Jeffrey Wall, OC, RSA (born September 29, 1946) is an artist best known for his large-scale back-lit Cibachrome photographs and art history writing. Early in his career, he helped define the Vancouver School[1] 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.
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, he 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[2] to do postgraduate work from 1970 to 1973 at the Courtauld Institute, where he studied with T.J. Clark.[3][4] Wall was assistant professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1974–75), associate professor at Simon Fraser University (1976–87), and lectured at the European Graduate School.[5] He was a full professor at the University of British Columbia until his retirement in 1999.[6] Wall has published essays on Dan Graham, Rodney Graham, Roy Arden, Ken Lum, Stephan Balkenhol, On Kawara, and other contemporary artists.[7] As a trained art historian, he has also discussed his own work extensively. Wall's essays and interviews conveying his philosophical interests have shaped critical discussions of his career.[6]
Artistic practice
Wall experimented with conceptual art while an undergraduate at UBC.[3] He then made no art until 1977, when he produced his first backlit photo-transparencies.[8] Most 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,[9] or to writers such as Franz Kafka, Yukio Mishima, and Ralph Ellison.[10]
Wall's work beginning in the late 1970s experimented with notions of theatricality influenced by television, advertising, and commercial window displays.[6] Presenting his first gallery exhibition in 1978 as an "installation" rather than as a photography show, the artist placed The Destroyed Room in the storefront window of the Nova Gallery, enclosing it in a plasterboard wall.
Mimic (1982)
Mimic[11] (1982) typifies Wall's cinematographic style and according to art historian Michael Fried is "characteristic of Wall's engagement in his art of the 1980s with social issues".[12] A 198 × 226cm 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.[13][14]
Picture for Women (1979). Art critic Jed Perl describes Picture for Women as Wall's signature piece.
Picture for Women is a 142.5 × 204.5cm 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 (the illuminated signs of cinema and advertising hoardings) 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."[15]
There are two figures in the scene, Wall himself, and a woman looking into the camera. In a profile of Wall in 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."[16] 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.[17]
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:
Un bar aux Folies Bergère by Édouard Manet, completed in 1882
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 (the scene reflected in the mirror) and, at the same time, looks straight out at us.[18]
Jeff Wall A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993
Katsushika Hokusai Yejiri Station, Province of Suruga, ca. 1832
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.[19] He distinguishes between unstaged "documentary" pictures, like Still Creek, Vancouver, winter 2003,[20] and "cinematographic" pictures, produced using a combination of actors, sets, and special effects, such as A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993. Based on Yejiri Station, Province of Suruga (ca. 1832) a woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai, A Sudden Gust of Wind recreates the depicted 19th-century Japanese scene in contemporary British Columbia, using 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."[21]
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.[22] 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 gelatine black and white photographs, and these have become an increasingly significant part of his work.[22] Examples were exhibited at Kassel's documenta X.
First shown at documenta 11, After "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue (1999–2000) 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.[23]
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.[24]
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 (Fassbinder, Bergman, the Dardenne brothers) to pieces by contemporaries Thomas Struth and David Claerbout. They were shown alongside 25 of his own pictures.[26]
Recognition
Wall was among the names in Blake Gopnik's 2011 list "The 10 Most Important Artists of Today", with Gopnik arguing, "For three decades, Wall has been testing the full range of what pictures can still do and mean, after anti-art had 'proved' them dead."[27] The artist has also gotten the following accolades:
↑ Wall, Jeff (2007). Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
↑ Newman, "Towards the Reinvigoration of the 'Western Tableau': Some Notes on Jeff Wall and Duchamp", p. 85
↑ Merritt, Naomi Manet's Mirror and Jeff Wall's Picture for Women: Reflection or Refraction?, Emaj, issue 4, 2009, "Emaj: Online journal of art". Archived from the original on 29 September 2010. Retrieved 15 April 2010.
1 2 Newman, "Towards the Reinvigoration of the 'Western Tableau': Some Notes on Jeff Wall and Duchamp", pp. 83–4
↑ Campany, David (2007). "'A Theoretical Diagram in an Empty Classroom': Jeff Wall's Picture for Women". Oxford Art Journal. 30 (1): 7–25. doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcl033.
↑ Gallery Guide text for the exhibition Jeff Wall Photographs 1978–2004, Tate Modern, London, 21 October 2005 to 8 January 2006; quoted in David Campany, "'A Theoretical Diagram in an Empty Classroom': Jeff Wall's Picture for Women", Oxford Art Journal 20.1 (2007): 12–14.
Richard William Hamilton CH was an English painter and collage artist. His 1955 exhibition Man, Machine and Motion and his 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, produced for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition of the Independent Group in London, are considered by critics and historians to be among the earliest works of pop art. A major retrospective of his work was at Tate Modern in 2014.
Richard Billingham is an English photographer and artist, film maker and art teacher. His work has mostly concerned his family, the place he grew up in the West Midlands, but also landscapes elsewhere.
Andreas Gursky is a German photographer and professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany.
Fountain is a readymade sculpture by Marcel Duchamp in 1917, consisting of a porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt". In April 1917, an ordinary piece of plumbing chosen by Duchamp was submitted for an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, the inaugural exhibition by the Society to be staged at the Grand Central Palace in New York. When explaining the purpose of his readymade sculpture, Duchamp stated they are "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice." In Duchamp's presentation, the urinal's orientation was altered from its usual positioning. Fountain was not rejected by the committee, since Society rules stated that all works would be accepted from artists who paid the fee, but the work was never placed in the show area. Following that removal, Fountain was photographed at Alfred Stieglitz's studio, and the photo published in the Dada journal The Blind Man. The original has been lost.
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère is a painting by Édouard Manet, considered to be his last major work. It was painted in 1882 and exhibited at the Paris Salon of that year. It depicts a scene in the Folies Bergère nightclub in Paris. The painting originally belonged to the composer Emmanuel Chabrier, a close friend of Manet, and hung over his piano. It is now in the Courtauld Gallery in London.
Stephen Shore is an American photographer known for his images of scenes and objects of the banal, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography. His books include Uncommon Places (1982) and American Surfaces (1999), photographs that he took on cross-country road trips in the 1970s.
Paul Graham is a British fine-art and documentary photographer. He has published three survey monographs, along with 17 other publications.
Nick Waplington is a British / American artist and photographer. Many books of Waplington's work have been published, both self-published and through Aperture, Cornerhouse, Mack, Phaidon, and Trolley. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Tate Britain and The Photographers' Gallery in London, at Philadelphia Museum of Art in the USA, and at the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television in Bradford, UK; and in group exhibitions at Venice Biennale, Italy and Brooklyn Museum, New York City. In 1993 he was awarded an Infinity Award for Young Photographer by the International Center of Photography. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Victoria and Albert Museum and Government Art Collection in London, National Gallery of Australia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Royal Library, Denmark.
Fred Herzog D.F.A. was a German-born Canadian photographer, who devoted his artistic life to walking the streets of Vancouver as well as almost 40 countries with his Leica, and various Nikon, Kodak and Canon, photographing - mostly with colour slide film - his observations of the street life with all its complexities. Herzog did not achieve critical recognition until the 1990s, when his unusual early use of colour in art photography was recognized. He became celebrated internationally for his pioneering street photography, his understanding of the medium combined with, as he put it, "how you see and how you think" created the right moment to take a picture.
The Vancouver School of conceptual or post-conceptual photography is a loose term applied to a grouping of artists from Vancouver starting in the 1980s. Critics and curators began writing about artists reacting to both older conceptual art practices and mass media by countering with "photographs of high intensity and complex content that probed, obliquely or directly, the social force of imagery." No formal "school" exists and the grouping remains both informal and often controversial even amongst the artists themselves, who often resist the term. Artists associated with the term include Vikky Alexander, Roy Arden, Ken Lum, Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, Stan Douglas and Rodney Graham.
Peter Fraser is a British fine art photographer. He was shortlisted for the Citigroup Photography Prize in 2004.
Jason Evans is a Welsh photographer and lecturer on photography. His best known work is Strictly, a series of portraits of young black men dressed as "country gents" made in collaboration with stylist Simon Foxton, and which were acquired for the permanent collection of the Tate Gallery, in 2004.
John Divola is an American contemporary visual artist and educator, living in Riverside, California. He works in photography, describing himself as exploring the landscape by looking for the edge between the abstract and the specific. He is a professor in the art department at University of California Riverside.
John O'Brian is an art historian, writer, and curator. He is best known for his books on modern art, including Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, one of TheNew York Times "Notable Books of the Year" in 1986, and for his exhibitions on nuclear photography such as Camera Atomica, organized for the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2015. Camera Atomica was the first comprehensive exhibition on postwar nuclear photography. From 1987 to 2017 he taught at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where he held the Brenda & David McLean Chair in Canadian Studies (2008-11) and was an associate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. O'Brian has been a critic of neoconservative policies since the start of the Culture Wars in the 1980s. He is a recipient of the Thakore Award in Human Rights and Peace Studies from Simon Fraser University.
Elad Lassry is an American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles.
Picture for Women is a photographic work by Canadian artist Jeff Wall. Produced in 1979, Picture for Women is a key early work in Wall's career and exemplifies a number of conceptual, material and visual concerns found in his art throughout the 1980s and 1990s. An influential photographic work, Picture for Women is a response to Édouard Manet's Un bar aux Folies Bergère and is a key photograph in the shift from small-scale black and white photographs to large-scale colour that took place in the 1980s in art photography and museum exhibitions. It is the subject of a monographic book written by David Campany and published as part of Afterall Books' One Work series.
David Campany is a British writer, curator, artist and educator, working mainly with photography. He has written and edited books; contributed essays and reviews to other books, journals, magazines and websites; curated photography exhibitions; given public lectures, talks and conference papers; had exhibitions of his own work; and been a jury member for photography awards. He has taught photographic theory and practice at the University of Westminster, London. Campany is Managing Director of Programs at the International Center of Photography in New York City.
Doug Rickard was an American artist and photographer. He used technologies such as Google Street View and YouTube to find images, which he then photographed on his computer monitor. His photography has been published in books, exhibited in galleries and held in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Rickard was best known for his book A New American Picture (2010). He was founder and publisher of the website on contemporary photography, American Suburb X, and the website These Americans which published some of his collection of found photographs.
John T. Hill is an American artist. His work focuses mainly on design and photography.
Mark Ruwedel is an American landscape photographer and educator.
Merritt, Naomi. ‘Manet's Mirror and Jeff Wall's Picture for Women: Reflection or Refraction?’, Emaj (Electronic Melbourne Art Journal), Issue 4, 2009, emaj: online journal of art
Newman, Michael. "Towards the Reinvigoration of the 'Western Tableau': Some Notes on Jeff Wall and Duchamp." Oxford Art Journal 30.1 (2007): 81–100.
Del Río, Víctor. La querella oculta. Jeff Wall y la crítica de la neovanguardia. El Desvelo Ediciones, 2012. Spain. ISBN9788493866389
Lauter, Rolf. Jeff Wall: figures & places: selected works from 1978–2000; Frankfurt: Museum für Moderne Kunst, 2001/2002. ISBN3791326074ISBN9783791326078
Lubow, Arthur. "The Luminist."The New York Times (February 25, 2007).
Lütticken, Sven. "The Story of Art According to Jeff Wall." Secret Publicity: Essays on Contemporary Art. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005. 69–82. ISBN9056624679
Merritt, Naomi. ‘Manet's Mirror and Jeff Wall's Picture for Women: Reflection or Refraction?’, Emaj (Electronic Melbourne Art Journal), Issue 4, 2009, emaj: online journal of art
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
