Jamie Wagg
«History Painting: Shopping Mall»

The blurred image shows a small boy in the company of a somewhat bigger boy. The meaning drawn from the image is that the smaller boy, James Bulger, soon after being captured in this surveillance camera scene, recorded on February 12, 1993, at 3:42:31 p.m., was then murdered – and by the somewhat bigger boy. Only in retrospect does the underlying explosiveness of the image reveal itself – and even show the abduction of James Bulger. In 1993 this case caused a sensation in Great Britain. By using this controversial image (for which Wagg not only suffered much criticism; his images were also physically attacked) and erasing the recorded references to time and place with digital image-processing techniques, Wagg not only decontextualizes it; he also robs the image of its inter-media substance: the lettering and digits indicating a time and place (easily added by request with most currently available video cameras) are removed, or stored in a title apart from the image – which also nullifies its location in the video stream retrospectively generated by the archive, and so the archive ‹desediments›. This is how Wagg shows that the only permissible, public interpretation of the image – as the horrifying evidence of a killing – depends on specific discursive parameters. This gesture of neutralizing the archive was obviously enough to make his work fall prey to the rudest accusations.
BIO=
Jamie Wagg was born 1958 in King's Lynn, Norfolk [GB]. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Leeds Polytechnic University and was awarded his doctorate in Visual Culture at the University of Middlesex. He has held lectures at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, as well as at the universities of Middlesex and Leeds, at Goldsmiths College of Art and Design, and at the Norfolk College of Art and Technology.