FROM THE OCTOBER 2005 ISSUE OF MODERN PAINTERS

By Vince Aletti

No question: Jeff Wall can be intimidating. In fact, the Canadian photographer, whose terrific retrospective arrived at Tate Modern in October, is exactly the sort of brainy artist-theorist I tend to stay far away from.

His meticulously staged and digitally constructed images are the contemporary equivalent of history paintingbig, ambitious, earnest tours de force that, for all their concern with social justice, could never be described as soulful. Nearly every one is intended to illuminate an idea about capitalism, immigration, exploitation, alienation, the environment, intolerance, urban life, the landscape, war or death.

But no matter how dauntingly intellectual, Walls work rarely lapses into the kind of opaque pedantry that crops up in his essays and interviews. Actually, his pictures can be quite ravishing, and not just because of their flawless technical polish. Wall is that rare conceptualist who understands the importance of beauty. He also understands that a picture cannot merely be the realization of an idea.

There has to be a dramatic mediation of the conceptual element in art, he told one interviewer. Without this mediation you have only concepts on the one hand and pictures on the other. Images become a decorative completion of an already fully evolved thought. They are just illustrations. So they are boring; there is no drama.

Wall, who often refers to himself as a cinematographer, is so adept at dramatic mediation that even his most elaborately staged fictionsA Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), for instance, or the panoramic Restoration (both 1993)are surprisingly convincing imitations of life. Hes hardly the first photographer to orchestrate tableaux, whether theatrical or cinematic; the tradition goes back to Julia Margaret Cameron, Thomas Eakins, Fred Holland Day and countless fashion and commercial pros.

But Wall, whose earliest pictures date from the late 1970s, remains at the peak of a still-cresting wave of photographersGregory Crewdson, Hannah Starkey, Collier Schorr, Adi Nes, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Justine Kurland among themwho deliberately blur the line between document and fabrication. This may no longer be the strategy of choice for the latest crop of photography majors, but fiction frequently trumps fact when photography shows up in art galleries, and the snapshot aesthetic of Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans is almost ready for the endangered list.

The rest of this article appears in the October 2005 issue of MODERN PAINTERS.

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