I want to tell you the story of my extraordinary visit to Anthony Reynolds to see the exhibition of Mark Wallinger's recent work.

Things started ordinarily enough.

To being with, I was nonplussed by the first of the two pieces in the show - Third Generation (Ascher Family) 2003: back projection, video installation, (DVD transfer) 37 minutes 58 seconds.

The conceit is familiar enough: watching some viewers watching a black & white home movie, circa 1930. The movie is distinguished from its represented setting, by its grainier, monochrome imagery, and also by a black frame. (The latter belongs to the former typography of death: funeral invitations used to be announced by a black-edged envelope... ) The viewers are visitors in Berlin's Jewish Museum.

'Isn't this a sort of time-based version of Thomas Struth?' I asked myself.

I thought the piece's animating pun, 'Third Generation', was rather obvious. For sure, the copy-industry recourses to genetic metaphors, including, it has to be noted, the one of 'reproduction', which Walter Benjamin makes light of in this regard. But is this all too human instance of making the alien familiar - here an aspect of technology - so remarkable?

Yet, as I plied the pun as it is played by Third Generation, it unraveled richly. On the one hand, as the piece reminds us, copying defies death, and brings one human closer to another, however spectral the person-in-the-image is. But on the other hand, the progress - or should I say mutation? - of technology reverses that. There are three audio-visual media here, I think; the piece is a little slipshod in specifying what is where: Super 8, video (which I assume is tape and is either the Super 8 transferred to video, and / or the tape recording made in the Museum), and DVD. With each 'generation' of new technology the premise of the copy as a resurrection is progressively reversed as the 'better' image quality removes us - ontologically - once more, from the original. And I noted another irony, with grim pleasure. These 'generations' of audio-visual copying neatly coincide with the human generations encompassed by the work. Culturally perhaps, this is not gratuitous, but rather the inventor's Oedipal desire to render his father’s work redundant.

Pondering these complex dialectics, I made my way upstairs.

Another video projection: Via Dolorosa. The sorrowful - and painful - road. (There's little humour in this show.) Just to complicate things, this work sustains a dialogue with Third Generation. If the latter engages with the idea of death and the copy, Via Dolorosa, as I saw it, tropes the image per se with death. And here, the image is 'of death' in two senses: first there is the footage - from Jesus of Nazareth, I think - of Christ's crucifixion. However, this figurative, and found imagery is squeezed to the edge of the screen by a saturated black blank; an abstract rectangle evoking Malevich, Rodchenko, Ad Reinhardt, perhaps, and with them, the end or the death of painting. Thus the image - in its figurative form - is 'of death' in being almost murdered by abstraction. Oedipus returns. That the abstract component of the work is a black rectangle - the nearest video can get to its own end (not that the black square has yet put an end to painting) makes the 'death' of figuration uncertain. For the almost dead (if that is what the blank is) make feeble murderers. Again, Wallinger constructs a profoundly ambivalent allegory.

There is a further link between the two pieces, that is more visually obvious: the edge that is missing, as it were, from Via Dolorosa as a fully abstract work, can of course, be found in Third Generation as the black frame. And the frame as a problematic frames both works. Both use the frame as the space of death (and life). The frame contains - in both senses - finitude. In Third Generation we move towards the full-stop of a long-gone past. However, outside the frame, and certainly, via Third Generation, space is of a different order: infinite. Framing a frame implies an outwards movement and an endless regression. Nothing stops this logic, only perhaps the point at which the frame meets the edges of the world - but where are these?

Walking out of the installation, back into the bright light, I took down the details of Via Dolorosa (2002, projected video, installation (DVD transfer) 18 minutes, 8 seconds). And then, stepping back, I tripped, as the narrow landing gave way to stairs...

... and I fell into the shoes of one M A Faust. An artist and a writer, of sorts, if rather odd as both. (Bibliographic details of her work at the end of the session if you wish.)

She wondered why she was there - in Anthony Reynolds looking at Mark Wallinger, since she was trying very hard to give up encounters with this type of art.

My voice in her ear said:

'But Wallinger's a "good" artist. The best of his generation - well, certainly, the YBA brigade. He should have won the Turner Prize if the Turner Prize rewarded the idea of a practice with a deep vision. One which, Janus-like, looks both to life and art and turns the one upon the other. His work grapples with the warp of life - its grand themes - life and death (daringly, there’s very little sex), faith, class and money (or, in its recent incarnation, Capital )..., and does so, via the multifarious weft of art's rhetoric. There's no one to touch him on this score; and you could say, that in this dexterity and scope, he's the artist as a metaphysical poet. Or vice-versa. Certainly, he has a great facility across a range of forms; at every turn, you see him really understanding his materials; for Wallinger art's media are truly both the means and ends. In fact, he’s a polymath!'

Faust was irritated. Firstly by the fact that these claims - on their own terms - were not readily disputable. Then, that they accepted what, for her, were unsatisfactory prescriptions for contemporary art practice. And to cap it all, she wanted the title of 'polymath' herself - exclusively; for wasn't she a far better jack of all trades...? She turned away, descended the stairs, and exited the gallery.

Invigorated by the sharp, fumy air of Great Marlborough Street, Faust started thinking as she walked. Moreover, distance, as she often found with much of contemporary art, makes the heart grow stronger. She said:

'I want an art that acknowledges a certain history of art. It's difficult to paraphrase, but were I to have a go, I'd say that in the first place, this history is openly prescriptive: it wants certain things for the past, present, and the future. So it argues that postmodernism has only gone half way. This history of contemporary art is something like the one that Jean-Marie Schaeffer has, recently, outlined in Think Art.(1) Perhaps not approvingly. And so I'd say, that while postmodernism did at least reverse modernism's "aesthetic autonomy" - the differentiation of one art from another around their formal specificity - it hasn't done the same with modernism's "artistic autonomy". That is to say: "the idea that art possesses a sort of ontologic insularity";(2) "a self-imposed radical enclosure" that has not provoked a drive to "move art back to the center" that it occupied "before the invention of technological images", "but has on the contrary taken it further and further away from any common ground which it could share with visual culture as we know it in everyday life."(3) The "insularity" still reigns, with the gallery its guardian angel.

Striding after Faust, I was barely managing to keep up. My legs ached. My head spun. But there was no stopping her:

'The need that modernism had for "aesthetic autonomy"' - she ranted somewhat - 'The need for art to be distinct from other cultural practices by virtue of its own aesthetic properties - this has clearly been refuted. For example: look at the presence of photography in fine art over the last 30 years. And think about the way in which the "differentiation" of media - which Schaeffer sees as an effect of aesthetic autonomy - has long since been rejected: in Wallinger's own oeuvre par excellance (yes, he’s a polymath, though could go further on this front...) Not that the show that we've just seen substantiates that point.'

She carried on: 'So why does the second bit - that is to say, the merging of art with other cultural-social practices, not, now, follow? Haven't we been waiting long enough? For at least twenty years? We've seen conceptual practice - as the first stage of postmodernism's refutation - played out, then re-staged, again and again, and Wallinger partakes of this effrontery. In this sense, I'd say that we squander our attention in considering him at all...'

'No that’s not true!' I interrupted. 'His work is full of different cultural practices; mass culture and high culture; the culture of religion and the culture of the state -'

- and Faust interrupted back:

'But at one remove. It's never the original; the ontologic version of that practice; but, rather, second-generation (in the copy-context of the term). It's always mediated by the "there was" of the document.'

And here, I thought of Faust's distinctly European tastes that were ill-served by Brit Art. Her passion for the work of Superflex and ParkFiction and a whole host of practices she labeled 'post-autonomous' (sometimes adding 'art' to the end of this phrase). As if eavesdropping on my thoughts, she carried on:

'I want an art which might undo itself as such; at least which runs the risk of disappearing; one which certainly exceeds the frame of the gallery and the art institution as currently configured, to take in so much more... only this can be responsible to history.'

'But Wallinger's practice is historically acute too - responsible, or "of our time" - for how can it not be?' I countered.

At this point I was struggling with the argument and also to kick off Faust's shoes. She sensed my hostility and angrily struck out. Painfully, the blow dislodged me from her equally uncomfortable footwear. I stood at the end of Great Marlborough Street, stunned. Faust fled down Regent Street, jumping on a number 13 bus at a set of red traffic lights. On the tube home, I started to write this talk.

(1) Think Art: Theory and Practice in the Art of Today ed. J-M Schaeffer (Witte de With; Rotterdam; 1998)
(2) ibid. p. 41
(3) ibid. p. 43

back