The Arts: Jeff Wall's fascinating large-scale retrospective at the Tate Modern plays with ideas of reality and artifice, writes Aidan Dunne.
Jeff Wall is one of the key figures who have provided a definitive answer to the old question of whether photography can be regarded as art. While his work certainly adds up to a convincing yes, that positive comes with a price attached. That price is partly the demystification of photography, a recognition that the photographic image doesn't enjoy as privileged a relationship with reality as was once thought. Now that most people are familiar with the wonders of Photoshop this isn't a particularly radical proposition. We all know the camera can be persuaded to lie.
Wall has himself often used computer manipulation in making his photographs over the last 15 years or so: one epic image from 1993, A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai), seamlessly incorporates more than 100 individual photographs, for example. But it's not just a question of faking it. His underlying point is that all image-making, including all photography, is fake, in the sense that it is all artifice. He is a pioneer of the thriving genre of contemporary tableau photography which, as the term implies, involves photographing elaborately staged scenes involving performers, and hence draws attention to its own artifice. One effect is that when we look at an image by Wall we are prompted to look at ourselves looking.
Jeff Wall: Photographs 1978-2004 at Tate Modern is a big, consistently fascinating retrospective. It has to be big because most of his work is on a large scale, inclining towards the size of a cinema screen and, like the cinema, it takes the form of transparencies. Rather than being projected and moving, Wall's transparencies are still and backlit, giving them a heightened brilliance and clarity. Their light box presentation is more commonly used in advertising. Scale and luminosity are integral to the work so that, as with paintings, it is important to encounter it at first hand. Much is inevitably lost in reproduction.
Wall is Canadian. He was born in Vancouver in 1946, and is still based there. He didn't set out to be a photographic artist, but it was while he was studying for his MA in art history (he went on to complete a doctorate at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London) that he began to take photographs. It was 1978 before he made his first light box works. One of his first ambitious pieces is included in the Tate show. It draws directly on his experience of 19th-century art. The Destroyed Room is just that: a photograph of a comprehensively trashed room. But the composition is an inventive recreation of Delacroix's tumultuous painting The Death of Sardanapalus, minus figures. Wall only obliquely refers to the slaughter of the ruler's concubines depicted in the original, through indications that the wrecked room is a woman's bedroom. Furthermore, the "room" is obviously a constructed set, it doesn't pretend to be a documentary image of a genuine scene.
Wall is directing our attention both to the fabricated nature of the image, bidding us to be suspicious of it and, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, hinting at its genuine narrative potential. He is also encouraging us to look at images in terms of what we don't immediately see, what is invisible because it's taken as read, or concealed in other ways. All of these ideas remain central to everything he's done since. It is immediately striking that, even at this early stage, his photographs have a quality of presence, a deliberation that owes a great deal to the classical tradition in European painting, while also drawing on elements of mainstream photography, cinema and advertising.
Apart from referring to specific paintings (and a Japanese woodblock print in the case of the Hokusai) Wall has devised his images in various ways, re-staging incidents glimpsed in passing or distantly remembered, inventing dramatic tableaux of his own, drawing on literary sources or, perhaps surprisingly, relying on straight documentary material. As he has noted, all of these can overlap in various ways: the boundaries are blurred because that is the nature of representation. This risks making him sound more like an academic theorist than an artist, and some of his images can, at first glance, comes across as dry and bland, almost nondescript, partly because we are so used to scanning and dismissing photographs in terms of their formulaic presentation of information, and partly because his subject matter is as often as not nondescript, everyday reality.
He certainly does much more than provide an academic critique of classical painting and, even though a great deal of what he does takes as starting point an apparently neutral or received source, it is notable that a body of personal concerns become apparent when you see his work en masse.
For one thing, he is obviously interested in anomalous spaces, in corners and laneways, the accidents or by-products of urban planning, patches of waste ground, places unsure of their identity, uneasy amalgams of residential, functional, industrial, agricultural and natural. The Crooked Path, for example, is an informal path, what planners call a "desire path" worn across an open patch of ground adjacent to a housing complex; A Hunting Scene features men with rifles by a similar stretch of suburbia; Dawn centres on a deserted alleyway between grim, utilitarian urban buildings. Time and again we see people in the context of anonymous, generic urban spaces dominated by concrete and municipal planting, as in Overpass.
His interest in these spaces probably relates to his preoccupation with belonging and exclusion, and that in turn has to do with visibility and invisibility. Time and again he depicts outsiders, people on the margins of society, the people who we often fail to see. In Paul Auster's novel, City of Glass, the protagonist, after a traumatic reversal, walks around Manhattan and is suddenly aware of just these kinds of marginal figures. He feels compelled to write about them: "Today, as never before: the tramps, the down-and-outs, the shopping-bag ladies, the drifters and drunks . . ." Looking at one of "the aristocracy" of vagabonds - a street musician - he thinks: "To be inside the music . . . perhaps that is a place where one could finally disappear."
Wall is drawn to individuals at that point of social invisibility. He approaches the theme brilliantly in, untypically, one of a series of black and white images, Forest. In a woodland setting, we catch a fragmentary glimpse of a female figure retreating from elements of a makeshift shelter. In Milk, a man flings a bottle of milk, a symbol of sustenance and charity, towards the camera. The clustered groups in The Storyteller suggest people literally by-passed by contemporary urban culture. Volunteer draws us into the chill impersonality of a homeless centre. Insomnia, a terrific picture of a man asleep under a kitchen table, imparts a sense of larger problems and anxieties.
Odradek, Taboritska 8, Prague, 18 July 1994, which features a dark stairwell, refers to Kafka's story about a hybrid creature who lurks unseen in just these kinds of spaces. The idea recurs in another of Wall's remarkable literary pictures, inspired by the prologue of Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man. He has made concrete Ellison's description of a man who lives secretly in the cellar of a New York apartment building. The room is illuminated by 1,369 light bulbs wired into the building's circuits, and the image is, literally and figuratively, dazzling.
Oddly enough, for someone who delights in making us see ordinary things afresh, there is also a side to Wall's imagination that is given to Gothic fantasy. A vampires' picnic formed the subject of one picture and, in Dead Troops Talk, a celebrated work from 1992 (exhibited once at Imma), he has imagined that the soldiers of a Red Army patrol, killed in an ambush in Afghanistan in 1986, have come back to life. Their grisly pantomiming is disconcerting, but it does have something in common with a distinctively Russian vein of black humour.
Wall's most recent work, though, represents the apotheosis of utter normality. In A View from an Apartment, we see two young women engaged in casual activities in an apartment overlooking an industrial-looking river landscape.
The normality is both real and a construct. Wall rented the apartment and invited the women to furnish and live in it. The image we see was made progressively and cumulatively over the best part of a year. Everything is ordinary, but everything also has a pleasing, enhanced presence to it. We realise the view of the outside world is impossibly vivid and detailed: in reality neither we, nor a single camera lens, would see things this way. What is usually taken as read suddenly becomes visible and even uncanny.
Jeff Wall: Photographs 1978-2004 is at Tate Modern, London until Jan 8, 2006
