Questioning authenticity

ARTWALK

IN THE BEGINNING, Jeff Wall was known for his large, neon-back lit photographs. Deeply saturated and altar-like, his works, as they became, were riveting. Imagines, many from daily life, seemed to stare back at you as you stared at them. Wall imbues initially familiar objects and scenarios with new, assertive identities in their framed, back-lit boxed forms.

Their sheer size is daunting, demanding a close, homage-like look. And that's when they hook you with a detail you'd never expect. Over the years, Wall's work has changed to a much more complex set of interventions. An important retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, MOMA, New York, details this path.

One of the most dramatic works from Wall includes a scene outside a night club. Stiletto-heeled women size each other and the ambience, hanging around, is deceptively still. It's a panoramic scene replete with exuberant details, dripping Delacroix in its majesty and in its theatrical quality.

Like all his other works, you don't get the feeling that you're looking at the work alone "" the life-size works stands squarely up to you, defying your expectations. The only hidden surprise, if that is possible, is that Wall has constructed the image from hundreds of pictures he's clicked previously. Constructing these photographic images, Wall interrogates the notion of "authentic".

There is double entendre at play: in the art market, authenticity "" that created by the author of the work "" is fundamental and carefully tracked. In the photograph, every detail is presumed often to be authentic. Wall moves beyond assumptions and takes you with him. You learn to see the lineage he seems to share with several dramatic, pre-modernist painters.

In a delightful tango with the Japanese genius Hokusai, "A sudden gust of wind", Wall allows you the indulgence of a leisurely gaze, tricking you to thinking it's the moment. It isn't, we learn later, and Wall took a long time and much effort to build that up. What

I enjoyed about that image was the unlikely challenge it threw to the candid moment photography perspective. If this work is a technical achievement, many others are too. Jeff Wall engages at a deep intellectual level with art history. Sometimes, as you can see in "In Front of a Night Club", 2006, his lighting is like the Dutch Masters.

His work from 1978, "The Destroyed Room", is strikingly like a Snyder. He titillates you with his constructions, revealing another reality within the ordinary. No work can illustrate this more than "Mimic", a chilling 1982 comment on racism and gesture. It's so subtle, you need a moment to take it in. When you do, the horror descends.

The sheer everyday quality of power and shock spreads like a super toxin. In an interview in 1985, Wall himself said something prophetic. "The mimic in Mimic is a tragic figure because...mimesis is the germ of art, here turned into a weapon of war. These little gestures are precursors of worse things to come," he had pointed out.

His works, a theatre of landscapes, digs deeper. Wall leans on the populist expectation from photography to show it as it is, to peel off the surface and reveal what's not present, convincingly.

"Eviction" gets you to catch your breath. It's not an unusual phenomenon, but placed as it is, like part of a wider landscape, the trauma and cruelty almost trivialised, is disturbing. This is Jeff Wall, stirring our inner cauldron. That's why this retrospective is especially riveting. The everyday stirrings from the last 30 years actually turn out to be our very own.