Voyeurs 1
Jeff Wall’s pictures are huge. You have to step back to grasp the whole, get all the pieces, and see how they fit together.
Jeff Wall’s pictures have tiny details that tell the story. Sometimes you have to get close to recognize an object, and when you get close you can see the minuscule scar on the arm of the woman, the texture of the wall, the discoloration on the table.
We don’t see this way. We grasp an overall image of the world around us but we can focus on one thing at the time; in the meanwhile the scene changes and we lose the details we didn’t pay attention to for ever. But Jeff Wall’s pictures stay there, still and complex, and you can came back and notice what escaped you the first time. While your attention moves from the details to the whole and vice versa, back and forth like in a dance, objects that seemed trivial and boring become suddenly interesting and addictive.
After the first few photographs, you wonder if the images have been staged or are natural. They must be staged, you think, but you hope in some way that they are spontaneous (wouldn’t the world be a much more interesting place if you could discover scenes like those in your daily walk to work?). Then, suddenly, it doesn’t matter any longer: it’s not the realism of the photo that it’s important as much as the process of exploration and perception that the images are forcing on you.
Jeff Wall’s picture show a lot of ugly stuff. Industrial harbors, the side of a highway, a dirty sidewalk, a dirty man, a dirty gesture.
Jeff Wall’s pictures have moments of pure beauty. By staring at the ugliness, something shift in your perception, and beauty appears from nowhere, startling.
Like in a classic painting, the direction and intensity of the gaze of the people in the image define much of the dynamic of the picture. The man looking at his hat flying in the sky in A Sudden Gust of Wind. The woman in front of night club, looking at a black paper cup lid on the sidewalk in A View From a Nightclub. The Native Americans all looking at the woman gesticulating in left bottom corner of The Story Teller. The asian man by the tree in Trân Dúc Ván looking skyward as if struck by a sudden ecstasy, the crowd of children at the birthday party staring at the ventriloquist.
When you exit the exhibit, the world around you has changed. Everything looks different, more intense. Every person around you seems worth a huge photograph that shows the tiny details and the whole. You follow people’s gaze as this could reveal a new secret pattern in the fabric of reality. Every object is full of details you have never payed attention to before. For just a little while, you get the Jeff Wall’s after-effect: a unsettling sharpening of your perception.
[Note: March 5th’s issue of The New Yorker has an article by Peter Schjeldahl on Jeff Wall’s exhibition at Moma. Both Husband and I found the article disappointing and far from being able to communicate the experience of Jeff Wall. However, the article provides interesting background information you may want to read after going to the exhibition. On 2/24, the New York Time published an more insightful article by Roberta Smith.
Link: Jeff Wall’s exhibit at Moma, NYC.
Voyeurs 2
We know that the observer changes the thing being observed. It happens in physics and it happens in our social world. But what about the observer? How is he changed by what he sees?
In The life of others, Stasi’s agent Gerd Wiesler (the secret policeman), the objective and cold observer, is irresistibly pulled into the life of writer Georg Dreyman and actress Christa Maria Sieland (the artists). By paying attention to their lives (full, complete, clinical attention) he loses objectivity and detachment. He commits the ultimate misstep for a spy: starting to identify with the people he is spying.
The events in The Life of Others are at times difficult to believe, but the story is too good to worry about realism. The devastation caused by the regime’s absolute control on people’s fate and the intrusion in their private lives rings painfully true. Everything they say and do is recorded and used against them in a brutal assassination of free will and expression.
The horror is so much stronger because people in this story are not physically abused; through manipulation of their emotions (fear, shame, hopelessness) the characters in the movie are denied what they need to survive psychologically and socially: self-respect, expression, creativity, a place in the world.