Jeff Wall's New Show in Washington, DC

[Mark Sampson]

Glenstone is a museum founded by the billionaire financier Mitchell Rales to house his vast collection of ultra-contemporary art. It was private for a long time, now open to the public. It sits in a vast estate; IIRC the museum's buildings are by the modernist architect Charles Gwathmey. I had business there, seven or eight years ago; it's expanded quite a bit since then.
It's probably worth seeing- but Washington DC is full of museums and sights, so a short-term visitor to the city might find their dance card filled rather quickly. Glenstone does feature today's art superstars... who you probably won't find at the National Gallery of Art, the Hirschhorn, or the Phillips Collection (to name only a few).
I wouldn't mind seeing Jeff Wall's work, but it's four years since I moved away from that part of the world, so I won't get to see the show.

[Chester McCheeserton]

My issue isn't it being uninteresting - it is interesting. I've been following his work for awhile; that PBS segment wasn't by any means my first encounter. But it's really neither fish nor fowl. .... But there is simply no way on that size scale it's going to appeal to my own instincts as a printmaker, even if 8x10 film was once involved....But the degree of manipulation turns me off in general. It just doesn't ring true...

Drew, before I saw the work in person I felt the same as you, that it had to be too big to hold up and that hiring actors and staging everything was somehow wrong, and "faking it" or something, that it was more artful to find things, real true things that existed already in the world. But after seeing a show at a gallery in in nyc almost 20 years ago, I had to step back and re-evaluate. The lightboxes had an impact in person that was undeniable, for me at least, and it was unlike anything I had experienced before. Not Photography? certainly, but photography, specifically the large format photography we all love, was there. It was in color, and it was glowing with a presence usually only felt in a movie theater. The art theory and painting references are there too, but i think the best of his work is impactful even for those who have no knowledge of such things. (I didn't then, and only slightly do now) I think there already is a backlash against huge prints now, he's become like a sort of Stephen Spielberg or Jeff Koons type figure that people love to hate on. But I think of the people who brought big photo prints into the art museums he is one of, if not the, most important figures. His knowledge of the cinema, of painting, and of critical writers like Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno can be seen in the pictures – he created something new and he did it using the gear we all geek out on. But yeah I like taking pictures of trees that I didn't pay and tell what to do too.

[profvandegraf]

Looks like Cindy Sherman meets Gregory Crewdson. I would like to see these in person.

[Alan Klein]

Walls pictures in the museum are not prints but rather chromes displayed through very large back-lit lightboxes which bring out the colors and 3D look. I've noticed from other photos I've seen elsewhere by most other photographers, that large always seems to make the photos look better even if they're ho-hum. His work is planned like Crewdson, not my style. I prefer street shots that are extemporaneous.

[Alan Klein]

Lik uses backlighting too. It's very dramatic. Yeah. I know. It's inane. But it works. And sells.

[nolindan]

Although big has a quality all its own, for big glowing color pictures I usually haul out my slide projector. And then there is just the plain-ole-boring 60"+ TV set everyone has in their home.

As to Wall's work, I haven't seen it and can't comment.

[Drew Wiley]

Well, everyone already knows what I think about Lik, so I won't go there; and Jeff Wall is certainly not in that category, esthetically. But as far as backlit transparencies in general, besides being at risk of premature fading, I just find the whole manner of presentation tacky. It reminds me of oversized backlit Hamm's beer ad boxes in dive windows. Now someone might accuse me of hypocrisy, because for appropriate subjects, I have made a considerable number of full gloss polyester prints of various sizes, including relatively large, on either Cibachrome or more lately Fujiflex Supergloss. But at the point of display, I try to frame them and illumine them in a very tasteful manner. And that provides both a 3D effect without going silly, and, at the same time, a certain reserve which is quite compatible with other adjacent prints of other degrees of reflection, including outright flat, whether color or black and white, or even paintings. I've done a number of gallery or special venue exhibits based on that very premise.

But a giant light box would just be... well, more like something Peter L. does trying to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse, and hoping that Ma Kettle just won the Kansas lottery and has just stepped off a tour ship docked at Lahaina, seeking something glitzy to hang adjacent to her black velvet Elvis rug.

[bob carnie]

One of the reasons Jeff Wall made backlit cCba's was due to the current timeline belief that Cibas were non fading in dark storage, unlike dye coupler prints. I have to believe this to be true as I just put
a few Discovery Series of Norma Jean on my walls, they were printed in 88 (not by me ) but I have kept them in dark storage for over 30 years and I have to say they are as fresh today as what I imagine I
felt about them in 88. I believe and would bet money that Jeff would pull 6 copies of each image he sold and instructed the buyer to only pull out the other copies if indeed the first copy ever faded, so a museum
only showing his work sporadically could indeed have samples of his handy work for over 800 years. At the time I owned a Ciba lab working for others, I was privately told that Jeff Wall a working artist in Vancouver was the single
biggest user of Cibachrome in the world ... I find this quite interesting and if true I give huge credo to him and believe is the reason he used cibatrans over other artists using RA4 paper

[Drew Wiley]

Hi Bob. I'm doing some remodeling, fresh painting, new lights, etc., and just yesterday pulled an old framed Ciba out of the stack that had been under indirect mountain light for nearly 30 years, and climate conditions so abusive that the plexiglass over the top is all crazed with tiny cracks. But the print itself look like it was made yesterday. I'll replace the plastic and give the print another life. Stored ones - well, even better odds. But harsh UV, whether direct sunlight or intense artificial lighting rich in UV does prematurely fade them, often quite prematurely.

You might be entirely right about Jeff making multiples, presumably at his own expense. How museums these day could afford to do it repeatedly defies logic; most of them are desperate for funds. The mere storage of significant quantities of large pieces is becoming an almost impossible challenge. And 800 years from now ... well, that's a flight of imagination. There could be another world war in only another 8 years as far as I know, flattening half the museums in the world. And I am extremely skeptical about Wall being the largest consumer of Ciba at one time - perhaps in the "art world" as defined in a very limited sense. Dunno. Most of those kind of assessments come from people who just don't know what's going on elsewhere.

But as far as display permanence goes (versus dark storage), I have no doubt that the present Fujiflex Supergloss medium is superior to Ciba, and a lot easier to work with too. There is a related Fuji RA4 transparency version, as you no doubt already known, but the very nature of that limits its permanence. But what do either of us really know? We'll be faded into our little underground pine boxes long before some of our prints are due for the same fate.

[Pieter]

Similer to Crewdson, maybe less dramatic and less dramatically lit. But they both still use film, much to my surprise. I don't know if film is used throughout, or only to capture the original scene. I would think digital would be more appropriate for the number of possible manipulations and the lack of needing to make multiple generations before reaching a transparency or print that size. I guess I need to do some more research into both their technique. I know Salgado makes his photos today with a digital camera, but then converts to film for the final large prints.