Jeff Wall at MoMA

Seeing his mid-career retrospective at MoMA made me realize just how large Wall’s debt to advertising really is. He claims that an ad spied from a bus in Spain in 1977 dramatically shifted his career from art critic to photoconceptualist. His standard format—large, backlit photo boxes in metal frames—emphasizes the theatricality of his work. It’s all staged, most of it in his studio. Seeing the photos at close range shows how even the ostensibly pointed at-and-shot documentary views of landscapes have been somehow altered. Like an ad, Wall’s work has been carefully manipulated to produce effects in its viewers.

But that’s art, particularly contemporary art---and that’s the point. Once we realize that the tense racial scene depicted in “Mimic” (a white man holds the hand of his trashy girlfriend in one outsized paw and flips off an Asian man with the other) isn’t really happening, we can let down our guard and start to enjoy ourselves. Most of the photos are designed to produce this arc of tension, then release in their viewers.

Another example: “Dead Troops Talk.” Up close, the fakery is clear, as some of the wounded soldiers laughingly hump and tease one another. In one corner, candy spills from a bag; in another, guts spill between the splayed fingers of a clutching hand. Talk about macabre.

And after the release comes a flood of pleasant observations, such as the way the light-box format illuminates the multiplicity of grays in the Pacific Northwest skies (“Overpass”), or the jokey dialogue between “Some Beans” (a photo of two tables, one with some beans) and “An Octopus” (another photo of the two tables, but this time one has an octopus upon it). Things don’t have to be violent to be creepy, of course, but in Wall’s world the creepiness of objects seems to heighten their aesthetic appeal and potential for emotional manipulation.