A scurrilous old art-world rumour tells of the bosses at Tate Modern casting about for a loss-making exhibition. The object was to never appear to be too successful when applying for more government funding. Eventually they hit upon the Canadian artist Jeff Wall (b.1946), calculating that only a very select audience would buy tickets for his show. How wrong they were. Visitors came in droves.
So it is at White Cube Bermondsey, where crowds circle among galleries hung with more than 40 years of huge backlit photographs, looking and talking and pondering the famous riddles. A cleaner mops the floor of a deserted mansion, as if something has spilled across the floor (but what?). A dignified woman contemplates the darning of a sock in a venerable library (but why?). A toddler lies on the ground, resisting her exhausted father: everyday cliche, until you notice a bypasser shooting the photographer a questioning glance.
For he is here; or perhaps they are here: every scene is staged as if for a movie, by some painstaking crew. That much is apparent from the start. A woman in Salvation Army uniform pleads with a tourist in theatreland, and you realise that Wall can hardly have caught this apparently spontaneous encounter, right at the centre of a huge and populous street scene, without both help and intent. Surely there’s a moral point in the staging itself?
Enigmas issue directly from aesthetics. Why is this photograph of a woman holding up a necklace, about which she appears strangely ambivalent, shot in black and white? Is it to establish an air of documentary truth, which the sheer theatricality of the scene immediately undermines? Why is this enormous nude on a library staircase so out of scale with the tiny readers around her, the elements of the collage thus so openly exposed?
All of this would be merely intriguing if it were not for a deep disquiet that often stirs below the surface. It is true that some of the images are more obvious than others. Knots of visitors stand in sotto voce debate before a huge diptych of a man cajoling – or pleading, or perhaps pestering – a woman in the first picture, before giving up – or despairing, or perhaps plotting – in the next. The psychodrama is too familiar. Far more disturbing is the encounter of two men – bewilderingly similar – at a formal event.
One, seen from behind, jabs a finger. Are they guests, or staff, in their shining shoes and black suits? You look from chin to nose to hand, from hairline to toecap, trying to spot the distinctions, trying to work out whether they are twins, or the same man twice, or eerie doppelgangers? All is in the air, never-ending as the altercation itself.
A trio of smaller photographs shows a filthy sink, chipped floor and languishing mop in an unidentified building. The word degrade is printed on the side of an old cabinet. It seems as if you are looking at an abattoir, or perhaps a torture chamber. Yet these are all shots of the artist’s own studio in Vancouver, according to the catalogue. Does Wall really work in conditions like these? Has he mocked it all up? Truth is at a premium.
Wall can be melodramatic. The Thinker shows a labourer in battered boots sitting head in hand like Rodin’s nude of the same name, on a block of masonry, or Dürer’s Melencolia. He has been stabbed in the back, the weapon still lodged there. The artist has described this as a monument to disenchantment. It is also a contrived bit of hokum.
But there are scenes in this show where the action – or inaction – has a powerful resonance. Wall’s art always invites you to look into a tableau, searching for clues, noticing details, wondering whether what you see is fiction or a fragment of reality. And this has its climax – as well as its emblem – in two very sombre works at White Cube.
Each shows an excavation. In one, a man is digging a deep hole in a forest, surrounded by hard hats, clipboards and forensic chemicals. You peer, anxiously, into the gaping pit, wondering who or what might be buried there. In the other, a plot in a cemetery lies open to reveal a flood. There are starfish in the watery grave. Both pictures hold the fear of death and the hope of resurrection in perfect tension.
The National Gallery’s latest artist in residence, Katrina Palmer, has replaced the pictures in Room 17A with an empty bookcase, a mediocre sculpture and some seats upon which to read her “book”. This is an anthology of notes, emails and terse descriptions of the violence in the gallery’s collection. No artists, titles or images appear on the mainly blank pages; each masterpiece is identified only as a crucifixion, say, or a rape.
The Touch Report – a colloquial reference to the NG’s record of physical “incidents’, accidental or deliberate – clearly equates real and depicted violence. Palmer’s reflections on the frailty of paint (and of reputations) can be striking. A vein of bleak humour runs through her account. And it is wonderful to learn that on the back of Titian’s tremendously fragile Bacchus and Ariadne is a drawing of a woman that we will never see, except faintly reproduced here by Palmer.
But invisible art is a slim reward for what reads, at times, like a Wiki entry on botched restorations and male violence in western painting. This has so little to do with depiction itself that – presumably as Palmer intends – you leave the room, and her book, with a yearning for actual art.
Star ratings (out of five)
Jeff Wall: Life in Pictures ★★★★
Katrina Palmer: The Touch Report ★★
Jeff Wall: Life in Pictures is at White Cube Bermondsey until 12 January 2025
Katrina Palmer: The Touch Report is at the National Gallery, London, until 2 March 2025
