jeff wall, photographer

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106 LIFESTYLES MAGAZINE WINTER 2011

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Not exactly an easy conversationalist.

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Page 1: Jeff Wall, Photographer

106 lifestyles magazine Winter 2011

Page 2: Jeff Wall, Photographer

the camera never blinks

Looking for meaning—or none at all—in Jeff Wall’s photographs.

By Darren Gluckman

begin by not photographing.”

Jeff Wall doesn’t carry a camera. Artists who

practice documentary photography, or reportage,

he explains, “need to hunt, and they need to capture.

And they will feel defeated if something gets by them.

Whereas I’m interested in something getting by me. I

witness as many things as your average street photog-

rapher. I just don’t photograph them. I let them go. I let

them escape.”

But they make an impression. And once a subject

takes root, begins to germinate, he develops a relation-

ship with it that transcends the moment it entered his

field of vision. “Therefore I can reinvent it, transcribe it

faithfully, or any blend of those things. That’s the kind of

artistic freedom I’m intrigued by, and it all begins for me

by declining the opportunity to do reportage.”

His reinventions often involve staged scenarios with

nonprofessional actors, intricate, elaborate sets, and,

over the last couple of decades, software. One of his

best known works, A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai),

107lifestyles magazineWinter 2011Photo courtesy of the artist

Profile Jeff Wall

A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)

“I

Page 3: Jeff Wall, Photographer

108 lifestyles magazine Winter 2011 Photos courtesy of the artist

completed in 1993, involved the seamless digitized colla-tion of over 100 separate images. It also happens to be a faithfully magisterial and yet completely original rendi-tion, in style and in form, of Hokusai’s woodblock print Jejuri Station, Province of Suruga, from 1832. But there was nothing digital about the work that first established him—a work of very real, very physical destruction.

Let’s begin by not talking.Are there any unsung artists whose praises you’d care

to sing? “I probably could name you 20 people, but I don’t want to name you 20 people.” Whom do you admire among your contemporaries? “I don’t pick favorites. I don’t want to make those lists for you. Sorry.” Can we discuss the meaning behind some of your works? “I’m not so inter-ested in interpreting my work or anyone else’s right now. Not for any great reason.” Actually, there is a reason, but we’ll get to that.

Vancouver, 1946. Jeff Wall ( future Officer of the Order of Canada, Hasselblad Award winner, exhibitor at galler-ies and museums around the world) is born to a physician father and a mother who takes a “conventional” role and who is interested in art and architecture. She doesn’t quite

lead him to art, exactly (comic books are an early inspira-tional spark), but both his parents (each the child of Jewish immigrants from Odessa) are certainly supportive of his artistic ambitions.

At 24, his booklet of photographs taken from a car in various Vancouver locations is included in an exhibit at MoMA. But this doesn’t satisfy. He stops making art and throws himself instead into graduate work at the Universi-ty of British Columbia, where he meets his wife, Jeannette, a transplanted Brit. They have two children and temporar-ily relocate to London, England, where Wall pursues post-graduate studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Upon their return to Vancouver, he gains a teaching post at Simon Fraser University, followed by another at UBC, where he remains until 1999. Why did you stop? “That was 25 years of teaching,” he exclaims, with as close to a raised voice as one might imagine his voice gets. For the most part it’s quiet, polite, flat but not cold, serious, but capable of a chuckle. “I’d had enough of that.” Early on, he teaches in order to pay the bills; as soon as he can sustain himself with his art, there isn’t time for anything else.

He writes screenplays and attempts a film—modeled on Hitchcock, about a female kleptomaniac—with a few art-ist friends. But the attempt fails for a variety of reasons, including collaborative tensions and issues of artistic control. The film—along with any thought of becoming a

The Destroyed Room

Pleading

Profile Jeff Wall

Page 4: Jeff Wall, Photographer

109lifestyles magazineWinter 2011

filmmaker—is abandoned, although the idea of control, or the misnomer of control, will resurface.

Are you ever tempted to return to film? “No. I have so much affection for the single picture because of the fact that it doesn’t develop in time, and there doesn’t have to be a beginning, middle, and end, and things don’t have to be resolved. The uncertainty of the event, especially when it’s isolated, opens up possibilities for viewers that wouldn’t be there if they knew what the next moment was going to be. I don’t enjoy the idea of having to conclude a story or bring it to an end. I like the middle. I’m devoted to the single image. I’m interested in what escapes the picture.”

But you’ve done a few multi-part pieces. “I hate to seem so blandly eclectic, but I would do these things”—a dip-tych, a triptych, more—“at any moment that the oppor-tunity and the theme popped up.” As a matter of fact, he suddenly recalls, he’s recently completed two such works in anticipation of his forthcoming show at White Cube in London. So perhaps it’s fair to say you’re returning to film, but one frame at a time? He chortles charitably.

In his view, he never really left; he’s always been a cin-ematographer. He currently has an exhibit in Brussels, where he’s paired some of his works with works by art-ists—including filmmakers—who have affected him over the years. Among the films whose clips are featured are Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, Bergman’s Persona, and Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.

But he’s not disconnected from current cinema. For in-stance, he saw Malick’s recent Tree of Life. “I liked it partly because I thought it included some extremely bad pas-

sages, but that made it more interesting. I’m fascinated that he had the courage to include things that could seem inappropriate and even really wrong, and yet made his film more complicated that way.” And he considers Kelly Reichardt, a young independent American filmmaker (Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, and most recently, Meek’s Cutoff), a kindred spirit. Her lens, like his, lingers on unexpected, of-ten surprisingly quotidian subjects not typically accorded artistic attention. “A real original,” he calls her.

In 1977, Wall takes a break from teaching and travels with his family to Europe and Morocco. At the Prado, in Madrid, he is impressed by the luminosity of Velázquez. On the subsequent journey, by bus, from Madrid to Lon-don, various stops feature back-lit advertisements for the standard fare: cigarettes, clothes, cars. And it’s here, peer-ing out from the bus, that Wall makes the conceptual con-nection between the lambent Velázquez and these garish commercial displays, although he insists that the idea of using light boxes (large-scale transparencies lit from be-hind), which were to become his signature, was hardly a lightbulb moment.

“That’s a story that’s circulated and gotten simplified. I’d already been interested in transparencies before I made that trip,” he says. Wall wants his work to be able to age so that the passage of time might infuse the material and enrich the viewer’s experience. The problem is that the dye in traditional color photographs loses its potency at a far more accelerated rate than does the oil used in paint-ings. Metallic dyes last longer, but Wall doesn’t care for the paper they’re printed on. Before the trip, a photo lab technician in Vancouver had suggested transparencies. Wall had considered the notion but was hardly convinced. Afterward—with the bus ads perhaps having nudged him

After Spring Snow, by Yukio Mishima, chapter 34

After Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, the Preface

Profile Jeff Wall

Page 5: Jeff Wall, Photographer

110 lifestyles magazine Winter 2011 Photo by Katy raddatz/san francisco chronicle/corbis

just a handful of his more than 130 works, but among them are two stunning pieces. In a cluttered room, festooned with 1,000 lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling like an up-side-down field of bulbed wheat, a man sits in a chair. It’s a moment from Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man. Anoth-er literary ode is an inkjet print of an impossibly elegant young woman in the coach of an ancient car, her back to the viewer, emptying sand from one of her shoes. This one is inspired by a heartwrenching passage from chapter 34 of Spring Snow, by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima.

Like most of his works, these are staged ( for Spring Snow, the dress had to be made, the car manufactured). Do you favor this approach (in contrast, say, with reportage), in part because it doesn’t impose on the unsuspecting man on the street who may not wish to be featured in your art? Not in the least. “If you walk out on the street, others have the right to photograph you without your permission. If you don’t like that, move to a society where no one takes photographs without the state’s authorization.”

And he is at pains to point out that, in fact, he does prac-tice straight reportage from time to time. A poignant ex-ample, Pleading, features a young couple at night on a city street in the throes of what might be a desperate conversa-tion. “I don’t think there’s any mode of photography that I want to be closed off from. I don’t draw any lines between

along more than struck him on the noggin—Wall gives it a shot. But contrary to the by-now-apocryphal recounting, he says, “It wasn’t my first choice by any means.”

Would you ever consider exhibiting your work at bus stops, in homage to that fateful (if unduly credited) ride from Madrid? “No. I’m not interested in art in public plac-es unless it’s really appropriate, like a monumental sculp-ture that’s going to survive out there. I think pictures need shelter.” But not, apparently, a bus shelter.

In 1978, Wall has his first solo show, at Vancouver’s Nova Gallery. The featured piece is a light box transpar-ency, roughly five feet tall, eight across, blocked into the front window of the gallery so that nothing else is visible from the street. The picture, The Destroyed Room, presents a room, destroyed as advertised. Three mud red walls and the pale ceiling of a modest room, complete with a bed, a dresser, and women’s clothing. Violence has been done to it all—the furniture, the clothes, the window, wall, and door.

The lit scene is particularly jarring at night, especially for passing motorists. A few tire-screeching near misses ensue. The work is purchased by the National Gallery of Canada. Not a bad debut.

While The Destroyed Room and A Sudden Gust of Wind are both modeled on paintings, Wall has also drawn on lit-erature to great effect (which is not to say he scribbles in the margins). He makes overt references to other artists in

Profile Jeff Wall

Wall looks over a model for his san francisco museum of modern art retrospective.

Page 6: Jeff Wall, Photographer

Profile Jeff Wall

111lifestyles magazineWinter 2011

so-called staged and unstaged, doc-umentary and not. What I like about photography is how you can flicker between all these positions and blend them and never settle on one necessarily.” He sees what he does as having “a relation-ship to reportage, not an abandonment of it.”

Reportage itself, he notes, isn’t always pure. “These are just nu-ances of practice inside of what photography is. They blend into each other very quickly. For example, if you’re out on the sidewalk trying to take street photographs and you

point the camera at someone and they notice you and they do something, even if they just somehow respond to you, you’ve created a collaboration with that person. They’re performing. It’s the thinnest of differences.”

To Wall’s evident irritation, a failure to grasp this fuels the most common misconception of his work: “I have a reputation for somehow controlling everything in my work, to the last inch. That’s the most prevalent cliché that I hear and read all the time. The most inaccurate thing that’s said about what I do.” Which is? “What I do is a con-fusion of intention and accident.” Hired performers, for instance, don’t always behave as directed, or don’t always interpret directions as one might expect. “Accidents are al-ways happening and I work with them. I’m pretty ambiva-lent about the idea of control. Often I create it so I can play with it and then let it go.”

There’s no denying that his process is intriguing. Some of his pieces take years to come together. But he rails against the current fascination with going behind the scenes, a trend encouraged by the plethora of DVD extras accompa-nying every new movie’s release. “Now people just want to be insiders.” Wall urges spectators to learn to enjoy their status, to butt out—for their own good—of the artist’s

business as he goes about it. “They’re in the privileged po-sition of just enjoying the result.” What that result means to the artist, or how he achieved it, is decidedly second rate, and perhaps entirely discountable information. To hear an artist declaim authoritatively on the creation or significance of a work is, in Wall’s view, “an impingement on the freedom of the viewer, which is really the single most important thing about art. This concentration on the notion that you might know how a thing was made is a distraction. What’s wonderful about the spectator is that he’s not an insider. But he can become an insider by being a great spectator.”

Some of Wall’s pieces have gone for upward of a million dollars. Has success affected your work? “I made my pic-tures with very little money at the beginning and I could make them that way now if I had to. And I don’t mind the idea of doing it that way. I’m still capable of going back to where I was in 1980, scuffling around the street by myself. In terms of the financial part, that’s great: I have a studio, I employ people, I don’t have to carry heavy objects. But if I had to, I’d do it. I don’t think it’s made my work any better.”

What about critical success? There, he says, “things just get harder. If you accomplish something and raise your standards, then they’re that high and they can’t get low-er. If it wouldn’t get harder it would probably get boring, so I’m quite happy with that. But it’s easy to believe that you’re really good because people say you are. And that’s not in your interests as an artist. So I am wary that way.”

Despite his earlier protestation, there is a perfectly good reason for Wall’s disinterest in engaging in self-reflexive interpretation at the moment. He is intensely focused on completing the work for his London show, slated for Oc-tober (which, among other things, makes him exceedingly difficult to pin down for a conversation).

“When I’ve been struck by a subject, I know that subject has meaning which could be unraveled by people who are interested in meaning. But at the moment I don’t want to think about meaning very much. Because I know that the goodness of the picture will reveal the meaning. And if the picture’s not good, then of course it won’t have any mean-ing that anyone cares about. So for me, it’s rolled up in the quality of the work. If it’s successful, then meaning will emerge. But I’m happy for it to emerge for other people.”

Generous with his time, Wall now signals that the dis-cussion is drawing to a close. He has to get back to work. And to do so—at least for now—without thinking too much, or at all, about what it means.

What I do is a confusion of intention and accident.Accidentsare alwayshappeningand I work with them.I’m prettyambivalent about theidea of control.