Jeff Wall Review

Jeff Wall Dennis Matthews June 29th to September 23rd 2007 The Art Institute of Chicago's Regenstein Hall Jeff Wall, born in 1946, is one of the leading artists of the photo-conceptualist movement started by several artists living and working in Vancouver, Canada. This grouping of contemporaries in the movement, such as Rodney Graham, are a community of artists who with the use of large format photography have expanded the realm of expectation and further increased the dividing line between the viewer and the image's subject matter.
In the work of Jeff Wall we are no longer only left witness to the grand events of everyday life, the subject is not some other story being told it is yours. Told most definitely through the common language of art history, as easy as we recognize Munch's "The Scream" being used for selling credit cards, we have Wall taking up two views on the subject, offering us a choice in Man on the Street of 1995. In images such as this one we have Wall "blatantly devising his shots, he induces us [viewers] to ask exactly what is we ordinarily read as "natural"---and why," Richard Vine, writer for Art in America comments.
The advent of being able to manipulate photographs by way of computers has only strengthened the illusionism and insight of his work as we see the changes clearly in this retrospective. Jeff Wall's newfound digital edge on more traditional photographers has not made his efforts any easier. The stages upon which his dramas are played still take weeks of constructing the final image and months of planning how to even get the images out of the vault of ideas and into some kind of feigned reality that almost stops at believable.
The use of montage in fusing two moments after each other as the one incidental moment he has just snapped blends ideas of what memorization and a replaying of a memory is, they may just be the same thing Wall suggests. In an interview for the last retrospective of his work, he tells Arielle Pelenc that, "...the illusion that something was there in the world and the photograph is a trace of it. In photography, the unattributed, anonymous poetry of the world itself appears, probably for the first time.", it would be clear to say that the work remains aware of the fact that every photograph is only a presentation of a possibility of its own occurrence.



In 1977, Wall traveled to Spain where he was enlightened by his encounters with the lit up ads on bus stops. One of his most ambitious early projects was in the following year with "The Destroyed Room" where he used this format when it was exhibited. The strength of its art historical overtones could not be left unattended to by the viewers and its magnificent contemporary presence in 2007 a generation later shows that it will be viewed as the turning point to greatness in Jeff Wall's career.
Revival, decay, danger, and the grit involved in our everyday are painted across each lightbox illuminated like grand Spanish Renaissance work such as Murillo's many "Mary Magdalene"s from the inside out, they flash to us a feeling and a suspicion that the adjective amiss may be an understatement. Jeff Wall's "The Vampire's Picnic" is a classical copy of Manet's "Luncheon on the Grass" but it carries the composition close to the original, there are many new characters introduced in this image.
Some clearly mimic the gestures of the contemporary Master Manet's while the others appear to be lost in the feasting, one man holds a pair of a lady's shoes the owner not to be found in the composition. The literal bloodline I am referring to is being carried on in the work of today's photographers who are providing new possible routes for the expansion of our usual expectations of the art form of making it appear like one can always click at the right moment.
In the last dozen years, the work of Jeff Wall has gained a cinematic sheen and set production level of his stages for these moments. The scale of the final images refer more to projections of films than the wall coverers of the previous generation of large abstract painters.
One of the most memorable sets of works are his "Movie Watchers" beyond being a bearer of regrettable haircuts, its the same daze we find in the misplaced vampires at the picnic. Jeff Wall has created those suspicious, unforgettable moments that have happened to all of us and re-presented all of the times we didn't trust our experience of some occurrence as not really happening at the time.