People fall from trees, they lie in the street, they lie on the grass near their horse, and they lie - looking suicidal - on their kitchen floor beneath a table. There's a room in Bermondsey's White Cube gallery (which is where, earlier today, I went to see Jeff Wall's Life in Pictures retrospective) where the art historian James Fox speaks knowingly about the 78 year old Canadian photographer and artist's penchant for showing people returning to the earth from where they came.
Even graves, and graveyards, crop up fairly regularly and he's got some fairly offbeat themes too - kitchens and cleaning utensils aren't normal fodder for photo art. But Wall is a different kind of photographer. He meticulously plans his images and arranges people to pose for them. Though it's not exactly clear how he managed to capture the boy, above, in full flight as he falls from a tree. A childhood accident Wall wanted to revisit.
Confrontations appear in his art, too. The two guys in suits and dickie bows having a set to or a pair of well to do looking young lads boxing in a front room of a nice tidy house. Most of the works at the White Cube didn't have titles attached (the ones I've added come from their website) but that's not particularly relevant. Surely a photograph is as good as a photograph is whatever it's called.
The little girl lying on the sidewalk on a sunny day in Vancouver is a powerful, ambiguous, image as is the one of a young woman standing up and talking on a telephone wearing a white coat. All looks very serious. I'm less impressed with the lady in the sombre looking black dress and her gentleman friend but others seem to start telling stories that we must finish ourselves.
The woman surrounded by, trapped even, her library of books. What's going on there? As for the topless guy on rough ground, he seems to be on the receiving end of some kind of violence but what kind and why? Wall's been doing this kind of stuff for over forty years now so he's learned how to use his (mostly very big) lightbox photographs to tell these stories.
Recovery (2017-18)
Insomnia (1994)
What to leave in and what to leave out. Recovery looks an outlier at first as it's a photo of a painting but you soon notice that one of the
faces is that of a real man. What's he doing there? Insomnia is the photo of the suicidal looking man even if the title suggests a different diagnosis. What of the man surrounded by lightbulbs? I overheard fellow gallery visitors suggesting his wife would be pretty pissed off with the amount of electricity he's using up. It costs money, you know.
Wall looks at life's little, and sometimes big, moments with an eye for detail and an eye for the curious. There are some works at the
White Cube that are so big I couldn't get a decent photo of them (so they're not included here) and there are some black and white photos too which aren't included in here because I didn't really like them. I'm on a downer when it comes to black and white photography at the moment. I can't see the point of it when colour is so much better - and truer. It's like listening to records in mono.
Mimic (1982)
There's a woman coming down some stairs, a cleaner in a fancy Frank Lloyd Wright style house, and a load of people hanging around outside a nightclub. None of them particularly life changing or memorable moments but all very much part of the rich tapestry of life and all rendered as beautiful by Wall.
Then there's Mimic, a recreation of an ugly racist incident that Wall witnessed on the streets of his hometown Vancouver many years ago. The Flooded Grave, with its starfish and everything, plugs right into what seems to be Wall's obsession with death (mind you, who's not obsessed with death? It comes to us all, it's the one certainty) although I prefer the thoughtful man perched high above a Canadian city (Toronto perhaps?) pondering something. Mortality? Affairs of the heart? Work? What to have for dinner? Who knows.
The Flooded Grave (1998-2000)
In the Legion (2022)
Bands play, people do improbable aerobics in legion bars, somebody falls off a horse, people go for a walk in the desert, girls play in the river, somebody sits under
what looks like a motorway bridge, a heavily tattooed man in a Charles Bukowski t-shirt reads a book on a sunny day, and there are some very dirty kitchens.
Oh, and there's a giant naked woman in some sort of library complex. Because .... why not? It's known that Wall spends a long time using technology to alter and define his photographs but I'm still not sure if that giant naked lady is some kind of
Duane Hanson artwork or if it's a normal size naked lady that Wall has increased in size to give the image an uncanny edge.
The Sicilian lady standing by a wall in her native island is a reference to a classic Italian film (one I can't bloody remember now (!) and one that was also pastiched by The White Lotus) and that's very much the kind of thing Wall gets up to. Returning to the aforementioned video,
Fox talks about how some of Wall's paintings are inspired by artists like
Manet,
Goya, and
Delacroix.
Though, to be honest, I couldn't get it from my visit to
the White Cube. I liked (almost) all of Wall's photographs though from a young woman meditating, or just relaxing, on what appears to be the roof of a car to a group of people hanging around outside a theatre showing a play, or film, with Glenda Jackson in. All life, it seems, is in Jeff Wall's work and it's not so much as if he's raging about gravity and the grave, so much as he's celebrating our (hopefully) long journey towards it with all the bumps in the road that every journey will inevitably have. I'm glad I went (and I also enjoyed my pie and mash in Manze's on Tower Bridge Road beforehand too).
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