Jeff Wall
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| Jeff Wall | |
| Born | September 29, 1946 Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Field | Photography, Photoconceptualism |
| Training | University of British Columbia, Courtauld Institute |
| Movement | Vancouver School |
| Works | Picture for Women (1979), Mimic (1982), A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) (1993) |
| Awards | OC, Hasselblad Award, Royal Society of Canada |
Jeff Wall, OC (born September 29, 1946) in Vancouver, British Columbia is a Canadian photographer best known for his large-scale back-lit cibachrome photographs and art-historical writing.
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[edit] Biography
Jeff Wall received his MA from the University of British Columbia in 1970, with a thesis titled, Berlin Dada and the Notion of Context and did postgraduate work at the Courtauld Institute from 1970-73, where he studied with Manet expert T.J. Clark.[1] Wall was assistant professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1974-75), associate professor at Simon Fraser University (1976-87) and taught for many years at the University of British Columbia. He has published essays on Dan Graham, Rodney Graham, Roy Arden, Ken Lum, Stephen Balkenhol, On Kawara, and other contemporary artists.[2]
Born, living, and working in Vancouver, British Columbia, Wall has been a key figure in the city's arts scene for years. Early in his career, he helped define the so-called Vancouver School and he has published essays on the work of his close colleagues and fellow Vancouverites Rodney Graham, Ken Lum and Ian Wallace. His tableaux very often take Vancouver's mixture of natural beauty, urban decay and postmodern and industrial featurelessness as their generic backdrop.
In 1996 Wall was to replace Bernd Becher as head professor of the photography department at the Düsseldorf Academy, but was confronted by a former Becher student who pointed a loaded gun at him. He immediately resigned.[3]
In 2002, he was awarded the Hasselblad Award. In 2006, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. [4] Jeff Wall was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in December 2007.[5] In March 2008, Wall was awarded the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement, British Columbia's annual award for the visual arts.[6]
[edit] Work
Wall experimented with conceptual art while an undergraduate student at UBC.[7] Wall then made no art until 1977, when he produced his first backlit phototransparencies.[8] Many of these pictures are staged and refer to the history of art and philosophical problems of representation. The photographs' compositions often allude to historical artists like Velázquez, Hokusai, and Édouard Manet, or to writers such as Franz Kafka, Yukio Mishima, and Ralph Ellison.[9]
Mimic[10] (1982) typifies Wall's cinematographic style. A 198 x 226 cm. colour transparency, it shows a white couple and an Asian man walking towards the camera. The sidewalk, flanked by parked cars and residential and light-industrial buildings, suggests a North American industrial suburb. The woman is wearing red shorts and a white top displaying her midriff; her bearded, unkempt boyfriend wears a denim vest. The Asian man is casual but well-dressed in comparison, in a collared shirt and slacks. As the couple overtake the man, the boyfriend makes an ambiguous but apparently obscene and racist gesture, holding his upraised middle finger close to the corner of his eye, "slanting" his eye in mockery of the Asian man's eyes. The picture resembles a candid shot that captures the moment and its implicit social tensions, but is actually a recreation of an exchange witnessed by the artist.
Wall's work advances an argument for the necessity of pictorial art.[11] Some of Wall's photographs are complicated productions involving cast, sets, crews and digital postproduction. They have been characterized as one-frame cinematic productions. Wall distinguishes between unstaged "documentary" pictures, like Still Creek, Vancouver, winter 2003, and "cinematographic" pictures, produced using a combination of actors, sets, and special effects, such as Overpass, 2001. His signature works are large transparencies mounted on light boxes; he says he conceived this format when he saw back-lit advertisements at bus stops during a trip between Spain and London. Since the mid-1990s, Wall has also made large scale black and white photographs, some of which were exhibited at Kassel's Documenta X, as well as smaller colour prints.
[edit] Other media
Sonic Youth's compilation album The Destroyed Room: B-sides and Rarities uses Jeff Wall's 1978 photograph The Destroyed Room. The cover image of Iggy Pop's 1999 album Avenue B is a portrait photograph of Iggy by Wall.
[edit] References
[edit] Notes
- ^ Newman, "Towards the Reinvigoration of the 'Western Tableau': Some Notes on Jeff Wall and Duchamp", p. 83
- ^ Wall, Jeff (2007). Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
- ^ The Bechers' Industrial Lexicon
- ^ Royal Society of Canada, New Fellows 2006
- ^ Order of Canada 2007
- ^ Wall Awarded Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement
- ^ Newman, "Towards the Reinvigoration of the 'Western Tableau': Some Notes on Jeff Wall and Duchamp", p. 83
- ^ Newman, "Towards the Reinvigoration of the 'Western Tableau': Some Notes on Jeff Wall and Duchamp", p. 85
- ^ Newman, "Towards the Reinvigoration of the 'Western Tableau': Some Notes on Jeff Wall and Duchamp", pp. 83-4
- ^ http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/jeffwall/infocus/section1/img4.shtm
- ^ Newman, "Towards the Reinvigoration of the 'Western Tableau': Some Notes on Jeff Wall and Duchamp", pp. 83-4
[edit] Bibliography
- Newman, Michael. "Towards the Reinvigoration of the 'Western Tableau': Some Notes on Jeff Wall and Duchamp." Oxford Art Journal 30.1 (2007): 81-100.
- Wall, Jeff. Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007. ISBN 0870707086
[edit] Further reading
- Campany, David. "'A Theoretical Diagram in an Empty Classroom': Jeff Wall's Picture for Women." Oxford Art Journal 30.1 (2007): 7-25.
- Crow, Thomas. "Profane illuminations: Social History and the Art of Jeff Wall." ArtForum Vol. 31 No. 6 (Feb. 1993): 62-69.
- de Duve, Thierry, Arielle Pélenc and Boris Groïs. Jeff Wall. London: Phaidon Press, 1996. ISBN 0714833495
- Hochdörfer, Achim, ed. Jeff Wall: Photographs. Cologne: Walther König, 2003. ISBN 3883756989
- Lubow, Arthur. "The Luminist." The New York Times (February 25, 2007).
- Lütticken, Sven. "The Story of Art According to Jeff Wall." Secret Publicity: Essays on Contemporary Art. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005. 69-82. ISBN 9056624679
- Martin, Stewart. "Wall’s Tableau Mort." Oxford Art Journal 30.1 (2007): 117-33.
- Whyte, Murray. "Jeff Wall: The Visible Man." Canadian Art (May 11, 2006).
