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From: Adam Underwood
Category: Exhibitions
Date: 15 December 2005
Tim said he'd seen Jeff Wall's photos in the paper and hadn't been taken by them, but at the gallery... And quite right. Qua 'light boxes' - the nearest illustration to my mind being the illumination of film posters outside cinemas, and sometimes bustops too - these images gain what I can only call a hyperreality. If a lot of what drives the life of the mind of an artist could be called the desire for unconcealment, and I certainly think that a lot of what Jeff Wall sometimes desires is to simply [re]turn the viewer (back?) to a plain sense of things, then the works not only further wrench out the difference between 'their' reproduction of the empirical world and 'our' own photos with every shutter of the eyelid, then there is a sort of divine light behind their/our exposure in the gallery space. ('The Coast Exposed' presently at the Queens house in Greenwich has light boxes in a darkened room - as opposed to the bright sparseness of the Tate Modern rooms - and it is revealing how painful it is to raise one's eyes to the individual slides.) The talk of Wall constantly having-in-mind the prevailing conception of photography as 'truth' throughout his work, and so the ambiguously staged nature of his scenes, might be expressed in another way as his way of creating a stopgap for our reifying gaze upon the works that detrimentally sustain our gaze. Being told that the 'instant' of his photos is a carefully recreated one from his own memory or something like that - again, the photo and the memory-image - goes some way to reinvest the works with their work-full (or work-stuffed, considering the Kubrickian research and preperation) lineage. But at any rate, even if the 'original scene' - especially when it is obviously of an pure mental construction of Wall's as in 'Dead Soldier'- is somewhat displaced and unavailable directly for our eyes, and if all we have left is a few tendrils of narrative and time and place and the sometimes unbearable understanding of the anal character of the construction, they have a tendency to quake very silently. In deed.
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