjaminian constellation has always played an important role in art history: double projection may, indeed, be an allegorical mode). A Donkey in Blackpool metonymically recasts Stubbs’s dialectic of constraint and containment, turning the dynamic thrust of agrarian-capitalist improvement in the direction of modern ‘unfreedom’. I have tried to keep my distance from Wall’s talk – helped by the lack of commentary on A Donkey in Blackpool – but one reference does seem helpful. Wall has said that his form and technique ‘have a hyper-organized rigid character, everything is strictly positioned. I want to express the existing unfreedom in the most realistic way’.25 By ‘unfreedom’ he has in mind something of the way that capitalist social relations are played out on the body, constraining and shaping even micro-gestures. This is to say, Wall’s figures are ‘modern’ in so far as they are awkward and staged – because they jar and OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.1 2007 49
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clunk, lack ‘spontaneity’ or ‘informality’. The performed awkwardness of ‘gestus’ is a way of conveying social constraint stripped of the voyeurism of the photographer-cum-flaˆneur.26 Whereas Whistlejacket is an image of dynamic movement – to the extent that the front and hind feet would appear to belong to discontinuous registers of space (the huge, exaggerated neck is a way of establishing some equilibrium for this excessive torque). In contrast, the donkey is placid. This is to say that in Wall’s picture, the themes of constraint and containment are displaced from equine hero to mise-en-sce`ne. The shift from the empty ground of Whistlejacket to a particular location is one of the most marked features of Wall’s encounter. In A Donkey in Blackpool it is this articulation of space, the placement of the animal, which conveys ‘unfreedom’.27 The photographic apparatus effectively pens in the donkey, and because this dispositif constructs the beholder’s point-of-view, the donkey is backed into the corner of the stable by each successive viewer. This positioning leaves the animal trapped inside these walls with no apparent exit. As focus and flare draw our attention to the stable wall, the sense of imprisonment is amplified through an allusion to exterior space. The narrow blue band running across the rear wall introduces a horizon into the image. To this extent, the painted bricks double as an interiorization of the donkey’s external working environment: the beach and sea with the sky rising above it. We do not know whether Wall painted in this line or just made a lucky find.28 In any case, the painted blue line is an evocative feature of the image (and it is worth noting how far this is from Hiroshi Sugimoto’s evocations of infinite space). It is such a resonant blue, calling up the English seaside postcard with its dumb, sexual humour and panoply of familiar characters: bossy, fat ladies; skinny husbands in string vests and with knotted hankies protecting bald patches from the sun; little boys with their ice-creams and their innuendos and, of course, world-weary, over-burdened donkeys. This is an iconography where asses and arses are closely related. Wall contrasts Whisteljacket with a working animal. However, it is significant that he did not select an donkey from the modern peasant economy, but one that laboured in the ( faded) British leisure industry.29 Blackpool is undoubtedly a heterotopic space, one where beer, sun and sand distance the constraints of factory labour and its cognates. The topography of Blackpool proclaims a moment of excess: tower and beach; the three piers and the pleasure rides; the Golden Mile and the town – all orchestrate release from the everyday. It is unquestionably right to see Blackpool, at least for a period in its history, as a condenser of popular energy. The gaudy, raucous pleasures on display once provided an alternative to stuffy, rigid bourgeois values. However, the terms ‘pleasure beach’, and ‘Fun Town’ betray themselves: never has the ‘carnivalesque’ seemed so tame or such an integrated part of the normal business of social reproduction.30 This is what the commodity form routinely does: it harnesses popular vitality and enthusiasm – popular pleasures – to infuse its own, always moribund, forms with a semblance of life. Perhaps, I have been asking the wrong questions of A Vampires’ Picnic: the issue it raises may well be not which social type is characteristic of the undead, but what kind of social machine makes bloodsucking such a compelling image for late capitalism. In Wall’s picture all forms of difference are equivalent and substitutable (as such, it may make sense to see it as an instantiation of the fetish: commodity, ethnographic and sexual). The dialectical twist at 50 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.1 2007
26. Barants, ‘Typology, Luminescence, Freedom’, p. 100. For a summary of Wall’s view on straight photography see Jean-Franc¸ois Chevrier, ‘The Spectres of the Everyday’, Jeff Wall, 2nd edn (Phaidon, London, 2002), p. 165. In this sense, I think the proximity of Wall’s project to the representational ethics of the 1970s – to the work of, say, Martha Rosler – has not really been understood. However, Tom Crow spotted the connection in his brief comments on Milk. See Thomas Crow, ‘Profane Illumination: The Social History of Jeff Wall’, Modern Art in the Common Culture (Yale University Press: New Haven, CT, 1996), p. 162. 27. A comprehensive account of Wall’s image would require situating it relation to the conventions of animal picturing, particularly paying attention to the articulation of beast and background. For important pointers see Potts, ‘Natural Order and the Call of the Wild. . .’. 28. We know that some effort went into finding the location. A photograph by Emer O’Brian, from her series Where the Wild Things Are, depicts a donkey in the same or related stables, but this picture was produced some four years after Wall’s image and his paint scheme could have been left in place. I would like to thank David Campany for drawing my attention to O’Brian’s picture. 29. On this point see Morphet, Encounters, p. 328. 30. Grahame Thompson, ‘Carnival and the Calculable’, Formations of Pleasure (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1983), pp. 124–37; Tony Bennett, ‘A Thousand and One Troubles: Blackpool Pleasure Beach’, Formations of Pleasure pp. 138–55.
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Fig. 26. Charles Howell, Official Photgrapher, Pleasure Beach., Blackpool, postcard, date stamped 28 August 1926, published courtesy of Audrey Linkman.
work in Wall’s picture is that for the donkey it is this space of unfreedom that brings rest, or release, from drudgery. In contrast, the site of working-class leisure – the external space of the beach – entails nothing but unending graft for her. Freedom and unfreedom are once again bound together, but now we are in Adorno’s world rather than Brecht’s; this is a world in which rest, OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.1 2007 51
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recuperation and recreation appear as the administered and constrained counterparts to the unfreedom of the capitalist labour process. As Adorno put it: ‘Free time is shackled to its opposite’.31 Inertia presides over A Donkey in Blackpool. Whereas Whistlejacket encapsulates tension and dynamic force, energy drains from this picture. The prevailing mood is one of enervation, exhaustion or at least lethargy. I have already observed the placid, immobile character of Wall’s animal. Scale plays an important role in generating this impression: rather than controlling the space, the donkey is dominated by it. The decrepit environment – all flaking paint and chewed wood – infects the animal; we instinctively know she has seen better days. It is significant that the donkey’s coat has none of the fetishistic, burnished lustre of Whistlejacket. Even the dead straw strikes us as possessing more colour and life than the beast. This is grim stuff. However, the mood of Wall’s photograph turns darker still at the point that the beholder recognises those two mangers as the external reflection of the donkey’s interior – as two sets of splayed ribs, as if the animal’s carcass had been cracked open along its backbone. Once this is connection is made it is difficult not to imagine the scene in Horkstow barn where Stubbs carried out the majority of his equine dissections, to sense the presence of the flayed horses suspended from the ceiling, to smell the stale blood and viscera, to hear the buzz of the flies.32 The central, dry hollow of the picture space is now the cavity of the donkey’s chest and the beholder’s gaze is directed into the interior of the animal’s body. (Following the logic of Stubbs’s picture, it might be thought of as a kind of X-ray image of our own body.) Lack of vitality here leads us inexorably to another scene taking place in the knacker’s yard. This perception may take us too much into the territory of horror, displacing fun or recreation too thoroughly. My sense of the picture is that these terms – horror and fun – have to be held together: the photograph’s effect seems to turn on the oscillation between these antimonies. The moment that either conception assumes predominance, the image loses its charge and we are left with one or another form of dull, industrialised entertainment. (Joking always turns out to be such a serious business.) A Donkey in Blackpool shadows A Vampires’ Picnic, but the ghastly effect remains ‘in the background’ or, perhaps, of it; it is probably all the more disturbing for being less immediately transparent. Whereas A Vampires’ Picnic suggests a lack of social determinateness, A Donkey in Blackpool insists on social relations and on the realities of class. It stages for us the primal fantasy of commodity fetishism: it takes us behind the scenes and allows us to peek at the workings that sustain the illusory surfaces. If anything defines the spectacular commodity economy, late capitalism, or whatever we want to label the current grim state of things, it is the colonisation of ‘free time’. Leisure and wage labour; popular pleasure and servitude; release and incarceration; jouissance and boredom; unlimited semiosis and instruction: the list goes on, but these couplets are all are all bound together. Now, even the carnival turns on occluding the labour of others. The donkey can, I think, be understood as a figure for that occlusion; her enervation is the condition for others having a good time. (If this is an image of the ‘culture industry’, I cannot help thinking it is also a representation of domestic labour.) The stable figures as a dialectical image for late capitalism: it is simultaneously a representation of recuperation and a depiction of the place of production; recuperation as production and production as recuperation. There are, of course, no real 52 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 30.1 2007
31. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Free Time’, in J.M. Bernstein (ed.), The Culture Industry (Routledge: London, 1991), p. 162. See also the related formulation: ‘Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit strength in order to cope with it again.’ Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Verso: London, 1979), p. 137. 32. On Stubbs’s dissection practice see Warner, ‘Ecce Equus: Stubbs and the Horse of Feeling’, pp. 1–17; Blake, Stubbs and the Wide Creation.
‘Poor Ass!’
oppositions here. One pole so readily flips to its seeming opposite, because these are barely distinct moments in the process of capitalist reproduction. The role of the lightbox is important in this context: the glow that is so characteristic of Whistlejacket is here dispersed across the surface by fluorescent light. In the process, the artwork seems to recognise itself as commodity. A Donkey in Blackpool illuminates the fetish at the heart of contemporary capitalism (including the fetish ‘Art’), but in the constellation it generates it also draws out a paradox. In its imaginative juxtaposition with Stubbs’s painting, Wall’s photograph reveals that Whistlejacket was also a ‘donkey’. The wild, romantic, aristocratic horse was also just a working beast at the origins of modernity. In one sense, of course, he was one of capitalism’s first donkeys, occupying a prime position in the development of modern commodity culture. There was Stubbs depicting the commodification of leisure a century before the Impressionists gave us the spectacle of Longchamp. One difference between then and now – between the world of leisure depicted by Stubbs and ours – is that so much of the energy and glamour has now been rubbed away. It is by fixing on the absence of vitality, by making it central to our experience of his picture,
Fig. 27. Jeff Wall, A Villager from Aricako¨yu¨ arriving in Mahmutbey-Istanbul, September, 1997, transparency in lightbox, 209.5 271.5 cm, 1997.
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that Wall’s dispositif shifts us, through a series of detours, or spacings, from Stubbs’s agrarian capitalism to an image of its late-industrial offspring. Addendum: Aricako¨yu¨/Blackpool/Basel
In many ways, it is fitting that A Donkey in Blackpool should be permanently housed in Basel, the base of chemical giant Ciba (the manufacturer of cibachrome), with its modernist factory and the nearby housing estate, probably built to accomodate the workforce, and which now houses Basel’s immigrant workers. It is just conceivable that the figure depicted two years earlier by Wall, at a crossing in the road outside Mahmutbey-Istanbul, took the other path and ended up, like so many of his compatriots, in Basel (Fig. 27). Under conditions where a rural migrant from Aricako¨yu¨ might exert his labour power stacking boxes for Ciba before returning after his shift to those flats, A Donkey in Blackpool moves from local English conditions to become, intended or not, an allegorical image for its own place in the uneven global economy of late capitalism. Here self-reflexivity applies not simply to the dry architecture of the apparatus, or even pictorial forms, but to the imbrication of art in the process of social division on a world scale. (Straw really does turn to gold.) In Basel, Wall’s picture affords its beholder another ghastly moment of recognition. Poor Ass! Thy Master should have learnt to shew Pity – best taught by fellowship of Woe! For much I fear me, that He lives, like thee, Half-famish’d in a land of luxury! Samuel Taylor Coleridge33
Thanks to Gail Day, Andrew Hemingway and Alex Potts for their comments on an earlier version of this essay; their scepticism also helped. Caroline Arscott should be singled out for the good advice she offered throughout. I would also like to express my gratitude to Sophie Howarth for insisting that I speak at the conference Jeff Wall: Six Works.
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33. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘To a Young Ass, Its Mother Being Tethered Near It’ (1794), in J.C.C. Mays (ed.), The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetical Works vol. 1 (Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 2001), p. 148.
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