Proposition for Jeff Wall exhibition to be held in ... - VisitBrussels

From a Crooked Path Towards an Open EndExtrait du catalogueThe unique quality of the project presented here lies in the fact that this attempt at acomprehensive understanding of Jeff Wall‘s oeuvre in light of its historical significance today hasbeen made in close collaboration with the artist himself – combining existing theoreticalframeworks with very personal – not to say purely subjective – points of emphasis to arrive at aunique exhibition, which opens with a picture of a small landscape by the artist, called TheCrooked Path.But how to translate the aforementioned ambitious intentions into a sister publication? From theoutset, it was clear to me that a traditional catalogue format would not be sufficient for the taskahead. For this reason, I devised an organization into chapters, centered on interviews andentrées, that aims to cover as accurately as possible the skein of opinions, reflections, historicalfacts, images and artworks from a variety of backgrounds and periods that is the presentexhibition. Even here the crooked path functions as a perfect metaphor: however original thenewly developed format may be, it also in itself illustrates that no book scheme will ever capturethe complexity of Jeff Wall‘s endeavour as an artist. Even when, as an editor, you can rely on thecommitment of over thirty excellent contributors who are all acquainted with Jeff‘s work throughdifferent experiences, you unavoidably end with a new overall picture of the oeuvre that onlyapproaches what constitutes the heart of its artistic essence. To work your way around theoeuvre seems to be the only option; you can take many directions, and you are free to follow ornot to follow the crooked path.This introduction will not dwell on what follows in the book, as I believe it would be much moreinteresting to familiarize the reader with a number of analytical models that will allow him or her tomove freely and with deeper understanding across the different chapters. Let‘s start with a modelnamed after a famous Japanese movie.The “Rashomon model”In his 1950 masterpiece Rashomon, the Japanese cineaste Akira Kurosawa unfolds the simplestory of how a samurai, travelling with his wife on horseback, is trapped in an ambush by anotorious bandit. Tied to a tree, the man is forced to witness his wife‘s violation and he iseventually murdered. Kurosawa famously set the action in a court context, which allowed him torelate the narrative from four different points of view, one for each of the film‘s main characters, inaddition to the (so to speak) neutral perspective of a lumberjack, who takes on the role of theobligatory bystander. The result is astonishing. The events are quickly told and are the same forall four of the characters. Beyond those mere facts the spectator, however, loses any grip on thesituation because all the narratives constantly contradict each other.Our understanding of reality is suddenly replaced by another model, based on the coexistence ofprobabilities and narrative structures that cross each other in their complexity. It is a model thatdoes not come with the need to stick to an absolute truth. This notion of the truth, however, is notabandoned either because it is replaced by the realization that, together, the coexistence of thesedifferent versions forms a more or less complete understanding of what is at stake, and certainlya more interesting one. I therefore suggest we relate the fundamental motivation of this Jeff Wallproject to four similar lines of understanding, essentially intertwined. They operate and relate toeach other according to a very similar model, fuelled by energies of negation and attraction, andtogether they are more or less complete.Without any pretention whatsoever that this selection of four is an exhaustive one (otherspectators might come up with other combinations), I selected the following four lines ofunderstanding.7