ART REVIEW : Life in a Dramatic New Light

As an artist, Jeff Wall is engaged in a rather unusual effort to retrieve various modes of artistic expression that were common before the modern era. No mere revivalist, Wall means to transform those traditions through an appeal to the camera, a defining element of modern life.

A small but welcome exhibition of seven recent works by the Canadian artist--he lives in Vancouver and teaches at the University of British Columbia--opened last weekend at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. The show is welcome because, although widely shown in Europe during the 1980s, Wall’s art has almost never been seen in Southern California. The sole exception is a collaborative design for a children’s playground, executed with Conceptualist Dan Graham and shown at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum in 1989.

The current exhibition, which will not travel and has no catalogue, is effectively Wall’s West Coast debut. It offers a reasonable introduction.

Wall, 45, makes big photographic transparencies, in color, of scenes he has carefully staged, and he shows them in light boxes fluorescently lit from behind. Typically large (as much as 8 feet by 14 feet), the form recalls commercial advertising signs familiar from airports, bus shelters and urban street corners. The scale of movies is also suggested by the glowing illumination of big, theatrically staged pictures.

The light-box format establishes a commanding dramatic presence that ordinary photographs, by themselves, simply wouldn’t have. Absent any text or product names, and in the space of the museum or art gallery, it is a presence notably associated with painting.

Wall’s popularity in Europe may be explained, at least in part, by his determined resuscitation of motifs familiar from the history of European painting. The composition of a 1989 work called “Outburst” has an oddly Neo-Classical feel, while its subject--Asian workers in a garment factory--updates to the present-day depictions of women sewing so familiar to European genre painting from Vermeer to Degas.

In gallery labels, Madeleine Grynstejn, associate curator of San Diego MOCA and organizer of the show, notes other such connections. The expansive sky and the low, compressed landscape in “The Holocaust Memorial in the Jewish Cemetery” (1987) come straight from conventions of 17th-Century Dutch painting. In “Eviction Struggle” (1988), the high vantage point, panoramic view of the suburban neighborhood and relative insignificance to the larger composition of the scuffle that is the source of the picture’s title all recall the 16th-Century genre paintings of Pieter Bruegel, here recast in working-class Vancouver.

Wall takes peculiar advantage of his glossy, theatrical medium to distract attention from the conflict that frequently occupies center stage. The Bruegel-like tone that results is a pessimism in regard to human nature, which reverberates against a luxurious reverence for the exquisiteness of the world.

The rich, panoramic detail of “Eviction Struggle” keeps leading you away from the central scene, in which uniformed guards fight with a bearded man in the front yard of a suburban house as a blond woman rushes to his aid and a young boy stands frozen in the doorway. The all-over composition and even illumination of the picture quietly diverts attention. Your eye wanders off to the impossibly lush rose bush at a neighbor’s front stoop, up to the elevated railway that slices through the otherwise quiet neighborhood, down to the fellow a few blocks away who walks the tracks, back to the crisp pine forest that bumps up against the cityscape in the distance.

Wall repeatedly pulls you back to the little drama at hand by populating the street with passers-by who have stopped dead in their tracks at the sound of the eviction ruckus. But you continue to wander and to daydream (what does that neighbor do to get such incredibly huge blossoms on that rose bush?). In the scheme of things, the wrenching trauma of eviction is equally small.

Wall’s way with seemingly insignificant details can be disarming. The most bizarre is in “Outburst,” in which a scowling, furiously gesticulating man has startled an unsuspecting woman at her sewing machine and--as you scan the scene beyond this dramatic focal point--several other workers around the room as well.

The oddest feature of the picture, which is large and dense with incident, is the screaming man’s shoes. He’s conventionally dressed--shirt, tie, slacks--and his shoes, which are conspicuously lit, are brand new. I mean brand new, straight from the shoe box new, with nary a smudge or scuff in sight.

Why this anomaly? And why has the artist given it such subtly inflected prominence in the scene? Does it have a special meaning--say, as a clue to the wild man’s character?

No answer is evident or conclusive. What’s remarkable, instead, is how such an utterly insignificant item easily manages to draw you away from the explosiveness of the scene. The violence of the moment gets irrationally trivialized.

At their best, Wall’s photographs convey a conflicted sense of poignant drama. Ordinary brutalities, which range from a showdown between a junkyard dog and a chicken in a poor Tijuana street (“An Encounter in the Calle Valentin Gomez Farias,” 1991, commissioned by the museum for the show) to an encompassing horror like the Holocaust, become appallingly incidental episodes weighted down by the press of everyday life.

In a way, Wall’s light boxes return to that moment in the 19th Century when the invention of the camera began the derailment of painting’s traditional authority. Like many artists since the 1970s, he began making images that denied the supposed documentary status of photography and were, instead, scenes clearly fabricated to be photographed. Emphasizing camera-derived methods for an invocation of painting’s history, Wall tries to transform a tradition through a language appropriate to our moment.

Yet, somehow it doesn’t quite work. Perhaps the reason is that the medium of the light box can’t help but seem at cross-purposes with that other modern invention, the museum itself. In that context a light box seems a mere novelty--electrified easel painting. It distracts, but not in as provocative a way as, say, the shiny new shoes in “Outburst.” Wall is using a public form, but the public context of its display seems unconsidered.

Maybe that will change. This museum, at least, is trying its best to put the light-box medium into the mainstream. Wall’s is the third show in recent seasons to feature the device (exhibitions with Krzysztof Wodiczko and Alfredo Jaar used it, too). The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art is on its way to becoming “Light Boxes R Us.”

At San Diego MOCA, 700 Prospect St., La Jolla, (619) 454-3541, through Jan. 19. Closed Mondays.