The latest installation at the UCLA Hammer Museum features
photographs that literally pop off the walls. For students in
UCLA’s graduate art program, the man behind those photos has
made his way out of the gallery and into the classroom.
Showing through April 13, the display presents a small slice of
the career of Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, an artist whose work
has amassed international recognition for over 20 years. His
pictures have been shown in places like the Museum of Modern Art in
New York and the Tate in London, as well as in other major museums
and exhibitions around the world. But for a few days in January and
March, Wall can be found holding seminars at UCLA’s Warner
Graduate Art Studios in Culver City, talking to students about art,
photography and whatever else might be on his mind.
“I’m not presenting an academic seminar as
such,” he said. “That is, I don’t ask students to
read things and then develop a discussion around that. I guess I
like to think that what I can present is just as interesting as
something that some other author could have presented.”
His students agree. Wall was asked back to UCLA as an honorary
Arts Council chairman ““ this is his second year ““ due
to positive response.
Graduate photography student Kora Manheimer says that Wall
combines his success as an artist with the intellectualism of a
critic.
“He brings a self-reflexive point of view to the
discussions that I think is really valuable. He also talks about
problems he has in his own work, which is really refreshing,”
she said.
Wall says, however, that even after 25 years as a professor in
Canada and Europe, he cannot definitively state what is the
“right way” to teach young artists. The idea that there
might be a balance, he says, between studying art and creating art
is an abstract concept that can’t be realized in any one
way.
Ironically, when he was a student himself, Wall did not attend
art school but studied art history instead.
“I didn’t want to get trained,” he said.
“I had a kind of anarchic attitude. I had my own studio and
worked as a very young person. I don’t like the idea of
training anyway; it seems like training is for dogs ““
obedience school. But I was always interested in what was good, to
think about artists I knew who were good.”
As it turns out, Wall is widely recognized as one of those good
artists. In fact, arts faculty professor James Welling calls him
the most important photographer working in the art world today. He
is best known for the type of work currently displayed at the
Hammer Museum: color transparencies mounted in lightboxes ““
similar to the ones you might see in bus shelter advertising.
The largest, titled “After “˜Invisible Man’ by
Ralph Ellison, the Preface,” is a photographic response to a
scene in the novel’s preface. It depicts the protagonist
sitting in his light-filled basement hovel, having tapped into New
York City’s power source. This backlit piece received
critical praise at last year’s Documenta 11, a prestigious,
international art exhibition in Kassel, Germany, and subsequently
caught the eye of Hammer chief curator Russell Ferguson.
“Jeff Wall is a very important artist, very
influential,” he said. “”˜Invisible Man’ was
one of the best works at Documenta, and I thought it would be worth
showing in Los Angeles.”
Wall officially retired from teaching four years ago to focus
solely on his work. But he relishes the time he has spent with UCLA
students, who include, as he says, the pick of some of the best
young artists in a city that has become one of the world centers
for contemporary art education.
“I’d say it’s a good place,” he said,
referring to the university. “You know, if I wanted to have a
real job, this would be the kind of place I’d like to have it
in.”