Jeffrey "Jeff" Wall, OC, RSA is a Canadian artist best known for his
large-scale back-lit cibachrome photographs and art history writing.
Wall has been a key figure in Vancouver's art scene since the
early-1970s. Early in his career, he helped define the Vancouver School and
he has published essays on the work of his colleagues and fellow Vancouverites
Rodney Graham, Ken Lum and Ian Wallace. His photographic tableaux often take
Vancouver's mixture of natural beauty, urban decay and postmodern and
industrial featurelessness as their backdrop.
Career Wall received his MA from the University
of British Columbia in 1970, with a thesis titled Berlin Dada and the Notion
of Context. That same year, Wall stopped making art. With his English wife,
Jeannette, whom he had met as a student in Vancouver, and their two young sons,
he moved to London to do postgraduate work at the Courtauld Institute from
1970–73, where he studied with Manet expert T.J. Clark. Wall was assistant
professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, associate professor at
Simon Fraser University, taught for many years at the University of British
Columbia and lectured at European Graduate School. He has published essays
on Dan Graham, Rodney Graham, Roy Arden, Ken Lum, Stephan Balkenhol, On Kawara,
and other contemporary artists. Artistic practice
Wall experimented with conceptual art while an undergraduate at UBC. He then
made no art until 1977, when he produced his first backlit phototransparencies.
Many of these are staged and refer to the history of art and philosophical
problems of representation. Their compositions often allude to artists
like Diego Velázquez, Hokusai, and Édouard Manet, or to writers such as
Franz Kafka, Yukio Mishima, and Ralph Ellison.
Presenting his first gallery exhibition in 1978 as an “installation” rather than
as a photography show, Wall placed The Destroyed Room in the storefront window
of the Nova Gallery, enclosing it in a plasterboard wall. Mimic typifies Wall's
cinematographic style. A 198 × 226 cm. colour transparency, it shows a white
couple and an Asian man walking towards the camera. The sidewalk, flanked by
parked cars and residential and light-industrial buildings, suggests a
North American industrial suburb. The woman is wearing red shorts and a white
top displaying her midriff; her bearded, unkempt boyfriend wears a denim vest.
The Asian man is casual but well-dressed in comparison, in a collared shirt and
slacks. As the couple overtake the man, the boyfriend makes an ambiguous but
apparently obscene and racist gesture, holding his upraised middle finger close
to the corner of his eye, "slanting" his eye in mockery of the Asian man's eyes.
The picture resembles a candid shot that captures the moment and its implicit
social tensions, but is actually a recreation of an exchange witnessed by
the artist. First shown at documenta 11, After
“Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Preface represents a well-known scene
from Ellison’s classic novel. Wall’s version shows us the cellar room, “warm
and full of light,” in which Ellison’s narrator lives, complete with its 1,369
lightbulbs. Picture for Women is a 142.5 × 204.5 cm
cibachrome transparency mounted on a lightbox. Along with The Destroyed Room,
Wall considers Picture for Women to be his first success in challenging
photographic tradition. According to Tate Modern, this success allows Wall to
reference “both popular culture and the sense of scale he admires in classical
painting. As three-dimensional objects, the lightboxes take on a sculptural
presence, impacting on the viewer’s physical sense of orientation in
relationship to the work.” There are two figures in the scene, Wall
himself, and a woman looking into the camera. In a profile of Wall in the The
New Republic, art critic Jed Perl describes Picture for Women as Wall's
signature piece, "since it doubles as a portrait of the late-twentieth-century
artist in his studio." Art historian David Campany calls Picture for Women an
important early work for Wall as it establishes central themes and motifs
found in much of his later work. A response to Manet's Un bar aux Folies
Bergère, the Tate Modern wall text for Picture of Women, from the 2005-2006
exhibition Jeff Wall Photographs 1978–2004, outlines the influence of
Manet's painting: In Manet’s painting, a barmaid gazes out
of frame, observed by a shadowy male figure. The whole scene appears to be
reflected in the mirror behind the bar, creating a complex web of viewpoints.
Wall borrows the internal structure of the painting, and motifs such as the
light bulbs that give it spatial depth. The figures are similarly reflected in a
mirror, and the woman has the absorbed gaze and posture of Manet’s barmaid,
while the man is the artist himself. Though issues of the male gaze,
particularly the power relationship between male artist and female model,
and the viewer’s role as onlooker, are implicit in Manet’s painting, Wall
updates the theme by positioning the camera at the centre of the work, so
that it captures the act of making the image and, at the same time, looks
straight out at us. Wall's work advances an argument for the
need for pictorial art. Some of Wall's photographs are complicated productions
involving cast, sets, crews and digital postproduction. They have been
characterized as one-frame cinematic productions. Susan Sontag ended her last
book, Regarding the Pain of Others, with a long, laudatory discussion of one of
them, Dead Troops Talk, calling Wall's Goya-influenced depiction of a made-up
event "exemplary in its thoughtfulness and power."
While Wall is known for large-scale photographs of contemporary everyday
genre scenes populated with figures, in the early 1990s he became interested in
still lifes. He distinguishes between unstaged "documentary" pictures, like
Still Creek, Vancouver, winter 2003, and "cinematographic" pictures, produced
using a combination of actors, sets, and special effects, such as A Sudden Gust
of Wind, 1993. Based on Yejiri Station, Province of Suruga a woodprint by
Katsushika Hokusai, A Sudden Gust of Wind recreates the depicted 19th-century
Japanese scene in contemporary British Columbia, utilizing actors and took over
a year to produce 100 photographs in order "to achieve a seamless montage
that gives the illusion of capturing a real moment in time."
Since the early 1990s, Wall has used digital technology to create montages of
different individual negatives, blending them into what appears as a single
unified photograph. His signature works are large transparencies mounted on
light boxes; he says he conceived this format when he saw back-lit
advertisements at bus stops during a trip between Spain and London. In 1995,
Wall began making traditional silver gelatin black and white photographs, and
these have become an increasingly significant part of his work. Examples
were exhibited at Kassel's documenta X. Other media
Sonic Youth's compilation album The Destroyed Room: B-sides and Rarities
uses Jeff Wall's 1978 photograph The Destroyed Room. The cover image of Iggy
Pop's 1999 album Avenue B is a portrait photograph of Iggy by Wall.
Exhibitions Wall's early group exhibitions include
1969 shows at the Seattle Art Museum, Washington, and Vancouver Art Gallery,
and New Multiple Art at the Whitechapel Gallery, London in 1970. His first
one-man show was held at Nova Gallery, Vancouver in 1978.
Solo shows include ICA, London, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland,
Whitechapel Gallery, London, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany,
Hasselblad Center, Göteborg, Sweden, Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, Norway and
retrospectives at Schaulager, Basel, Tate Modern and MoMA, New York, Art
Institute of Chicago, SFMoMA, San Francisco, Tamayo Museum, Mexico City
and Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, and Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.
Wall was also included in documentas 10 and 11.
For his retrospective at the Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels in 2011, Wall chose
some 130 works by his favorite artists, from 1900s photographer Eugène Atget to
film excerpts to pieces by contemporaries Thomas Struth and David
Claerbout. They were shown alongside 25 of his own pictures.
Recognition In 2002, Wall was awarded the Hasselblad
Award. In 2006, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Jeff Wall
was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in December 2007. In March 2008,
Wall was awarded the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement, British Columbia's
annual award for the visual arts. Influence
Wall's large-scale images and studied compositions are regarded as influential
on the Düsseldorf group led by Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, and
Candida Höfer. General references
Hochdörfer, Achim, ed. Jeff Wall: Photographs. Cologne: Walther König,
2003. ISBN 3883756989 Merritt, Naomi. ‘Manet’s Mirror and Jeff
Wall’s Picture for Women: Reflection or Refraction?’, Emaj, Issue 4, 2009,
p:www.melbourneartjournal.unimelb.edu.au Newman, Michael. "Towards the
Reinvigoration of the 'Western Tableau': Some Notes on Jeff Wall and Duchamp."
Oxford Art Journal 30.1: 81-100. Wall, Jeff. Jeff Wall: Selected Essays
and Interviews. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007. ISBN 0870707086
Del Río, Víctor. La querella oculta. Jeff Wall y la crítica de la
neovanguardia. El Desvelo Ediciones, 2012. Spain. ISBN 9788493866389
References Further reading
Burnett, Craig. "Jeff Wall". London: Tate Publishing, 2005. ISBN
978-1854376114 Campany, David. "'A Theoretical Diagram
in an Empty Classroom': Jeff Wall's Picture for Women." Oxford Art Journal
30.1: 7-25. Crow, Thomas. "Profane illuminations:
Social History and the Art of Jeff Wall." ArtForum Vol. 31 No. 6: 62-69.
De Duve, Thierry, Arielle Pelenc, Boris Groys and Jean-Francois Chevrier, Jeff
Wall: Complete Edition, Phaidon, 2010. ISBN 978-0714855974
Lubow, Arthur. "The Luminist." The New York Times.
Lütticken, Sven. "The Story of Art According to Jeff Wall." Secret
Publicity: Essays on Contemporary Art. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005. 69-82.
ISBN 9056624679 Martin, Stewart. "Wall’s Tableau Mort."
Oxford Art Journal 30.1: 117-33. Merritt, Naomi. ‘Manet’s Mirror and Jeff
Wall’s Picture for Women: Reflection or Refraction?’, Emaj, Issue 4, 2009,
p:www.melbourneartjournal.unimelb.edu.au Stallabrass, Julian. "Museum Photography
and Museum Prose" New Left Review 65, Sept-Oct 2010, pp. 93–125.
Vasudevan, Alexander. "'The Photographer of Modern Life': Jeff Wall's
Photographic Materialism." Cultural Geographies Vol. 14, No. 4: 563-588.
Whyte, Murray. "Jeff Wall: The Visible Man." Canadian Art.
External links Jeff Wall resources and exhibition at
Tate Jeff Wall Profile at European Graduate
School. Biography and bibliography. Time article mentioning Jeff Wall
Jeff Wall Exhibition in MoMA LUX-Mag on Jeff Wall
Jeff Wall Exhibition - Art Institute of Chicago June 29 – September 23, 2007
Jeff Wall - SFMOMA Exhibition Jeff Wall at Kadist Art Foundation
Jeff Wall Kapsul Image Collection CBC radio programs on The Art of Jeff
Wall, aired on Ideas Feb. 24 & 25, 2014 Pictures Like Poems. An interview with
Jeff Wall Video by Louisiana Channel