Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall, Steve's Farm, Steveston 1991

A grit road passes, undulating, through an unremarkable town. In the middle distance, someone walks unhurriedly towards us along one of the light grey tyre tracks.  We notice two horses, on a patch of  ground behind dilapidated wooden buildings.  Around these gently animated figures the stillness gathers. This is a place waiting for something to happen. The road, the tyre tracks, stand as traces of purpose. Beyond the sheds and the huddled houses we sense infinities of space.

In the stillness, we notice: a loose portico, about to slide to the ground; rusting vehicles; scrubby brown grass on a shallow embankment and field. Behind the crumbling houses there’s a pile of timber for burning (a gutted outbuilding?). Echoing this, fallen tree branches lie opposite. Above, the blue is draining out of a still, even sky. In the background, where the road swerves to the right in the distance and disappears, a row of identical houses leads us to the picture’s edge.  We look again and we notice that the road is more of a track, encroached on by wild grass; the field is becoming a wilderness; indifferent trees sway slightly, under a dying sky. It’s a frontier place, a threshold between human dwelling and ragged nature. It’s also a transparency, over a lighted box, and it’s entrancingly beautiful.

I am in Tate Modern, looking at Jeff Wall’s Steve’s Farm, Steveston (1980).  I’ve seen it before, at a small exhibition in Norwich Castle two years ago, and coming back to it I remember the details: those horses, the holes in the roof, that spindly tree near the corner of the field. I don’t think it’s just chance that those things have stayed in my mind, though chance is always an essential element in what we take away with us from exhibitions. But details - in art, in life - become truly memorable when they belong to a powerful atmosphere. And Steve’s Farm is typical of Wall’s pictures in that it does impress on your mind a really strong, strange feeling. His pictures don’t hit you, sensation-like. Instead, they seep into you as keep looking at them. They are a slow-burn emotional experience. Though they are made in the ‘instant’ medium of photography, the slow kind of looking they induce is anything but instantaneous. You look, you register, you take your time.

What is the atmosphere of Steve’s Farm? I would say it’s melancholy. Not operatic, tragic grief, but the sadness of a ruined farm and of identical houses, each as solitary as a Carthusian cell, surrounded by lone and level straggly land. A sadness of wonky fences and clapped out cars, of living on the edge of nowhere. It’s the melancholy so wound into the fabric of life you don’t even notice it, except when you’re still, except when you stand just outside it for a moment, as we do now. The subjects are neither diminished nor aggrandised by the contrivances of art. They return us to the stuff of life, simply more disposed, for a while, to see it.

The stuff of experience, however terrible the experience, is still just ordinary stuff.  Photography, the recording art, is a wonderful medium for reminding us of this. But ordinary things have one peculiar quality: namely, they don’t exist. Or rather, things are only ordinary when they are on the margins of vision, as this town must have been ordinary to the driver who passed through it, an hour ago, a day ago. Things stop being ordinary when you start looking at them. Take the most everyday, dull thing you can think of and start drawing it, and it becomes the most interesting thing in the world. As we look at it, we feel that it is an important matter to capture its form, its texture, its presence.

And this gazing on the ordinary is what much of Wall’s art is about. His suburban images, based in his home town of Vancouver, become as fascinating as Chardin’s pots and hares. Many of his  photos remark on what usually goes unremarked, they describe the nondescript.  They remind me of David Lynch’s filming technique of shooting scenes from one fixed point, turning a sideways glimpse into a frontal gaze. This attentiveness to things is analogous to the moral act of giving your attention to another, of looking sympathetically beyond yourself, but it is not in itself moral, or morally improving. It is also paradoxical, as the looking itself involves some kind of organisation, as we assimilate the scene before us: the immediate impression turns into a mediated, meaningful vision. Another way of looking at Wall’s photos is to see them as a meditation on the processing we do as we sort the world into ordered images.

Central to the ordered, artful image are genre and composition. We look again at Steve’s Farm, and we notice that it is a certain kind of picture, a landscape. And it does the things that landscapes in the classical tradition tend to do: it disposes its parts into a harmonious, balanced whole. It makes us think of Dutch pastoral, say, or the classical world of Poussin. As in the old masters, the skyline in this picture divides the picture into a ratio which looks close to the Golden Mean. Like any number of seventeenth-century pictures, the road is a device to lead us from foreground to middleground and background. It also balances the strong horizontal of the houses, which is further counterpointed by the orthogonals: the wooden border and the water channel on the left, and the line of grass and fence on the right. While the diagonals lead us towards the vanishing point, the foreground is anchored by the shed, fence and tree on the bottom left. This helps to pull our attention back to inspect this waste ground. Land is connected to sky by the treetops. Most prominently, there is one tree centre left, one central and one on the right, each at a different depth in the pictorial field: they articulate these receding spatial planes, and also divide the landscape into four coherent vertical sections, making it more legible. There is a rough symmetry between the land on either side of the road, made more visually stimulating by having the road off-centre, and by the varied levels of ground. The rhythm of the wooden posts on the left is answered by the pattern of house shapes in the distance.

These devices of geometrical composition work with colour harmony: the image is unified by dominant tones of grey-blue (the road, the fence, the sky, the slate roofs), and green-brown. This is fitfully punctuated by the white and creamy house fronts, illuminated from the right. By such means, every part of the picture leads our eye easily to another. Good composition always draws us back into a picture, creating a satisfyingly regulated world which we instinctively don’t want to leave.

In the classical tradition, the harmonics of composition signify a harmonic, ordered society. The equilibrium of the image is a formal equivalent of the equitable cosmos. The Dutch landscape or interior is characteristically about the prosperity that follows good government, in the well-ordered soul and the well-ordered society. Wall’s images evoke this tradition, so we can see how his subject-matter overturns the usual repertoire of images. Prosperity has turned to shabbiness – uncultivated land, a defunct farm. A thriving society has become a desolate, unsocial world, where life is lived in isolation. This is the end of a story, an anti-pastoral where man’s enterprise is sinking back into stark, unbeautified nature. Thus the composition is not merely a technical device, but a way of making the image an ironic commentary on a whole tradition. At the same time, composition also balances, but does not resolve, the various tensions – between man and nature, between the old (the farm) and the new (the houses in the distance), between movement and stillness. And between the smart, weightless technology of the work and the drab, solid poverty of the thing represented.

To take another example: Milk (1984) is deliberately, one might say ostentatiously, composed: the bush balances the figure of the man, and this left column of the picture adds visual interest to the whole scene:  it creates a further space in the receding banister and staircase, and its verticals answer the tilted horizontal of the pavement. It’s unrelated in terms of narrative to the man, but cover it up with your hand and the picture loses much of its power. The variety of textures creates a visual interest:  glass is placed against brick; there is a syncopation of different rhythms of brickwork; the plant becomes an intriguing remnant of organic life,  enveloped by the mundane and the manmade. Like Steve’s Farm, Milk also alludes to paintings: the man, modelled in strong chiaroscuro, could easily belong in a painting by Caravaggio. He’s the stark obverse of Murillo’s cherubic streetkids.

But what is happening here? What has prompted this man to jolt the carton of milk and send its contents flying? We do not know. The more we look at these pictures, the more questions they raise. They lead us from the seen to the unseen. Techniques of absolute clarity are used to create an awareness of mystery. The work also directs us to think about the medium. Photography is an art based on light. In Wall’s work, light is fundamental in other ways: these images are transparencies, they are in light boxes, each one is a revelation of some kind. Yet what they reveal points to the unrevealed, to what is not transparent – the secret lives in suburban houses, the tragedies that happen on a street corner, and pass in an instant. Illumination is effective because it points us to the shadows.

This sense of mystery is also bound up with a feeling of wonder. Part of the fascination in Jeff Wall’s work is the complexity of the process. Images like Milk might be inspired by something happening on a street, which is then painstakingly recreated using actors, in dozens of separate shots.  Others, like A Sudden Gust of Wind (based on an image by Hokusai) or Dead Troops Talk, are studio fabrications. No such scene ever took place in the world out there: they exist only as art. These last two works cited have been digitally assembled to create an entirely new image. Sometimes this process of meticulous construction can take months. It is a kind of inversion of Gerhard Richter’s paintings of photos, or Ron Mueck’s sculptures. For while those artists use hyper-realist techniques to bring painting and sculpture close to the condition of photography, Jeff Wall takes photography in the direction of the crafting, fabricating process of the painting and sculpture workshop. In each case, we feel intrigued, and the sensation of some marvellous skill, beyond our comprehension, is part of the viewing experience.

Jeff Wall’s photos are utterly clear, easily readable images. And yet they involve us deeply by prompting complex responses. We can read them according to a classical language, and see them as a kind of deconstruction of that language. We can explore their ambience of mystery, imagining the narrative around them, consciously sensing the dislocating, rather eerie feelings that drift through us as they unfold their strangeness. We can relate sympathetically to the pathos of the subject matter, and then interpret them as post-modern explorations of artifice and the impossibility of pinning down the authentic. And we can be rapt by a fascination with the means of their production. Above all, they are such intensely, radiantly beautiful creations that they seem to offer some kind of transcendence, transposing the mass of reality into the ethereal world of the lighted box and the thin film of transparency. These glowing creations suggest stained glass, a juncture between earthly and perfect light. Reverently attentive to the texture of the real, Jeff Wall’s photography is finally a visionary art.