Gesture as exhibition of mediality. Jeff Wall between staged photography and staged recording

Abstract

Starting from Jeff Wall's artist writings (eg. Gestus), through different phases and techniques of his production and the gaze adopted in the most significant works (Mimic, 1982; Milk, 1984; Man with a Rifle, 2000 etc. ), I intend to focus on the nature and role of "micro-gestures" in the Canadian photographer's research also in the light of the definition given by Giorgio Agamben of gesture as a pure "exhibition of a mediality": "means without an end" which by the mere fact to be photographed, suspended from achieving their purpose, would embody the idea of “milieu pur” of fiction for the viewer (Mallarmé). But staged and photographed, or perhaps digitally assembled in a single image by Wall, the automatic, mutilated, interrupted gestures - similar to those of a mime – of a modern body would amplify their character as emblems (means of communication of an incommunicability, fragments of a human complexity that has lost its meaning) capable of making appear the “being-in-a-medium of man”, to quote Agamben again. They show their being in potential without being. They concentrate the activation of a film-like narrative in the frozen detail of a frame. They make it possible to re-read Wall's staged photography as the recording of a sequence of involuntary shots, movements of a dehumanized, robotic, cinematic body. They reveal a staged recording that reinvents the photographic medium.