Jeff Wall

Cherry Smyth

Tate Modern London October 21 to January 8

Jeff Wall's retrospective spans over 25 years, from his eureka moment in The Destroyed Room, 1978, which mimes Delacroix's The Death of Sardanapalus, to more recent works like Fieldwork..., 2003, which renegotiate the ethno­documentary gaze. I first encountered Wall at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, in 1997 and came away stimulated and satisfied. Having recuperated the light box from public advertising hoardings, Wall's early transparencies are luminescent, deliciously bizarre and indelible. Characters in search of a plot suck you into multiple narratives and leave none resolved. While Hollywood was insulting its audience with over­explication, Wall's single frame movies evoked the urgency and relevance of 70s American cinema. What drove the spiv in Milk, 1984, to jerk his cartoon of milk so violently that it burst out in a splatter worthy of Pollock? How does the white guy in Mimic, 1982, pulling his eye into a slant, relate to the untold story of the Chinese community in Vancouver (one of the biggest outside Japan) and the mimetic legacy of art history? Who is listening to the Native American, posed Dejeuner sur l'Herbe­style by the neglected side of an underpass in The Storyteller, 1986? These are re­enactments of leftover characters in leftover locations that niftily relocate class, race and gender.

We celebrate the sudden gust of wind in that eponymous photograph when it steals the townie's hat and scatters the female developer's papers into the vast pale sky. The locals/farm labourers, still connected to the land, are not undone by the erratic weather. The flying papers, after Hokusai, still resonate with the drama of the unexpected rupturing our ordered city lives. Just as painters like Manet and van Gogh imitated the flat colour washes of Japanese woodcuts that had arrived in Europe for the first time, Wall restages figurative painting, foregrounding his sources and influences with postmodern panache and digital accomplishment. It didn't matter that you didn't know Hokusai's Ejiri in Suruga Province, the direct source of the poetry of the image. There was a way to read a Jeff Wall, to detect the seams between the transparencies, to gather clues about what he calls the ethics of looking until deconstruction infected even his straightforward landscape portraits, where you saw an Alice Munro story in Steves Farm, Steveston, 1980, or wondered if the girl with long blonde hair in the window of a house in The Bridge, 1980, was placed there deliberately. You started to notice the recur­ ring red clothing on the figures in the landscapes, recalling Corot and the fact that he composed most of his landscapes in the studio, painting man's intrusion on the natural world, as Wall does.

This is Wall's genius - refreshing traditions of representation, based on media we're versed in understanding in a split second. And perhaps it's also his limitation. We can't look at what appears to be a documentary photograph of an industrial wasteland in The Crooked Path, 1991, without wondering whether he piled those red, white and blue containers in the frame. Or if his most successfully 'painterly' pieces, Diagonal Composition, 1993, and Diagonal Composition Number 2, 1998, are constructed or found. Did he engrain the yellow bar of soap with a diagonal line of dirt, making him the Weegee of postmodern photography? If ways of seeing are so constructed, can there be a response to beauty that isn't already predetermined?

Wall insists that we ask how real is the actual, how does the actual enter the imagined and how does the imagined govern the real. By the end of this exhibition, these questions grate and deaden rather than engage and enliven. Overpass, 2001, with its tribe of travellers with short-term luggage, has the vitality and mystery of earlier works, View from an apartment, 2004-05, deflates into a banal exercise in guesswork. Are these non-professional actors about to have a tea-break? How do we view the view? Wall suggests that those who can afford global mobility can choose to wake up to any view - this could be Vancouver or Shanghai or any reconditioned, cost-inflated dockland. The way we see is constantly evolving but we still cherish the archetypal room with a view. The view from this photograph will be different next year. Maybe we prefer something we don't know. Perhaps advertising has caught up with Wall's devices, his cinematography superseded by the desire to invent layers rather than be told where exactly they are. His later work seems to depend more on what Wall knows than what the images allow you to experience.

Cherry Smyth is a critic and curator.

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