Art in the "Post-Medium" Era: Aesthetics and Conceptualism in the Art of Jeff Wall

During the last decade of the twentieth century a wave of discussions and publications emerged in the academic and art worlds announcing a return of aesthetics in art theory and practice. While many of those involved spoke of making beauty resonate again, there was a sense that aesthetics generally had been resurrected after decades of neglect and denigration. ¹ In 1998, Fredric Jameson responded to this development by proposing that the recent return of aesthetics needs to be understood in the context of conceptual art practices since the 1960s, and within the broader sociological phenomenon of postmodernity. ²

Jameson identifies a historical conjunction between the post-sixties demise of modernist claims for art's autonomy allied to medium specificity and attempts in recent years to revivify aesthetics. He speaks of the legacy of conceptual art, and its postmodern derivations, which endorsed the abandonment of traditional media in favor of hybrid artistic forms and technologies. Conceptual and postmodern practices of impure and mixed media displaced formalist definitions of the medium based on the support's material properties, or as the perpetuation of distinct artistic traditions.

Drawing on Jameson's analysis, Rosalind Krauss describes this state of affairs as the "post-medium condition" of contemporary artistic production. ³ Seeking portents of this situation, Krauss focuses on conceptual art's integration of art and photography. She reminds us that such art adopted photography not so much as a medium with specific aesthetic qualities, but as a "theoretical object," historically aligned to the issue of the copy and a conventional reliance, in its mass media manifestations, on the written caption. ⁴ Accordingly, the conceptualist deployment of the photographic image retained a link with the visual domain, while enabling a retreat from a modernist aesthetics of autonomy, specificity, and originality. As artist Jeff Wall has observed, for conceptual artists, photography became a "paradigm for all aesthetically-critical, model-constructing thought about art." ⁵ This theoretical understanding of the photographic medium was part of a general ambition to undermine visual art's definition as an aesthetic discipline preoccupied with sensory or perceptual experience.

What follows is both an elaboration and a response to these accounts of the "post-medium condition" of contemporary art, prefatory to a discussion of the photo-conceptualism of Jeff Wall. A sketch of the trajectory and reception of Wall's art since the 1980s will preface a more detailed account of a photographic image produced by Wall in the late 1990s. I propose that the interplay of the aesthetic and the conceptual in this work is reducible neither to aestheticist, nor to anti-aesthetic postmodern paradigms. This means that Wall's recent art offers an alternative to two opposed standpoints emergent in contemporary art discourse: an impasse between those seeking to revive an aesthetics of beauty or visual pleasure, and those wishing to sustain the critical and theoretical purchase of neoconceptual and anti-aesthetic postmodernism.

Significant shifts in visual art in the wake of conceptualism displaced key aspects of Kantian-derived aesthetic theory. Premised on a positive and disinterested pleasure in the play of formal appearances, Kant's articulation of judgments of beauty was rejected in anti-aesthetic polemics because of its perceived complicity with vested institutional and market interests. Idealizing notions of beauty were dismissed as offering a fraudulent escape from institutional and social determinations. At the same time, sublime feeling, which, in Kant, arises from the perceptual disorder of an encounter with something that exceeds representation, was also downplayed in anti-aesthetic postmodernism.

In Jameson's narrative, modernist art supplants an aesthetics of the beautiful with the sublime as originally delineated in Kant's Critique of Judgment. The sublime impetus of modernist art manifests in two ways. First, modernist practice mined what earlier artistic traditions deemed in excess of prevailing standards of beauty. In modernism, Jameson attests, "the function of...