Jeff Wall
The Vampires’ Picnic also contains shocks and contradictions more subtle than its gory subject. A security guard at the left holds a pair of red high heels, and a nude man in the center, blood streaming from his neck, holds a green apple aloft almost triumphantly. The light-box display recalls commercial advertising, especially movie ads; but it also makes the blood oddly ethereal. No two characters are clothed or posed alike or wear the same facial expression, and there’s no apparent narrative explanation for these differences. Wall the postmodernist knows that narratives left contradictory and unexplained are more engaging than those accounted for, but Wall the humorist makes a joke at postmodernism’s expense: this unimaginably silly movie scene features characters who feed off each other just as postmodernists “appropriate” others’ work.
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Ultimately the incongruities in Wall’s work, whether of subject matter, composition, or manner of display, don’t result in a fragmented, essentially paradoxical vision of an unknowable, unchangeable world. Instead they combine to suggest hidden connections, to make statements, perhaps pointing the way ever so subtly to a better future or suggesting the difficulty of communicating across barriers. The light boxes play an important role: they make the images independent of uneven gallery lighting, and the bright backlighting tends to make every part of the composition equally important–there isn’t as much contrast between light and dark areas as there would be in a paper print. If the compositions are riven, Wall seems to be saying, it’s not because of the light but because the diverse subjects are fundamentally incompatible.
I know of no other work of art in which spilled food is so moving. All is not well in this perfectly decorated kitchen: the girls are alone; the one on the floor seems unable even to eat. Yet on the right wall two children’s drawings are proudly mounted: this is not a loveless home, perhaps just a busy one. The out-of-sync element–the spilled Jell-O–is kin to the other visual disparities in Wall’s images, each of which suggests a problem in an apparently perfectly ordered universe. Wall reminds us that the intellectual contradictions between different people, different classes, between humans and nature, between representation and illusion can also register as human emotion–in the agonized face of the man in Insomnia, or in the bored, distracted faces of these two isolated little girls. Their loneliness is the loneliness inherent in Wall’s vision of modern life, in which nothing ever quite adds up.
