Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Reviewed by: Jo Manby
Set in the context of Manchester Art Gallery's collection of landscape painting – particularly its Dutch landscapes – and conceived as an opportunity to reconsider contemporary and historical representations of the land, Jeff Wall exhibited eight pristine transparencies in lightboxes in this stunning show. Only one, River road, 1997, was actually displayed within the Dutch section of Gallery 12 (Life and death in the seventeenth century). The others occupied their own large white exhibiting space.
River road displays a fresh white sky, the natural cosmetic of snow powdering the green grass, buildings and trucks. It exudes an ultra-modern gleam that the poor, dim, beautiful Dutch landscapes next to it can only dream of. Jan van de Capelle's Winter scene, an oil on panel from around 1650, and Jan van Goyen's version, Winter scene with a sledge in the foreground, show bare trees above the horizon of a distant town – rural encampments in a place touched by frost.
What more could a painter wish for than light itself shining through from the back of the picture plane. These Dutch painters would swiftly run out of daylight and in their workrooms resort to candlelight, but Wall's work has its own lasting light and a sense of enduring, aching beauty.
This aesthetic is compounded by narrative content which is epically indefinable, thereby fulfilling Wall's own prescription for beauty, summed up during In Conversation at Manchester Art Gallery (5 December 2002), defending the word 'beauty' to a somewhat accusatory panel member: "It's not definable. It's not conceptual. It's experiential. Enjoyable, but of a special kind of enjoyment that creates states of mind that have an effect on people. It can change behaviour as people take the ramifications of it where they will."
Coastal motifs, 1989, would be a dirty documentation of an industrial scene to a lesser artist. In this case quarry works; sink pools of tepid-looking contaminated water; gravel pits, gas cylinders, and holders of a mysteriously white chemical take their place in an elegiac, almost romantic (but faintly alien) landscape which seems to have blotted out pictorial impurities thereby cleansing those of the chosen subject matter.
The invisible footfalls in The crooked path, 1991, veer out of a site of nature's products (grass, saplings) into an artificial, climate-controlled context of food production (orange and leaf graphics on a van bound for Tom Yee Produce Inc). I asked Wall if there were any sinister undertones in the sense of a killer in a thriller, coming out of the woods and along a twisting path. He replied: "It's a little path made by its users, without a plan, in order to do something that the usual administration could not or did not do – so there's a slight trace of disobedience or independence – people may do things that we can't predict. Not so far as I feel is it sinister."
He speaks eloquently, and with admirable sententiousness: "Pictorial art shows us what it's like to see when we are not looking at pictures; pictorial art has always got potential for spontaneity to ignite culture again' emergence of intellectual conflict is never seen as a negative thing."
As the discussion panel of In Conversation (Mark Lewis, Lynda Morris and Fred Orton) put it: "A characteristic of writing on Jeff Wall is that the most interesting things that have been said have been said by Jeff Wall himself." I am heavily inclined to agree, so in summary here is his final comment, a Brechtian quote: "Never be interested in the good old days but only in the bad new days."
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JO MANBY
is an artist, curator and writer
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