Insomnia, 1994
By Jan Tumlir, Originally published in ArtForum, March, 2001
Vancouver, BC – British California, some locals call it, referring no doubt to their city’s ongoing annexation by the Hollywood dream factory. As a matter of fact, Vancouver’s topography and even its temperature are reminiscent of Golden State climes, and there’s that nagging sense of unreality. Vancouver, like LA, is a filmmaker’s paradise, providing every sort of setting-city, suburb, and wilderness-in a relatively compact area. Jeff Wall has lived in the Canadian metropolis since earliest childhood, and his photographs, even at their most fantastic, are inevitably rooted in the quotidian details of the place, in the simultaneously over- and underdetermined character of its various districts as well as the sudden, almost hallucinatory transitions between them.
This interview took place in Wall’s studio, located in Vancouver’s oldest neighborhood, an area blighted with alternating signs of homelessness, drug traffic, and generic gentrification. A pair of adjacent two-story townhouses have been converted into an all-purpose photo production facility, in accordance with the artist’s wishes to conduct every phase of the imaging process “in-house,” as it were. In the first building, a clean computer workstation extends toward a massive custom-made vat for developing the oversize transparencies Wall is known for. The second building houses sets, props, and costumes-the lights, camera, action. Separated only by a somewhat unfriendly alleyway, this arrangement provides a concrete analogy for the Janus-faced method at the core of Wall’s practice ever since his 1991 The Stumbling Block. In that work, several discrete photographic moments, shot both “in the field” and in the studio, were digitally conjoined. This montage process, which suggests the piecemeal production of a “history painting” like Courbet’s Burial at Ornans updated by the very latest technological possibilities, remains central to Wall’s thinking. The particular photo graph that I had come to Vancouver to see and discuss, The Flooded Grave, might well be considered its apotheosis. Although essentially a landscape picture free of human subjects, it is unrivaled in its technical complexity, not to mention the time and trouble the artist took to make it. The fruit of two years’ labor, this 90-by-111-inch image was finally unrolled in January onto an appropriately enormous light table. (The Flooded Grave made its public debut early last month in Ottawa as part of the National Gallery of Canada’s “Elusive Paradise” exhibition.) In fact, most of our conversation took place as we perched on either side of a tall folding ladder–to take in the picture in its entirety.
JEFF WALL: The “event” shown in The Flooded Grave–the “event” or the “theme,” sometimes I’m not sure what to call it–is a moment in a cemetery. The viewer might imagine a walk on a rainy day. He or she stops before a flooded hole and gazes into it and for some reason imagines the ocean bottom. We see the instant of that fantasy, and in another instant it will be gone.
JAN TUMLIR: This phantom moment, or phantasm, seems to recur in your pictures, especially the ones that have holes in them–people digging in the earth as in The Well [1989], or in The Drain [1989] and The Vampires’ Picnic [1991], which are set around sewage works. One can’t avoid the fantastic, Through the Looking Glass-type associations. There is a blatant symbolic link to the subconscious. It’s even overdetermined. You have the ocean, the grave, the hole: all these stand-ins for the underside.
JW: Yes, I guess the subject is almost a cliche, but that doesn’t bother me because it gave rise to a picture I thought would be good, and a picture has to be something more than its subject.
JT: Right, it doesn’t exhaust itself in the description. But how then do you avoid trivializing the subject? Thomas Crow described your return to an iconographic, allegorical mode as “nontrivial,” precisely because you tend to couch it in the guise of the mundane and everyday. Another strategy has to do with compression, providing a surplus of symbolic cues. It seems that here you deal with the problem of the trivial by facing it head-on, by giving these obvious readings a chance to collect, but still to surprise the viewer, somehow, through their realization.
JW: Maybe the “trivial” is just a failed version of the “everyday.” The everyday, or the commonplace, is the most basic and the richest artistic category. Although it seems familiar, it is always surprising and new. But at the same time, there is an openness that permits people to recognize what is there in the picture, because they have already seen something like it somewhere. So the everyday is a space in which meanings accumulate, but it’s the pictorial realization that carries the meanings into the realm of the pleasurable.
JT: Well, let me ask you about the making of the picture. To begin with, why did you choose this particular cemetery?
JW: I went through all the cemeteries in Vancouver, making photos in 35 mm. This one had the right feeling. Most cemeteries in Vancouver have no upright stones, only flat markers. I think that makes maintenance easier. But in this one there are upright stones and even some old statues. It also has the solitary, well-placed trees that we identify with cemeteries. I liked it best.
The camera is positioned at a low spot where flooding could actually occur. The background was shot there, in November and December of 1998. All the shooting was strictly documentary–very straight photography. I had to wait for the right light, and just captured what was there.
However, I couldn’t shoot the foreground in the same cemetery. There was already a grave in the place where I would have had to dig. So I went to a second cemetery and arranged to have a hole dug there. Now, the problem was to make it possible for the hole dug at Cemetery z to appear correctly in the pictures of Cemetery I.
With computer montage, everything has to be photographed from a single camera position and with the camera set almost the same for every shot. Otherwise, the pieces won’t fit together properly. The topography of the sites in the two cemeteries didn’t match, of course. So in order to get things right, we had to survey both sites, then rebuild the area to be photographed in Cemetery 2 to match the slope of the ground in Cemetery I. This was done in the spring and summer of ’98.
At the same time, we were building an aquatic system large enough to contain a set that would be the ocean bottom, the area of the hole beneath the water. My assistant Daniel Congdon and I had to design and build an environment that could sustain sea life for an extended period, since we didn’t know how long the shooting would last.
In the fall of ’98, I shot exteriors at Cemetery I with my other assistant, Scott McFarland, while Daniel was building the ecosystem and tanks. As soon as I felt the background shooting was complete, we moved to Cemetery z to shoot the hole and the foreground area. I wanted to shoot all the exteriors at the same time of year, so the light would be consistent. The foreground shooting had to be done as quickly as possible, since we had to make a plaster cast of the hole when the photography was finished. I needed the cast to make the shape of the imaginary ocean floor match that of the hole in the real world. The imaginary ocean floor would be built in the studio tank. The two “worlds” would be married at the waterline.
From the plaster casts, we made fiberglass molds of all the visible sides of the hole. Then we had to get all the pieces of the mold into the tank in exactly the right position, viewed through the camera. That was very difficult; the molds couldn’t be perfectly accurate since we were taking casts of a muddy hole whose shape changed as you worked on it. We had made a lot of measurements of known positions in the hole, which we used, along with a lot of sweat, to get it right. That was very hard work.
JT: It’s perfect, though; you can’t see the seam.
JW: If you could tell, I would have failed. The picture would be a failure if it permitted any doubt that the two worlds were as one, physically. The idea of a picture having to render a physically continuous space is a central part of the Western pictorial tradition. Photography has, if anything, intensified that. A picture somehow has to account for our experience of the continuity of space, for the knowledge that we have gained from the experience and activity of all our senses, the almost certain knowledge that, for example, the earth in the wall of the graves bends over at the top and goes on without interruption into the lawn, and so on. You could use the same digital montage techniques to question that, to introduce discrepancies that don’t correspond to the idea of spatial continuity I’ve just described. But I’m not interested in that.
DISCUSS