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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The Museum of Modern Art's retrospective of the resourceful Vancouver photographic artist Jeff Wall is richly uneven. It suggests less a career than a case history, tracking an intellectually ambitious, morally earnest perfectionist through the fevers and chills of latter-day avant-gardism, in which he has starred for nearly three decades. Rarely are viewers permitted to relax and enjoy the intrinsic gorgeousness of Wall's signature medium--big color transparencies of cinematically staged, often digitally jiggered scenes, mounted on fluorescent light boxes. The prevailing style is realist, but it is regularly beset by mixed, toilsome aims: Wall has harbored enough motives to impel several artists, and they have tended to get in the way of one another. There is the righteous Wall, who lodges complaints on behalf of racial minorities and the poor: in "Mimic" (1982), a bearded lout makes an insulting gesture to an Asian man on a city street; "An Eviction" (1988, reworked in 2004) is an aerial view of a neighborhood in which a violent dispossession takes place. The erudite Wall imports art-historical and ideological arcana with motifs from Manet, Hokusai, or Walker Evans here and a redolence of German or French critical theory there; Guy Debord's "The Society of the Spectacle" (1967), among other strenuous texts, influenced Wall's adoption of commercial signage techniques, in a spirit of...
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