Exhibitions
Jeff Wall (Whitechapel, till 5 May) Spellbound (Hayward, till 6 May)
Film is for film-makers
Martin Gayford
Painting and traditional sculpture are obsolete. They have been replaced by `powerful', new media such as photography and video. Or so, at least, quite a few peo- ple in the art world firmly believe. The argument may strike you as odd (How can they possibly know? Did the Zeitgeist tell them?). It is slightly rum to regard photog- raphy — invented around 150 years ago and video, essentially a version of film, as so all-fired new. But in any case there is a good opportunity to test the thesis by visit- ing a couple of current exhibitions in Lon- don which highlight the artist, respectively, as photographer and film-maker.
Of the two, the display of photographs by Jeff Wall at the Whitechapel is by far the most impressive, or least preposterous. Wall is a west coast Canadian with a large reputation. For some time now a piece by him has been a more or less obligatory ele- ment in any survey of international cutting- edge art (the Tate, for example, owns one of the exhibits in this show). And from the technical point of view, at least, his work really is remarkable.
It consists of enormous, ultra-high-reso- lution colour transparencies some 12 feet across — as large, that is, as one of Lord Leighton's middling efforts. These are mounted in metal boxes and illuminated from behind, so they glow like a television screen. Some are straight shots, generally of landscape carefully selected, apparently, for a slightly sullied sort of dullness. One of these shows a tarmac road winding away between conifers; another an area of deso- late wasteland behind a small factory including abandoned filing cabinets, a small path and autumnal undergrowth.
A second, and more interesting category, is made up of scenes which have been more or less elaborately posed, altered by com- puter-assisted montage or otherwise monkeyed about with. Among these is a large and elaborate tableau of suburban North Americans sucking the blood of other suburban North Americans. One of the most striking in this category, suggest- ing an updated, colour version of those ter- rible photographs of the first world war trenches, is 'Dead Troops Talk (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986)'.
A video interview of Wall reveals him as an engaging, drily amusing chap (which one would never guess from the catalogue, written in the impenetrable post-structural- ist boilerplate now obligatory for such pub- lications). His intentions, as he expresses them, seem to be to explore certain modes of photography — the posed shot in imita- tion of narrative painting, the landscape study — which have been pursued more or less since the time of Daguerre.
The reasons he gives for taking the shots he does reveal a genuine eccentricity of mind. The choice of motif in two otherwise identical still lifer — one with beans on a table, one with an octopus — is explained thus: 'Beans and octopus are polar oppo- sites along the continuum of possible foods.' One has to like the man who says things like that; and judged purely as pho- tography, some of his work is formally beautiful (although quite a lot is merely peculiar).
The problem comes with his real innova- tion — the way it is presented. Blown up to the size of 19th-century salon stunners, these colour photographs simply look mea- gre and dull. They lack the physical pres- ence, satisfying substantiality and power of paint (indeed, they look much better at six inches by four in the catalogue). Wall's work reveals not the outmodedness of painting, but the limitations of photography.
But this is a much more substantial and worthwhile exhibition than Spellbound at the Hayward. It is always a danger sign when a Southbank exhibition is given a title which would be more suitable for a fashion boutique in Cirencester than an art show in London — the catastrophic Doubletake a few years ago was another example. This one is dedicated to exploring a largely spu- rious `love affair' between art and film. In practice, this means that some artists were given the opportunity to muck around making films, and one film-maker con- tributes an installation. Amateur Hour would have been a better title.
Among the artists playing around with film, newcomer Douglas Gordon produces the most elegant effort. He has simply slowed down Alfred Hitchcock's classic Psycho, so that the whole screening takes 24 hours. This was a clever move, since Psycho is, of course — unlike all 'art' videos — beautifully shot, staged and acted. Gordon's device thus puts him miles ahead of the opposition, and enables us to savour every frame, unburdened by the dis- tractions of plot. It is also a useful reminder, however, that the principal device that art gallery video depends on is doing things very slowly, and/or repetitively — often in slow motion. This is not enough to launch a whole new medium.
Damien Hirst contributes a short drama entitled 'Hanging Around' about a man apparently a serial bigamist and mass mur- derer — who is very bored with life, and dreams of flight. In the end, it turns out the action was only a fantasy, dreamt in a café. `Hanging Around' reveals its creator, as one might have expected, to be callow, nihilistic, merciless towards butterflies one of which is incinerated in the final frames. For a first effort, however, it's not too bad. One day, perhaps, Hirst may have a future in film — more at any rate than in art. For the time being, there are plenty of major directors who are just as callow, nihilistic, etc., and also know vastly more about film.
Boyd Webb and Steve McQueen con- tribute the kind of underwhelming short that art cinemas used to put on before the main feature. Peter Greenaway, on the other hand — a film director — con- tributes an installation. This, consisting of live actors in plastic boxes, piles of props on tables, text in the form of old newspa- pers, and words such as 'light', 'sound', `earth', 'air' and 'water' flashing on the 'A sudden gust of wind (after Hokusai)' by Jeff Wall walls, is supposed to exhibit the basic ingredients of cinema. Rather like Green- away's films, the result is phenomenally pretentious, superficially entertaining, and has a good soundtrack.
What most of the exhibits in the show have in common is that no one would take the slightest interest in them if they weren't in an art gallery. The principle exception is a series of large pastels by Paula Rego of chunky ladies in tutus whose poses are based on Walt Disney films (though no one who did not know this would guess, and I suspect it doesn't much matter). But this is Rego's best body of work for some time, and worth seeing. Otherwise, Spellbound merely demonstrates that film is indeed a powerful medium, but only in the hands of talented film-makers. Artists would do much better to leave it alone.
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