Jeff Wall 1994 until 1998

1994 to 1998 were the years during which I studied photography and Jeff Wall was an important name, a kind of authority, as I felt at the time. My memories of my student days are blurred. If I try to recall what Jeff Wall stood for, it might be this: someone outwitted the premises of photography, namely that of pure depiction, by completely thinking through and elaborately arranging his pictures or the situations that he turned into pictures. But unlike others who did the same, his pictures did not look like the previously thought-out and arranged photographs. They had something casual about them - for me. In my aesthetic perception, they were closer to a snapshot than a tableau, more like a piece of isolated everyday life than a cinematographic stage, as I knew it from other staged photographs. Then Jeff Wall was also someone who produced few images. And I saw how each of his photographs was imbued with allusions and references, imbued with art and cultural historical knowledge, which impressed and intimidated me in equal measure.

I went to Jeff Wall's talk at the Fondation Beyeler in January 2024. After his presentation, the audience asked why he didn't go into the countless art historical references in his pictures in his talk. Jeff Wall's succinct answer: where they exist, he mentions them, often even in the title: Katsushika Hokusai, Eugène Delacroix, Ralph Ellison, Edouard Manet.He had probably answered the same question in the same way many times before.I found this answer refreshing.But also coquettish.If further references are not made explicitly, they are certainly there.Expectations are being played with. Expectations that come from the fact that, on the one hand, references are already explicitly made and, on the other, an enormous amount of art-historical knowledge lurks behind the construction of these images.That alone is clear from Jeff Wall's theoretical texts.

How do these images affect me today, almost thirty years after my studies?Am I still impressed and intimidated?How have the photographs that I already knew in the mid-nineties aged?Do I perceive them differently to photographs from the same period, which are less constructed and laden with references?How do I react to new pictures by Jeff Wall, pictures that I have never seen before, that have not yet been filed away in my mental catalogue of canonised images?The sheer number of tableaux makes me a little dizzy. Where should I go with the Jeff Wall phenomenon today?When I am asked for my opinion immediately after visiting the exhibition, I am inhibited. I don't get round to looking for an answer because I have to think about how exhausting it is that opinions are seemingly always and everywhere immediately produced and expected.
Je ne sais pas.

The show is on view at Fondation Beyeler from the 28. of January to the 21. of April 2024