ARTnotes

Jeff Wall at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

In Amsterdam last month, we came upon Canadian art star Jeff Wall's exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum. Jeff Wall:Tableaux Pictures Photographs 1996-2013 filled several rooms of the august, but light and airy museum.

Curator Hripsimé Visser said: “Jeff Wall is first and foremost an ‘artist’s artist,’ he is well- known and much loved by other artists, as well as critics."

There's an emotional aloofness about Wall's work which makes it hard to engage with immediately

This is the partly the result of the format; large scale light boxes more commonly used in advertising. In fact, Jeff Wall pioneered their use as a personal art medium. Also many elements of Wall's works are staged even though the results look like realism. The emotional remoteness of these images is partly what enables them to forcefully convey the idea of being an outsider, alienated and without power.The large scale and the authority of the format confront us with social realities that I think people generally prefer to keep out of sight and out of mind.

However," Fieldwork" (photo) is not staged, but involves a real professor and his First Nations assistant, a kind of documentary reference. The figure in the earlier Morning Cleaning, (second photo), though, is someone the artist hired to enact the role of cleaner, much as one might hire an actor for a role.

Jeff Wall Fieldwork. Excavation of the floor of a dwelling in a former Sto:lo nation village, Greenwood Island, Hope, B. C., August, 2003