Jeff Wall is a photographer who doesn’t take photographs and a contemporary artist whose art doesn’t always look contemporary.
The traveling show that has begun its international tour at the Museum of Contemporary Art presents 18 of the Canadian’s pieces in the largest local show since his first solo exhibition in the United States, organized in 1983 by the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.
Anyone familiar with the grandes machines of European painting, those huge academic canvases on mythological, biblical and historical themes, should have little trouble in grasping what Wall’s most spectacular works are up to, despite any remaining novelty in his format.
Since the end of the ’70s, the artist has created giant Cibachrome transparencies to be shown on fluorescent light boxes. The method of display was a stumbling block at first, suggesting less the world of art than advertising. This, combined with mundane subject matter, initially gave Wall’s work its startling character.
The ’70s was a period in photography that introduced pictures in what was then called the “directorial mode.” Everything in the photographs was rigorously planned and staged, though their compositions often still looked casual.
Such pictures went against the immediacy of the so-called “straight” aesthetic that dominated modern photography. Narratives and allegories common to the directorial mode harked back to photographs in the 19th Century, from Julia Margaret Cameron’s illustrations of the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson to Fred Holland Day’s re-enactment of Christ’s crucifixion.
Wall is a photographer in the directorial mode. It may be hard to tell in a piece such as “A Hunting Scene,” which seems to document men with rifles stalking something (or someone) behind a row of suburban tract houses. But the artifice is clearer in so theatrical a piece as “Insomnia,” with its male subject lying under a table in a cramped, dirty, lower-class kitchen.
Wall doesn’t take such pictures. He makes them, through staging but also through sophisticated manipulation. “Straight” photographers print their negatives without cropping or other darkroom doctoring. Wall uses digitalization and computer alteration to create images that didn’t–or couldn’t–happen.
He recalls figures such as Henry Peach Robinson, who created single landscapes from several negatives, combining shrubs from one, trees from another, clouds from a third and so on. Photographers in early decades of our century denounced the practice as cheating. Wall returns to it as a supreme exercise of the imagination.
He also recasts earlier works of art in modern clothing and settings. The exhibition holds only one example, “A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai)”; its technical refinement, size and impact are extraordinary.
In recent years, Wall has created images of pure fantasy that challenge any remaining notions of the camera as an instrument of truth. “The Vampires’ Picnic,” a Halloween-like orgy of 14 figures is, perhaps, the campiest of these pictures, but “Dead Troops Talk (A Vision After an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986)–14 soldiers with fatal wounds converse on the hill where they slaughtered each other–comes in second with its fake blood and gore.
Here we see Wall’s indebtedness to categories of painting established by old French and English academies. In fact, we can watch him work his way up the entire hierarchy, from still life and landscape to portrait and history painting.
It’s an odd progression to watch, given how it indulges ideas about one subject being “better” than another that early avant-garde artists rebelled against, comfortably applying them to contemporary photography. But just as the art of all countries and periods is fair game for quotation by postmodern artists, so are even outmoded conventions.
The melodramatic fakery of “The Vampires’ Picnic” and “Dead Troops Talk” may suggest Wall approaches now-quaint academic dictums about the Grand Manner of certain subjects with tongue in cheek. But that’s not wholly the case. His wonderful panorama that has a team of art restorers working on a giant circular mural has as much of a reference to history painting as the others and is equally a fabrication, yet it gets us thinking about the noble acts academic conventions were supposed to honor, and Wall gives us a heroic image appropriate to anti-heroic times.
The problem with some of the other pieces has to do with technology. As often happens in science, the availability of new technology becomes, in itself, a reason for use, regardless of the worth of the enterprise. “The Giant,” for example, has as its central image a nude elderly woman, which is unusual in the history of art. But the technology that allows the artist to place her, much enlarged, on the landing of a library staircase, diverts viewers from the uniqueness of her condition to simply her size. We react to seeing her as a prodigy of nature instead of to seeing her at all.
Elsewhere, despite the sophistication of Wall’s techniques, there’s the same sort of disjunction that occurs in live-action-plus-animated films. It’s like Gene Kelly dancing with Jerry the Mouse: The figures never perfectly relate as if they were together in the same space. It’s one of the difficulties with “The Vampires’ Picnic.” Individual groups of figures are cohesive, though the groups do not cohere to one another. Their collective intensity does not project; as with figures in a wax museum, there’s a break in concentration.
Remember Duane Hanson’s super-real figure sculptures? From a distance, they looked so much like humans that viewers expected them to move or talk. But upon approaching, you reached a spot where the lack of the figures’ engagement with their settings suddenly drained the illusion of life. It happens in Wall’s “Untangling.” The man seated, working with a rope is so removed from the scene that we would expect to learn he was electronically collaged into it.
There’s no such sense, of course, with Wall’s still lifes. Yet, when seen in the lightbox format, they’re subtly disquieting pictures. All the objects on view–tables, soap, beans, an octopus–are actual size and persuasively arranged in their gritty environments. The photographs don’t register, however, as formal exercises. They appear to have a symbolism at once stronger and more elusive than in any of the other works from the exhibition.
That’s Wall at his best, drawing you back again and again, only to still withhold his secrets. Photography is, without question, a more limited medium than painting, but it doesn’t seem so here.
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Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in collaboration with the Nationale Galerie at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, and the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, “Jeff Wall” will continue at the museum, 237 E. Ontario St., through Aug. 20. Free talks on the show will be at 12:15 p.m. Tuesday and Aug. 15 and at 2 p.m. July 16 and 29.
