Chantal Akerman and Jeff Wall
curated by Catherine David
Jeu de Paume
Place de la Concorde, Paris
Oct. 10 - Nov. 26, 1995
If you remember at the old days of the Jeu de Paume filled up with Renoir, Cezanne, Degas etc. before the opening of the Musee D'Orsay then you will get the right impression of the emancipation which took place in the last decade for images created through photography and film. No, you don't miss anything, not the smell of turpentine, not the questions about composition, not the look into the details of light and shadows and not the fascination for the narrative in huge representational scenes. Maybe you feel that painting has lost this field definitively to all the light which makes it's way through lenses since more than a century ago. Besides that, you have the impression it's not reality you are seeing.
These images offer you an exemplary view.
Everything you have seen before, especially if you are a TV-head. If your eyes and the brain which works out what your eyes are giving as information, are not fucked up with blindness, having seen too many equally uninteresting images, then you may realize, in this way, you never did see this before. For sure most works by Jeff Wall I have seen before and also the installation D'Est by Chantal Akerman, but sometimes the history of a space creates a special light.
Chantal Akerman was organized in collaboration with Walker Art Center
Minneapolis. Jeff Wall was organized in collaboration with the Museum of
Contemporary Art Chicago and Whitechapel Art Gallery London.
-Rainald Schumacher
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