Jeff Wall talks to Bob Nickas - '80s Then - Interview

BOB NICKAS: When I saw The Vampires' Picnic in 1991 it made me realize the '80s were over. In retrospect, how do you see the decade through the filter of your work?

JEFF WALL: I don't think it's because of the calendar, but by about 1990 I had decided to move in slightly different directions. The Vampires' Picnic was part of a group of pictures in which I wanted to work with larger groups of people. It was also one of a few pictures involving imaginary, fantastic elements and what I'd call an "ornate" style. I did this as a vague counterpoint to pictures like Mimic [1982] or Milk [1984], which I see as a kind of neorealism based on things I have witnessed and which have a close relationship to the idea of documentary.

BN: You've referred to the vampires as non-sexually reproducing--they simply overtake other bodies--which made me think of the picture in terms of the end of sexuality with the onset of AIDS. In the late '80s the idea of having a free relationship to your body, and to others, seemed to be at the end of the line.

JW: I never thought about it that way, but I can't deny what you're saying. It seems like a response to something that was in the air, something I probably wasn't even aware of. The whole vampiric mythology that I put into the Picnic goes back to the writings I did on Dan Graham at the beginning of the '80s, "Dan Graham's Kammerspiel," in which I developed some meanings for vampirism in relation to various urbanist and architectural discussions circulating in his work.

BN: You've also said that it's like a portrait of an '80s TV family: the whole Dynasty or Dallas clan, all sprawled out on some bloody battlefield at the end of the day.

JW: It's amusing to think the moment is somehow preserved in some allegorical way even though I never really experienced that moment. I was never that elated during the '80s. I know that things really changed around '89, after the collapse of the market, but that didn't happen to me. I was never that up, and I never went that down, In the early '90s I remember talking to an artist much younger than I who was lamenting that he might actually have to get a job. I always had a job: I was teaching. So I thought, "Well, I feel sorry for you, but I don't really know why I should." I guess they had had it so good that they didn't need to work. My view of success as an artist was that you didn't have to work at something besides your art. Even if you had little or no money, if you didn't have to have a job you were a success as an artist. But I came out of the '60s; I didn't expect much. It was normal to imagine having to do something to survive.

BN: As the money rolled in and New York spruced up, a type of freer '60s person, someone you'd see roaming the streets, was swept aside. When I saw the hippies and vagabonds in pictures like Abundance [1985], Doorpusher [1984], and The Agreement [1987], I wondered whether that had influenced you in any way.

JW: I wasn't living in New York in the '80s, but at the time I did notice that a lot of art at the end of the '70s began to have a fresh and optimistic feel, an exuberant quality to it. I felt that the dirty things about life were not appearing, even though the new imagistic art of the moment made some claims to being closer to life than, say, post-Minimal art, or whatever was sensed to be "over" at the time. I still liked some of that new work, but it didn't satisfy me on the question of the actual appearance of things. So I did have a feeling that it was necessary for me to focus on decayed, forgotten, broken, and problematic things, which is part of how I got a reputation for being a social artist, or for making a kind of politically engaged art. I've never really identified too much with that characterization, but it must be part of the impulse to show that kind of thing in a picture. So you're right about those broken-down hippie figures and marginal people; they seem to me to have a way of disclosing so mething about just what things were like and, I guess, what I am like.

BN: I remember the exact moment when I was bitten by the '80s bug. I saw a work of yours in a gallery and wanted to buy it on the spot. I think it was Steve's Farm, Steveston [1980], and it was $15,000 or $16,000, probably my entire life savings at the time. I had to ask myself: Had I been pulled into the moment, to be so excited that I actually wanted to own something?

JW: Well, I'm glad you wanted it. Too bad you didn't get it.

BN: Of course, what was a small fortune then is nothing compared to what it might cost now.

JW: Or the converse can be true: It could be quite a lot compared to how little some art is worth now, which is the case with a lot of work from that time--or any time. The public always hears about the price of art going up; nobody seems to notice how most works lose value. Anyway, I didn't have a New York gallery until the end of the '80s. I don't think I sold any pictures at all in the US before then. So when there was the downturn in the market, it had little to do with me. Paradoxically, it was just at that moment that my dealers and I decided my work was too cheap, so my prices went up pretty sharply around '88, and when I first started showing in New York people were shocked at what my pictures cost.