Seeing Things Anew Through Wall’s Lens

“What am I looking at?”

That deceptively simple question isn’t one you often ask yourself when you look at photographs, so ubiquitous are they in modern life. Typically, from the time you get up in the morning to the time you go to sleep at night, you’ve looked at so many hundreds of camera images that they blend seamlessly with your natural experience of life. And life gets questioned only selectively.

It’s like being a blank screen washed by a continuous stream of pictures, day in and day out, each more or less the same as the rest. Automatically, what you see, you think you know.

Jeff Wall is an artist who, by stark contrast, makes photographs that interrupt the common process.

Seemingly without effort, his work pries apart perception, opening it up into multiply resonant levels of seeing, remembering, assuming and inventing. Typically passive acts of spectatorship get surreptitiously transformed, becoming active processes of viewing.

Wall’s work is the subject of a concise, satisfying touring survey that opened Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Former MOCA curator Kerry Brougher, who is now director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England, has brought together 34 pictures made between 1978 and 1996.

If that sounds like a small number, consider the bulkiness of Wall’s photographic format. Dimensions of 8 by 10 feet are not uncommon, in color transparencies mounted in enormous light-boxes--the kind filled with fluorescent tubes and typically used for commercial purposes in locations like bus shelters and airport terminals.

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Wall is perhaps the most important Canadian artist to have emerged in the 1980s, and his work has been especially popular in Europe. (Anyone who has followed the international circuit in the last dozen years will be familiar with most of the photographs in the show.) But his pictures have not often been seen in Los Angeles, making this an opportunity not to miss.

One reason for Wall’s popularity in Europe is that his photographs rely heavily on motifs important to 19th century European art--especially French painting. Wall, trained as an art historian at London’s Courtauld Institute, was plainly captivated by 1970s revisionist scholarship, in which a new generation of art historians concerned itself primarily with the art of France, the academy and the newly evolving modern world.

His photographic work employs strategic compositions that will be instantly recognizable as translations from historical painting. In part, they also function as commentaries related to contemporary art historical practice.

Wall’s photographic images are as carefully staged as an Old Master painting. The slashed mattress and strewn bedroom debris in “The Destroyed Room” (1978) derive from Delacroix’s monumental 1827 canvas, “The Death of Sardanapalus.” The distant figure walking a winding path between a collapsing old farm and a sprawl of new suburban tract homes in “Steve’s Farm, Steveston” (1980) practically announces, in its evocation of the tumultuous passing of one era into another, Bonjour, M. Courbet!

Likewise, the grotesque carnage shown in “Dead Troops Talk” (1992) overlays the vicious 1986 Soviet war in Afghanistan on the standard painterly genre of commemorative battle scenes, such as Messonier’s “Memory of Civil War” (1849) or perhaps something by Baron Gros. Elsewhere, the businessman’s portfolio of documents being snatched and sent skyward in “A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai)” (1993) recalls the influential popularity of Japanese prints in 19th century France, while also suggesting the unexpected turbulence within today’s newly globalizing economy.

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Wall’s use of long-established artistic motifs is emphatically traditional--even academic--and he plainly means to invoke that art historical legacy.

For example, the scruffy figures crouched beside a concrete highway overpass in his “The Storyteller” (1986) might be presumed to hail from a nearby homeless encampment or be undocumented immigrants on the run. But their carefully staged poses audaciously recall the picnickers in Edouard Manet’s famous 1863 painting of scandalous bourgeois pleasure, “Luncheon on the Grass.”

Manet’s pastoral figures were themselves adaptations, taken from a detail in a popular engraving of lounging river gods, borrowed from Raphael’s “The Judgment of Paris.” Like sedimentary rock, Wall’s up-to-the-minute picture is layered with an oral tradition of Greek and Roman mythology that resonates beneath the pictorial tradition disrupted by Manet. “The Storyteller” is thus filled with the visual equivalent of literary footnotes.

Wall isn’t just showing off a smarty-pants pedigree, though. His subject is storytelling, and in the age of mass media, narrative has taken a dizzying new turn.

Wall’s use of big light-boxes, which project out about a foot from the wall and illuminate these pictures in a suggestively cinematic glow, is frankly aggressive. The huge, enigmatic images read more like commercial advertisements than traditional works of art. Wall exploits that commercial familiarity as a means to get your attention, in a way that “painting big” once did but never could today.

In fact, the most curious and beguiling feature of Wall’s endeavor is not its relationship to painting at all, or to painting’s history. Rather, it’s that he’s created an eccentric, academic wing for otherwise glib commercial art.

Wall is like a latter-day Thomas Couture--Manet’s academic hero and influential teacher--operating with insightful panache in the established salons of contemporary culture. Staging an obvious, layered dialogue with familiar visual art traditions is an effective way to get you to automatically ask yourself critical questions about the imagery you encounter, despite the numbing ubiquity of photographic images today.

The violent passing of an industrial world is a recurrent theme of Wall’s art, which is certainly peculiar for pictures that are so carefully staged as to be inevitably devoid of much visual energy. (“The Destroyed Room” may be a compositional riff on “The Death of Sardanapalus,” but the messy, voluptuous power of Delacroix’s paint is replaced by cerebral rumination in the pristine medium of photography.) What the photographs lack in tactile fireworks, however, they more than make up for in a slow, turn-it-over-in-your-mind sort of way.

The show concludes with four works from 1996. Black-and-white prints rather than glamorous color transparencies, these huge pictures forsake the signature light-box format.

Mostly they are dull, recalling the staged narrative work of any number of photographers from the late 1970s and early 1980s. But they do suggest that Wall is entertaining a restless desire to move into new directions, which simply might take some time to gel.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6222, through Oct. 5. Closed Mondays.