Jeff Wall’s Aim? To Improve Your Vision

Jeff Wall makes big pictures. His photographic artworks--usually presented as giant color transparencies in light boxes--occupy up to 4 by 16 feet of space, and they have the commanding presence of film stills or traditional history paintings.

He also deals with a daunting range of complicated subjects. Loath to repeat himself, Wall has revisited famous French paintings, from Delacroix’s “Death of Sardanapalus” to Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergere”; created a tableau of a grimy battlefield littered with bodies; devised surprising street scenes, both humorous and ominous; surveyed vast stretches of landscape; and addressed troubling social issues.

All these themes--and more--can be seen in Wall’s first major U.S. retrospective exhibition, opening today at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Organized by former MOCA curator Kerry Brougher, who became director of England’s Museum of Modern Art Oxford in April, the show consists of 34 pieces spanning nearly 20 years of work by the 50-year-old Canadian artist. Midway in an international tour, “Jeff Wall” began last winter at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington; it will conclude in Japan, at Art Tower Mito (Dec. 13-March 22).

Despite the ambitious scale and scope of his work, Wall talks about it in straightforward terms. “I want it to work as a picture,” he said in an interview at the museum. “That’s the thing. I always ask myself, ‘Does it work as a picture?’ ” An idea isn’t enough to make a work of art, he said. Neither is mere formal exploration. What intrigues him is the process of building a picture from ideas, people, places and unexpected occurrences, and mastering the technical expertise to bring it off as a complete pictorial experience.

As one might guess from observing his most complicated pictures, they are a long time in the making. “I look at pictorial possibilities,” Wall said. “I may see a location that looks promising, but then I wait until I think of someone who might appear there or something that might occur there.” Although critics frequently describe his work as being meticulously orchestrated, Wall said that’s not the way he works.

Rather like the director of a film or play who sets up a structure but encourages actors to shape their roles and dialogue, Wall allows his work to develop in ways he might not have predicted at the outset. When he employs performers, he watches how they inhabit the set or occupy space and often incorporates their movement and body language.

For “Citizen,” a relatively simple, 6-by-8-foot black-and-white image of a man lying on the grass, shot last fall in Culver City, Wall looked at lots of parks in the Los Angeles area before selecting Tellefson Park. Then he hired an actor and spent several days working intuitively while shooting on location.

“I wanted to make almost documentary, straight-photography-looking pictures, as a change of pace,” Wall said of his recent black-and-white photographs. What he had in mind for “Citizen” was a picture that “looks like it could have been made by someone who lives in the neighborhood.” Now that it’s finished, Wall likens it to one of Mathew Brady’s Civil War photographs, but the image is open to interpretation.

Except for a palm tree in the background, the park could be almost anywhere, Wall said. The actor was chosen partly because he had a receding chin that seems to dissolve when he reclines with his head turned away from the camera. “It’s hard to explain why I choose someone. It’s how they look, how it feels,” Wall said.

A thoughtful, soft-spoken artist, Wall has achieved considerable recognition for pushing the boundaries of photography within art’s hallowed pictorial traditions. He was born in Vancouver, Canada, in 1946 and studied art at the University of British Columbia, where he is now an associate professor in the fine arts department. He first gained notice as a conceptual artist, but took a hiatus from art making and did graduate work in art history at the Courtauld Institute in London from 1970-73. Intensely interested in film, he considered pursuing a career as a filmmaker and began writing scripts, but returned to photography in 1976.

The following year, while traveling from Barcelona to London, Wall saw a back-lit bus advertisement that led to his use of transparencies in light boxes. He had found a contemporary medium that offered scale and luminescence, captured public attention and provided possibilities for updating traditions of pictorial expression.

“The Destroyed Room,” a roughly 5-by-7 1/2-foot transparency in a light box made in 1978, marks the beginning of his new direction. It’s a startling image of a wrecked bedroom, with the bed tipped on its side and the mattress slashed, a mass of clothes and jewelry on the floor, and wallboard ripped away, exposing studs and insulation.

Seductively beautiful in its colors and textures, but ugly in its implications of violence, the picture invites audience speculation as to its meaning. Few viewers guess the picture is actually based on Delacroix’s romantic masterwork, “The Death of Sardanapalus,” depicting a defeated leader having all his possessions destroyed--women, slaves, horses and material goods.

In 1979, Wall used his new medium to re-create Manet’s Impressionist painting, “A Bar at the Folies-Bergere,” in a massive photograph, “Picture for Women.” In Wall’s version, the barmaid has been replaced by a woman in T-shirt and jeans, and the convivial bar scene reflected in a mirror has been exchanged for a stark photographer’s studio. In a point-blank reminder that this is a photograph, not a painting, the mirror behind Wall’s model reflects a camera on a tripod and the artist himself.

Multilayered works such as these have given Wall a means of exploring artistic traditions without retreating to the past or perpetuating the notion that art history is a progressive development.

“I never see my work as a return to tradition,” he said. What fascinates him is rethinking European pictorial ideas, and making intuitive connections with them. It’s partly an American thing, Wall said. “Being American is about not being European and not being Asian. There is a commonality, of course, but Americans are people who deliberately left the Old World, both to reinvent culture and preserve it. I see my work as coming out of Beuys, Judd and Smithson as much as Manet and Caravaggio. Both, not one or the other.”

Manet opened up the metaphor of painting modern life, he said. The French painter’s works have provided a rich source of inspiration for Wall, but it’s modern life--with all its tensions and strange appearances--that seems to keep him going. “What’s so great about photography is that it can respond to things that are actually happening,” he said at one point in a rambling conversation. A bit later he offered another insight into his motivation: “I want to make you see something you have seen but haven’t really seen, haven’t attended to, haven’t had a subjective relationship with.”

It’s difficult to sum up a body of work that ranges in subject matter from landscape and street shots to cinematic drama and art historical re-creations--and varies in emotional tone from loony to disturbing. Sometimes Wall fastens on small events, such as milk splashing out of a carton held by a man seated on a sidewalk. But he also stages bizarre scenes, such as “Giant,” depicting an oversize nude woman standing on the landing of a staircase in a pristine office building.

Still other pictures depict an artist in an anatomy lab drawing a severed human arm, or a man intent upon untangling a mass of rope in a machine shop. Temporarily switching to black-and-white during the last two years, Wall has focused on individuals in lonely settings. Although not conceived as a series, “they do have a common mood, which is pretty forlorn,” he said.

Wall got into photography largely because he felt its practitioners “hadn’t plumbed the possibilities of enlargement, color, interacting with the city and its relationship to painting.” His interest in art films opened up still more avenues of exploration.

After 20 years, he has helped open up the territory of photography, but he hasn’t exhausted it. “The old debate about art photography and anti-art photography is over,” he said. “I just want to be good.”

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“JEFF WALL,” Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave. Dates: Tuesdays and Wednesdays, Fridays to Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Ends Oct. 5. Prices: Adults, $6; senior citizens and students, $4; children under 12, free. Phone: (213) 626-6222.