.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
'I make landscapes, or cityscapes as the case may be to work out for myself what kind of picture (or photograph) we call a 'landscape' is. This permits me also to recognize the other kinds of picture with which it has necessary connections, or the other genres that a landscape might conceal within itself'
(J. Wall, 'About Making Landscapes', Jeff Wall, London, 1996, p. 140).
The Crooked Path, 1991, is a key work by Jeff Wall, one of the pioneers of the movement establishing photography as a contemporary art form. A defining photograph for the artist, The Crooked Path, has been included in virtually all of his major exhibitions. Created in Vancouver in the winter of 1991, The Crooked Path is positioned in Wall's output between A ventriloquist at a Birthday Party in October 1947, 1990, where the speaking doll performs as proxy for the human, and Dead Troops, 1992, where the vacant souls of the deceased rise up and engage in lively conversation. In The Crooked Path the protagonist is the absent wanderer, as evidenced by the physical echo of the footsteps of all those distant people who have passed this way before. Where many of Wall's pictures feature the act of speaking as a trope to illustrate the inherent silence and objecthood of a photograph, here the empty path of this hyper-real scene is the resounding echo: a linear trace of absent life. The scene we are witness to is the aftermath of an event we must craft in our mind. Wall is often described as a flâneur, or idle stroller, and in his contemporary revision of the wasteland, The Crooked Path is notable for the stillness it portrays.
Wall captures this overlooked landscape with all the intricacy and precision of classical painting. Paying homage to the compositional vocabulary of Poussin, Wall places the action outside of the scene in order to illustrate narrative drama taken from real life, bringing to light the equivocality inherent in all that we see. In its presentation in a photographic light-box furthers this quality of the represented image, the path leading into its interior, glowing hearth. Often used for advertising purposes, by mounting the gloss colour transparencies in a backlit aluminum edged box that lends the work a hyper-real glow, Wall heightens the concept of the power of the picture to create illusion.
Stretching into the distance, the linear perceptive and indefinite vanishing point employs a purposefully high horizon line which reaches to the very top of the composition. Adapting a Cézanne-like line of perspective, Wall situates the viewer along the path, inviting us to following this furrowed trail. As the winding path ambles into the distance, it leads the eye through overgrown foliage and bare brush, in which trees become telephone lines, giving way to urban buildings demarking the landscape. Where Cézanne's painting tends to soften the rougher edges of the contemporary moment in accord with the more idealistic aesthetics of the time, Wall's picture is rooted in the roughness or even incompleteness of the scene, capturing the abandonment of space once 'inhabited'. Punctuated by candy coloured chromatic boxes in the distance, the artist reminds us of the presence of humanity.
As the eye journeys up the composition, the beauty becomes dark and intriguing; the subject matter, the scale and the composition all combining to produce an unnerving sense of perspective, upsetting a balance that Wall sees as having dominated art for far too long, 'my landscape work has also been a way to reflect on internal structural problems in other types of pictures. In doing that, it's been possible to rethink, for myself, some rather obvious and conventional things about the genre of landscape as a genre' (J. Wall, 'About Making Landscapes', Jeff Wall, London, 1996, p. 246). Refreshing this pictorial tradition for the contemporary audience through his meticulous photographic practice, in The Crooked Path Wall shines a light on the overlooked aspects of the urban environment.
The title The Crooked Path is significant to the artist, as evidence by his choice to use its name for his exhibition at Bozar, Brussels, where Wall selected 25 works to display alongside historical and other contemporary artists. An allegory for the artist's creative process, Wall surmises, 'it's a metaphor for the uncertainty of development, the surprises that come along the way in art you can make use of all the little parts of that crooked path. In life, things can be more complicated (J. Wall, quoted in B. Grauman, 'Jeff Wall's Crooked Path', The Wall Street Journal, 27 May 2011, p. 13).
(J. Wall, 'About Making Landscapes', Jeff Wall, London, 1996, p. 140).
The Crooked Path, 1991, is a key work by Jeff Wall, one of the pioneers of the movement establishing photography as a contemporary art form. A defining photograph for the artist, The Crooked Path, has been included in virtually all of his major exhibitions. Created in Vancouver in the winter of 1991, The Crooked Path is positioned in Wall's output between A ventriloquist at a Birthday Party in October 1947, 1990, where the speaking doll performs as proxy for the human, and Dead Troops, 1992, where the vacant souls of the deceased rise up and engage in lively conversation. In The Crooked Path the protagonist is the absent wanderer, as evidenced by the physical echo of the footsteps of all those distant people who have passed this way before. Where many of Wall's pictures feature the act of speaking as a trope to illustrate the inherent silence and objecthood of a photograph, here the empty path of this hyper-real scene is the resounding echo: a linear trace of absent life. The scene we are witness to is the aftermath of an event we must craft in our mind. Wall is often described as a flâneur, or idle stroller, and in his contemporary revision of the wasteland, The Crooked Path is notable for the stillness it portrays.
Wall captures this overlooked landscape with all the intricacy and precision of classical painting. Paying homage to the compositional vocabulary of Poussin, Wall places the action outside of the scene in order to illustrate narrative drama taken from real life, bringing to light the equivocality inherent in all that we see. In its presentation in a photographic light-box furthers this quality of the represented image, the path leading into its interior, glowing hearth. Often used for advertising purposes, by mounting the gloss colour transparencies in a backlit aluminum edged box that lends the work a hyper-real glow, Wall heightens the concept of the power of the picture to create illusion.
Stretching into the distance, the linear perceptive and indefinite vanishing point employs a purposefully high horizon line which reaches to the very top of the composition. Adapting a Cézanne-like line of perspective, Wall situates the viewer along the path, inviting us to following this furrowed trail. As the winding path ambles into the distance, it leads the eye through overgrown foliage and bare brush, in which trees become telephone lines, giving way to urban buildings demarking the landscape. Where Cézanne's painting tends to soften the rougher edges of the contemporary moment in accord with the more idealistic aesthetics of the time, Wall's picture is rooted in the roughness or even incompleteness of the scene, capturing the abandonment of space once 'inhabited'. Punctuated by candy coloured chromatic boxes in the distance, the artist reminds us of the presence of humanity.
As the eye journeys up the composition, the beauty becomes dark and intriguing; the subject matter, the scale and the composition all combining to produce an unnerving sense of perspective, upsetting a balance that Wall sees as having dominated art for far too long, 'my landscape work has also been a way to reflect on internal structural problems in other types of pictures. In doing that, it's been possible to rethink, for myself, some rather obvious and conventional things about the genre of landscape as a genre' (J. Wall, 'About Making Landscapes', Jeff Wall, London, 1996, p. 246). Refreshing this pictorial tradition for the contemporary audience through his meticulous photographic practice, in The Crooked Path Wall shines a light on the overlooked aspects of the urban environment.
The title The Crooked Path is significant to the artist, as evidence by his choice to use its name for his exhibition at Bozar, Brussels, where Wall selected 25 works to display alongside historical and other contemporary artists. An allegory for the artist's creative process, Wall surmises, 'it's a metaphor for the uncertainty of development, the surprises that come along the way in art you can make use of all the little parts of that crooked path. In life, things can be more complicated (J. Wall, quoted in B. Grauman, 'Jeff Wall's Crooked Path', The Wall Street Journal, 27 May 2011, p. 13).