Perhaps I’m a little distracted lately from my impending graduation/emancipation and all that it entails for me but this Toni Ross article is not really making any sense to me at all. I understand that Wall breaks with notions of the avant-garde in the 1980s by doing realism, and history painting tableaux etc, and he incorporates his insane knowledge of the history of painting into what seems like every inch of every photo. Yet, its still really tough for me to think of him as avant-garde because I’m a baby and he was already old school feeling to me when I started art school. Also everyone in his pictures looks really 80s out too… Ok but I understand his realism project and his history of painting project and I also understand how influential those projects have been for the next 25 years. And I think I understand Jameson’s ideas about how aesthetic theory is not good under post-modernism because everything is just too charmingly aesthetic these days. Right so far so good. And I get the beautiful and the sublime and how they are different, but what do all these things, plus the Lacan stuff have to do with Jeff Wall? I am so lost.