Jeff Wall: ‘What’s really happened to me is those pictures — they’re my little adventures’

In a gallery inside the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Jeff Wall reaches behind a vast lightbox and flips a switch. As it flickers into life, a street scene appears: four monumental figures striding across an expanse of concrete sidewalk, beneath storm clouds, menacing and turquoise-blue. The people are dragging bags; hurrying, perhaps. Away from the apocalypse? To catch a bus? The photograph is as enigmatic as anything Wall has made. On a dingy Swiss January morning, rain slithering down the glass, it feels like we have just stepped into another, stranger, reality.

“Not bad,” Wall says curtly before launching into a disquisition on colour temperature and the difference between LED and fluorescent bulbs. Whatever secrets this picture holds, apparently they will have to wait.

Wall, 77, is on alert: this is his biggest retrospective in Switzerland in two decades — more than 50 works — and he is keen to see what the technicians have been up to. By the entrance, one team is fussing over the wiring illuminating his life-size portrait of a Blackpool donkey, made for London’s National Gallery in 1999 (a deadpan response to Stubbs’s “Whistlejacket”). Inside the gallery, five burly handlers are gingerly manoeuvring a dayglo print on to the wall, one of his newest, using a terrifying-looking machine more commonly used for installing industrial windows.

“It’s good to see the pictures together,” he says with satisfaction. “When I’m making them, I’m inside each one. When you see them together, you realise they’re like chapters of a novel. You think, ‘oh, I’ve been talking about certain things for a long time and I didn’t even realise’.”

Talking about what, though? As we walk through the show, it is hard to see connections at first. Rejecting conventional chronology, Wall and curator Martin Schwander have placed large-scale pictures from the early 1980s alongside more intimate images made nearly four decades later. Many are in colour, Wall’s preferred medium, but there are monochrome works too; prints as well as transparencies in lightboxes; portraits, landscapes, imagined scenes, homages to paintings, images it is difficult to classify at all.

One famous thing about Wall’s photographs — he prefers the more neutral term “picture” — is their air of suspended mystery, the way they mingle reality with something more artful and cinematic. Though a handful of his pictures are documentary in the most exacting sense (Wall simply lugs his large-format film camera and tripod to a scene and shoots), most aren’t exactly what they seem.

Who are those figures with suitcases? The image calls to mind news footage of migrants on the move, or people evacuating natural disaster. It transpires they are extras, hired by Wall to impersonate people he once saw walking past his studio in Vancouver. He spotted them, wondered who they might be, and spent two months restaging the scene.

Another image nearby is a different kind of restaging — this time, of a memory Wall had of him and his brother boxing in their parents’ living room as children. Wall is reluctant to say too much about how he created it, but lets slip that the boys he photographed, gloves on, balletically punching, were brothers too. The space we see them in is a close match for the one he remembers, albeit subtly altered.

Reality? Not exactly. Realism? “Maybe,” he allows. “It’s kind of me and my brother, it’s kind of my parents’ room, it’s kind of not. It’s not only about the boys; it’s about the composition. I just liked the way it looked.”

For all that this tricksy relationship with photographic truth puzzled critics when Wall came to prominence in the 1980s, one clue lies in the artist’s own background. Growing up in a medical family in Vancouver in the 1950s, his first exposure to art came in the form of popular books on the Old Masters: imitations rather than originals. As a teenager, he painted furiously, taught himself photography, then decided that art school would only get in his way.

“I was too arrogant,” he says with the hint of a laugh. “I was a 19-year-old kid who thought he knew everything. I was an artist.”

So he sidestepped and studied art history, initially at the University of British Columbia, then travelling to London’s Courtauld in 1970. Immersion in pictorial theory by day, then London’s conceptual art scene by night, was absorbing, but for most of his 20s it killed his urge to create. “It was a complicated period,” he remembers. “I didn’t make any art because I didn’t know what to do.”

After returning to Canada, he tried his hand at writing films (“I did go to Hollywood once,” he says drily, “they were nice to me”), but realised that it wasn’t stories he was creating so much as pictures: “In the process of writing those scripts, I realised I was writing images.”

In 1978, he made the photograph that became his calling card, “The Destroyed Room”, depicting a blood-red space filled with all manner of junk: a slashed mattress, a torrent of clothes on the floor, a chest of drawers vomiting its contents. Only if you know your art history do you notice the image’s compositional resemblance to Delacroix’s “The Death of Sardanapalus”, likewise a study in crimson and chaos.

Mounted in a lightbox installed in a gallery window in his hometown, the picture literally stopped traffic. Wall was there, seemingly fully formed. “Photography intervened for me,” he says. “It changed my whole path.”

The shadow of art history flickers across numerous works in the new show — not least because Wall often makes just two or three transparencies or prints, as if he were producing paintings. Pictures frequently take him months to research and shoot; some years, he’s produced only four or five.

“A Sudden Gust of Wind” (1993), a painstaking tribute to the ukiyo-e artist Hokusai’s depiction of a gale lifting away the possessions of a group of travellers, was shot on film but manipulated digitally, every bent branch and flying scrap of paper aligned to echo the original. A recent triptych, “I Giardini” (2017) depicts standing figures in verdant neoclassical gardens in homage to Poussin and Claude.

There are more personal echoes too, though you have to know where to look — and how. A diptych from 2013, “Summer Afternoons” — two nudes, one male and one female, reclining in matching egg-yellow interiors — turns out to be a replica of the London flat Wall shared with his now-wife Jeannette, decorated by her. A shot of the nondescript rear of an open-air theatre in Vancouver isn’t just a droll reflection on staginess and artifice: it’s a place Wall haunted as a kid.

Critics have often struggled to interpret how Wall selects locations and images, and why. Is his own life one key, I wonder. All this time, should we have been searching for him?

Wall himself is reluctant to go there. “If I’m looking for myself in my pictures, I don’t see me,” he says, but then concedes that the exhibition is a kind of memory palace, populated with places and people that have resonance, even if he doesn’t always understand why. 

“If someone wrote my biography, it wouldn’t be very long or interesting,” he says. “What’s really happened to me is those pictures. They’re my little adventures.”

Nearing 80, he recently completed work on the second volume of his catalogue raisonné, encompassing nearly 200 works, but doesn’t want this to be seen as a full stop. “Denial is very healthy,” he says with another dry laugh. “Maybe there’ll be a volume three.”

He’s just completed a new picture made in Barcelona, a commission from the city that will be installed permanently in a library in June. This winter, there’ll be a new retrospective at White Cube in London — 30 works, marking 30 years with the gallery.

As soon as this current show is up, it’s back to the grindstone. “I have a couple of things I want to do next, but it’s unpredictable what’s going to interest me,” he says, coolly surveying the gardens in front of the gallery. “Just more pictures.”

January 28 — April 21, fondationbeyeler.ch

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