Back to Photography's History:
Jeff Wall's Exhibition
"Exposure" at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin
After
the major retrospectives in Basel, London, and New York, the Deutsche
Guggenheim in Berlin is now showing a selection of Jeff Wall's most recent
black and white photographic works juxtaposed with earlier pieces. Brigitte
Werneburg on Wall's return to American photography from the Depression
era and his quest for the perfect image.
Jeff
Wall, Milk, 1984, The Museum of Modern Art, New York,
©
2007 Jeff Wall
The major Jeff
Wall retrospective of 2005/06 at the Tate
Modern in London and at the Schaulager
in Basel clearly showed how vast the arsenal of Wall's
works has to be to yield the dozen or so completely flawless, sharp-witted
images that occupy our fantasy afresh each time we encounter them. And
it's been like this for decades now: Mimic
(1982), an apparent snapshot of a provocation that is as random as it is
unfriendly, counts among the icons of recent art history that are firmly
rooted in collective memory. Or
Milk
(1984), the image of an indefinable situation in which a young man is
squeezing milk out of a carton, causing it to shoot through the air in a
magnificent arc. And then there's the view into the lodgings of the Invisible
Man (1999-2000) from Ralph
Ellison's novel of the same name. It took Jeff Wall some courage to do
this work, as it required him to venture into the artistically risky field
of illustration.
Jeff
Wall, After "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue, 2001,
The
Museum of Modern Art, New York,
©
2007 Jeff Wall
But what discoveries can
we expect from Exposure, Wall's latest show at the Deutsche
Guggenheim, which unites selected older works with four new works by
the artist, who was born in 1946 in Vancouver? We certainly can't fail to
notice the courage and firm resolution required to overcome the risk of
failing in the quest for the triumphant, perfect image. As the works
before them, the new works do not aim at surface provocation. Yet they
challenge prevailing expectations nonetheless, recalling as they do the
beginnings of Wall's career, which began with the photographic panel
picture.
Jeff
Wall, Men Waiting, 2006
© Jeff
Wall
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In the four large-scale black and white works Men Waiting
(2006), Tenants (2007), War Game (2007), and Cold Storage
(2007), Jeff Wall once again implements photography to renew a pictorial
tradition whose crisis it brought on of its own accord. Instead of turning
to painting, he addresses the legacy of photography from the Depression
era, the long queues of the unemployed as we know them from the images of Margaret
Bourke-White and Dorothea
Lange. Or he frames a reference to the bleak row houses that Walker
Evans discovered behind a movie poster featuring Carole
Lombard in Love
before Breakfast. Soberly, and even randomly, Wall reintroduces
the tradition of social documentary photography, whose crisis in the '60s
and '70s articulated the problem of straight
photography unleashed not least by conceptual approaches such as his
own staged photography.
Jeff Wall, A view from an apartment, 2004-2005, Tate, London
©
2007 Jeff Wall
The first photographs that
made Jeff Wall well known in the early '70s were shocking in a quiet, but
lasting way. They were staged and provocative by virtue of their narrative
approach, which - as was to be expected - was a poor match for the
conceptual photography of the time that represented standardized everyday
structures by ordering them in sequences of equivalent parts. Jeff Wall
was always interested and involved in the theoretical investigation into
contemporary aesthetics. Closely informed about the current state of
discourse, he now called this conceptual approach into question with his
own alternative concept. Each of his photographs portrayed a unique and
valid pictorial story. In clear reference to the large canvases of
traditional painting, each picture was meant to stand on its own.
Jeff
Wall, A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993, Tate, London,
©
2007 Jeff Wall
And it was precisely this
autonomy that made it vulnerable. At first, it was the references to
figurative painting of the late 19th century and classical narrative
cinema that were called into question - also and particularly because it
was during this very time that cinema grew aware of itself and its own
historicity and had developed anti-narrative forms similar to those in
modern literature and contemporary art. Jeff Wall always took care that
the given plot in these staged works, which he termed "cinematic
photography," remained obscure. In the 1987 image of the same name, what
"agreement," for instance, was arrived at between the man in the Chevy
Impala and the longhaired youth leaning against the car? But puzzles don't
always help to counter-act the stiffness of certain ideas. Tested formulas
and recurring mannerisms become all the more evident in the images, which
are always fastidiously arranged and in which no detail is left to chance
- such as in The
Storyteller (1986), probably one of his most famous works. Based
on the frequently quoted Dejeuner
sur l'herbe of Édouard
Manet, the work portrays indigenous Canadian natives having a picnic
under a highway overpass.
Jeff
Wall, Concrete Ball, 2002,
©
Jeff Wall
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