[king_buzzo]

veri nice, i like

[fishmonkey]

aww yeah, i like that

[foxforce5]

Article in the NY times Magazine 2/25/07 about "Destroyed Room" artist Jeff Wall if you're into photos.

www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/magazine/25Wall.t.html?ref=magazine

[Moshe]

The Mystery of 645 East Hastings

November 19th, 2007 by Kevan
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is home to an army of unsolved, unsolveable mysteries. I work there now, in the relative safety of a third-floor office building, and my daily transit commute is peppered by question marks from station to station. Each day I ride past the 8:00 am camp-out at the Bottle Depot, slide past the aimless congregation at Carnegie Community Centre, and step softly past the lonesome sleepers curled up in vestibules all across the city.
The mysteries of addiction and pain, buried inside people, are only explored through dialogue. I don’t have time for that, I assure myself, fumbling with my security pass. I’ll be late for work.
But work often lends itself to distraction, and this week I solved a mystery that has tugging at me since 2006. It’s the mystery of 645 East Hastings Street.
This building, nestled between a drycleaner’s and a clothing shop, is painted a reserved, uninviting gray. From the stucco to the security bars, the paint is like a blanket, covering even the windows. There is no signage — only a touch of graffiti — and the three black digits on the door, reading 645. It’s the cleanest building on this stretch of Hastings, but also the most austere.

 

645 E Hastings has a twin: a residential building covered by the same heavy coats of triple-thick concrete-milkshake paint. This twin is situated at 640 E Cordova. The narrow alley between Hastings and Cordova finds the rear ends of these two buildings situated diagonally across from each other, trying so hard to blend in.

 

Rarely does anybody enter or emerge from these twin buildings, save for the occasional vehicle being driven out of the heavily secured garage in the alley. The gray colour makes the buildings incredibly evasive – in fact, it’s such a subtle colour that the buildings are virtually invisible. I’ve often wondered why these buildings exist. What is their purpose? What function requires this much privacy, security and ambiguity? Is it a mob thing, a cult thing, a sex thing?
On Thursday, a lunchbreak stroll with a co-worker brought me through the alley where the mystery buildings connect. For the first time, the rear doors to 645 E Hastings were flung wide open. A young man was painting some very tall doors a very white colour. Inside, I saw white walls, white floors and a white ceiling. One or two workers moved about inside, amongst ladders, shelving and other unidentifiable gear in piles on the floor.
“He’s got an amazing studio space,” said my co-worker, shading his eyes to try and peer inside better.
“Wait, who does?” I asked. “It’s a studio? Whose studio? For what?”
“It’s Jeff Wall,” he said. “Jeff Wall, famous photographer?”
Jeff Wall, Jeff Wall, I repeated to myself, preserving the name until a convenient Googling time arrived. The web search quickly turned into an all-out Internet-wide info-hunting expedition, and I soon learned that Jeff Wall’s technical proficiency, creativity and iconoclasm has been a driving force in the international photography scene for decades.

[Moshe]

THE WORK OF JEFF WALL


Born in 1946, Jeff Wall has been creating art in Vancouver, BC since the late seventies. He takes pictures as if he were making an entire film: that is, each photograph is meticulously constructed over the course of weeks, months, and sometimes years.
Wall is known for his giant-sized photographic transparencies mounted on back-lit boxes – think bus-stop ads or X-ray screens. He specializes in elaborately composed shots that look either unfathomably complicated, or confusingly mundane. The shot below falls into the former category. Completed over the course of two years, the final image was composed from 75 different photographs, taken in two different Vancouver cemeteries and within Wall’s own studio. Wall worked with oceanographers to create the tidal pool in the open grave.

 

The Flooded Grave, 1998-2000
Read more about this image at Tate Modern.
Early in Wall’s career, he began experimenting with documentary-style compositions. Because his lightbox transparencies required large-format prints, a portable camera (in the 80s, at least), couldn’t provide the clarity he required to capture candid moments on the street. Still wishing to catch the genuine, street-level vibe of the occurrences taking place around him, Wall would instead hire amateur actors to recreate street scenes in studio. The shot below, titled “Mimic” is from 1982, and recreates a racist exchange Wall observed on a Vancouver sidewalk.

 

“The gesture was so small,” explains Wall. “I was interested in the… physical mimesis. The white man was copying the Asian’s body. Mimesis is one of the original gestures of art.”
Wall’s words are what gives his photography added significance. Critics might be less equipped to read into Wall’s work if he wasn’t so actively doing it himself. Having served as a professor at three different colleges and universities (including UBC), Jeff Wall has published a significant amount of essays relating to photography, philosophy and art, and of course, his own work.
Take a look at the photograph below, titled “The Storyteller.” Evidently one of Wall’s most iconic works, it exemplifies his mastery of elaborate set-ups that don’t seem elaborate, but which turn out to be loaded with intentionality and significance.

 

The storyteller in this image is the woman in the bottom left-hand corner. Wall has stated that this woman represents “the historical crisis of the Native peoples of Canada, whose traditions of oral history have been eroded by modern life.” By setting up the shot in a typically overlooked locale, he emphasizes the distance between Native history and contemporary existence.
Wall’s writing about this work are academic and dense, using words like “archaism” and “figura” in his descriptions. His inaccessibility is charming, illustrating an enchantment with intellectual explorations, but a detachment from popular art. In a way, Wall himself is the Storyteller, passionately providing fervent lectures on photography and art, just off the beaten path.

[Moshe]

THE INVISIBLE MAN

Hastings Street is certainly a curious corridor to choose for studio space, but I imagine that the veil of poverty lends itself to considerable privacy. As the annual Eastside Culture Crawl demonstrates, there are plenty of artists who find this part of town to be an ideal venue for their work.
Wall’s obscure studio is incongruous with such a prolific career, but provides such a captivating legend:
“I heard there’s a famous old photographer with a high-tech studio just two doors down from Union Gospel Mission.”
“I heard he lives there too, surrounded by photography gear.”
I don’t know anything about Jeff Wall beyond what I’ve learned this past week. I don’t know if he resides in his studio, if he’s connected to his community, if he ever emerges from the darkroom or the lightbox. But every time I walk past the gray walls, I imagine Wall at work in a situation similar to the one he created with his 2000 piece, “Invisible Man.” With 1,369 illegally connected light bulbs strung together over the ceiling, the subject lives quietly and unobtrusively in a New York cellar, going about his business under the otherwordly glow of leftover lightbulbs, completely separate from the city around him.

 

EXPLORING MORE JEFF WALL

• Wikipedia always offers fascinating tidbits, including this gem: did you know that Wall’s photograph “The Destroyed Room” was used as the cover shot for a Sonic Youth EP of the same name?
• Read “If You Build It They Will Come,” an article in Time Magazine from February 2007 and written by Richard Lacayo. The revealing essay explores staged photographs and includes Wall in the exploration, calling one of Wall’s shots the “photographic equivalent of a Jackson Pollock drip painting.” (Ouch.)
• TateModern has created an exceptional interactive online exhibit of Wall’s work from 1978-2004, featuring detailed views and write-ups for many of his signature pieces. All of the images I have used in this entry have been borrowed from the Tate site. Visit this page to see read up on Wall’s work and career. Be sure to explore my favourite from Wall’s photographs, called “A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusa)” from 1993:

 

[Tokolosh]

 

 

The Death of Sardanapalus by Eugène Delacroix

Another link with details.

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibi...ion1/img1.shtm