Jeff Wall’s place in the realm of exalted postmodern and post-photographic practitioners is well entrenched. Given his reputation, a mandatory tour of some of his finest work was bound for Australia at some point, and the present collection graced the Art Gallery of Western Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney. The exhibition at the MCA contained about twenty-five meisterwerks, the majority of which were large format photographic transparencies in light boxes. These were supplemented by a few colour and black and white images in various sizes. The selection covered the chronological terrain of the late 1970s through to 2010, and provided instructive insights into Wall’s stellar oeuvre.
The large transparencies resembled the grand salon paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, much as Wall perpetuates a ‘grand tradition’, his teeth were cut on mastering a postmodern attitude towards photography during the ‘crisis of authorship’ period in the late 1970s and 1980s. This included the view that the photograph was not an instance of neutral verisimilitude as much as it was an ideological element in a wider pictorial constellation of social messages. Artists like Barbara Kruger responded to these insights by producing directly political works, but Wall was attracted to the conceptual facets of photography as a communicative and aesthetic system. This led him to examine, explore and experiment with the intellectual, formal and stylistic components of photography. He recognises photography’s illusionistic parameters, but rather than critiquing this condition he revels in its conceptual and aesthetic possibilities. This combination of post-conceptual and aesthetic smarts, and his desire to exploit rather than attack the illusory power of the photographic image has... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
The Destroyed Room, 1978. Transparency in light box, AP 159 x 234cm. Courtesy of the artist. © Jeff Wall.
Double Self-Portrait, 1979. Transparency in light box, AP 172 x 229cm. Courtesy of the artist. © Jeff Wall.
