Photography with an eye for social relevance
- For two West Coast cities that have much in common, San Francisco and Vancouver exchange surprisingly little in the way of contemporary culture.
The Vancouver Art Gallery has a concurrent exhibition by Roy Arden, who also gets mentioned frequently as part of a "Vancouver School" of conceptual photography, along with Wall and his mentor, Ian Wallace.
The terms gained such currency as they have beginning in the 1980s. Critics and curators began then to notice a number of Vancouver artists reacting to conceptual art's downgrading of visual values with photographs of high intensity and complex content that probed, obliquely or directly, the social force of imagery.
"Nobody really wants these silly labels like 'Vancouver School' and 'photo-conceptualism,' " Arden said when we met at the art gallery. "But there was a tendency and it had to do with Ian and Jeff being very erudite and socially or politically conscious. Before Jeff and Ian, the predominant tendency here was Romantic and what we would have called at the time flaky - not very rigorous, not very historical. And there was from Ian and Jeff a reaction to that. I was definitely drawn to it."
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Wall and others such as Stan Douglas and Rodney Graham, especially in their early careers, tried to use photography and other media to break what they saw as an ideological spell cast by mainstream media and entertainment. Hence, Wall's signature adoption of the light box and giant color transparency, devices common to advertising in such settings as shopping malls and airports.
Many of Arden's pictures focus on "the landscape of the economy," as he calls it, from wide views such as "Development" (1993) and "Soil Compactor, Richmond, B.C." (1993) to more ambiguous narrow views such as the random patterns of "Gum Spots (#2)" (2005) on sidewalk and gutter.
And whereas a viewer of Wall's pictures may wonder about the extent to which he staged them, the viewer of Arden's often asks whether he seeks points at which photographic and social facts converge or diverge.
Arden, 50, was Wall's student at one point in his career. "I studied with Ian when I was younger," at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in the late '70s. "And he was very inspirational," Arden said. "But by the time I studied with Jeff," at the University of British Columbia in the late '80s, "I was already formed and had been exhibiting as an artist for a decade. Our relationship today, and even back then, was really like peers."
Occasional affinities between Wall's work and Arden's will strike anyone who sees both shows, or even both exhibition catalogs.
Wall's picture "Staining bench, furniture manufacturer's, Vancouver" (2003), showing a resin-encrusted workbench, looks related to individual shots in Arden's series, "Basement" (1996), in which color and black and white alternate.
Arden's pictures make a casual inventory of a jumbled basement's contents. Several report the same information from slightly different vantage points, ignoring aesthetic niceties.
"That piece was intended to be almost a cinematic vision, a kind of scanning, the way you do when you walk through a place," Arden said. "The moment you have two slightly different views of the same object, you introduce the idea of that kind of cinematic vision. It was also to destroy the singular-image idea of photography. You know, 'This is the picture?' Something I like about certain photographers, such as Walker Evans, is that they often did several images of the same thing and then they could never really choose. Art photography has always hinged on the idea of the perfect shot. But maybe you can have a series where there is no best one."
Wall's work, in contrast, seems rooted in calculation. He refers to his most stage-managed pictures as "cinematographic."
Arden contrasted his approach by saying, "I think of myself as doing direct photography, as opposed to directorial photography."
Even when he has used video, he has tended to unmake its most cinematic aspects. Arden's color video "Hole" (2000) plays at the gallery on a floor-level monitor in the corner of a closet-like space adjoining a large gallery. The camera, fixated on a hole in a grimy floor, does not move, leaving the hurried viewer with the impression of a single frozen frame. But a longer look reveals subtle motion within the image: Air currents from below lightly lift and release cobwebs that span the hole.
"I'm interested in the passage between still and moving imagery," Arden said. When he approached video, he considered doing tableaux in which nothing occurred except the performers' breathing. When he found "a hole that's breathing," he recognized a perfect match for his thinking about the medium.
A second video, "Supernatural" (2005), contrasts with "Hole" in every way. A montage of news camera footage, it revisits a night in 1994 when rioting hockey fans took over Vancouver's downtown shopping district after the New York Rangers routed Vancouver's team in a playoff qualifier.
Thoroughly depressing to watch, "Supernatural" evokes an all-too-recognizable realm of depoliticized popular frustration. Its title plays upon a slogan of British Columbia tourism: "Super. Natural."
Visitors to Wall's SFMOMA show are struck by the considerable size of many of his backlit transparencies. Arden's show, by contrast, contains prints ranging from wallet size to nearly wall size.
Asked about scale, Arden said, "I've been made acutely aware of that because of Jeff. He's really the master of scale in photography today. ... I think I'm guilty of maybe not paying enough attention to that. But really, the image tells you how big it has to be. Either you look at it and know, or you try printing it and learn. ... My work's always been like an education. I work through things. So there is a lot of change in my work."
Unlike Wall, Arden has tended to move through successive projects, sometimes shooting his own pictures, sometimes appropriating obscure archival images, such as the appalling pair that records sullen native British Columbians pressed into re-enacting the Crucifixion.
Arden's latest project plays in a gallery at the Vancouver Art Gallery, but anyone with an Internet connection can see it. A growing image archive, culled from the Internet and other sources, titled "The World as Will and Representation" (1991-2007), plays on computer as a rapid-fire cascade of 28,000-plus images through a link at .
Once you get it started, you may need to shut down your computer to stop it, so best set aside an hour and a half to let it roll. You may be overwhelmed, but not disappointed.
Arden has also begun making what he calls digital collages, single-page arrays of pictures culled from the Internet. Though as void of self-expression as the appropriated work of Richard Prince, Arden's collages suggest maps of association drawn from private memories of the public image domain.