Ian Wallace
Photo: Chick Rice

Poverty 1982
Courtesy: Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver

An Attack on Literature I and II 1975 Photo: Don Hall

Image Text 1979
Photo: Tim Bonham

Clayoquot Protest II 1993 Courtesy: Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver

Construction Site LA IV 2003 Courtesy: Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver

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Ian Wallace has spent his entire career in Vancouver, from his education at the University of British Columbia to the present. He is one of the artists who have given Vancouver its reputation abroad as the leading art centre in Canada, and he has done this in the best way possible – by making work that holds a central place in the art history of the last 40 years.

Throughout the 1970s, Wallace developed a series of large format photographs for which he asked various friends to act out parts in fictional scenarios. A good example is An Attack on Literature (1975). In these works he explored both the expressive possibilities of montage and the narrative legacy of historical painting. Wallace was one of the first, if not the first, to see the possibility that large format photography could be a way of working out of conceptualism into a new kind of pictorialism, with strong roots in historic painting. This has become a very important position in contemporary art, and it is recognized world wide that the best exponents of it are to be found in Vancouver.

Wallace is an independent thinker who saw connections, resemblances and possibilities that metropolitan artists in London or New York didn't see, or couldn't see, because they led off the existing map of art history. He demonstrates how one individual, in a local context, can resonate with central problems in modern culture and offer a critical reflection on those problems that can have a world-wide influence. During his long career, Wallace has lived through the emergence of the global art world in a way that can teach us how to live in it now—openness and independence of mind lead to synchronicity and relevance.

There are three main periods in Wallace's work. His early photography, in the late sixties, reflected the conceptual art of that period, using the snapshot as a tool of aesthetic and social analysis. The seventies was the period of the staged photo tableaux already mentioned, and this period comes to an end and culmination with the work Poverty, a piece that was developed over a period of years (1980 to 1987). This piece started as a short black and white film in which some of the artist's friends played the role of a group of homeless derelicts and clochards, passing the time in vacant lots and deserted streets. Later Wallace began to silkscreen stills of the film onto coloured canvas. The title Poverty is entirely ironic, because the work is nothing if not a testament to aesthetic abundance, and a brilliant example of how the trope of poverty or reduction can enable the richest modernist achievements. The closest parallels in art history are the courtly masques of Watteau, but the piece also picks up on the costume tableaux of Manet, the photos of nineteenth-century documentarist Thomas Annan, and the Italian neo-realist cinema of the post-war years. Poverty is also the hinge between his work from the seventies and the work that he has been doing since: photos laminated onto canvas in juxtaposition with painted areas. The recent work brings forward the documentary and snapshot photo-graphy of his first period, but combines it in a stylish, simple and knowing way with everything that he had learned about painting and the picture during the seventies.

Wallace's other principal activity has been teaching. His role as an instructor and mentor of several generations of younger Vancouver artists has been crucial. He began to teach as soon as he finished university, and three initiatives in particular had a big effect on the kind of work that the more intelligent artists of the eighties in Vancouver would make. He taught at the University of British Columbia, from 1967-70, and then at the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design) from 1972-1998, where he taught a contemporary art course that was one of the earliest to introduce the art of the recent past into the art history curriculum. Through this program Wallace demonstrated to his students how a contemporary artist could be, and in fact should be, engaged in both art history and in active contemporary debate. Wallace's practice includes both art production and art history, and that made him an important model. Secondly, he co-ordinated his course with an ambitious visitors program. Thirdly, in the eighties he introduced a History of Media course that brought printmaking, photography and film together with painting as a single domain of images. This seems unremarkable now, but at the time it was a very progressive step. It widened the range of reference significantly, placed many non-canonical or marginalized figures at the centre of discussion, and empowered younger artists to construct their own genealogies outside of the accepted canon. Wallace's courses and his visitors program cannot be underestimated for the effect they had on the art scene in Vancouver throughout the seventies and eighties. Through them, the qualities that characterize his own work, its cosmopolitanism, its openness to many media, its historical depth and above all its literariness, have infected the thinking and practice of many younger artists.

Modernism is supposed to be resolutely anti-literary, and so Wallace's literariness, which takes the realm of images as continuous with those of poetry and novels, is perhaps the hardest thing for an art world audience to appreciate. The difficulty is the more acute as Wallace is not aligned with post-modernism, and his interests do lie with the classic modernist works. But the key to Wallace's achievement is that he takes even the most mundane photo, or even the most abstract artistic gesture, as full of narrative meaning, meaning that will emerge in time. His work demands an intelligent viewer, and I suspect that it is too demanding for most, yet on the surface it is extremely simple. This simplicity is in fact the guarantee of its integrity. Wallace never plays to the stadium. His work has the dignity of beauty, but refuses to be entertainment. The beauty appears in his later period as the simple rectitude of good design, and this is the generic form that underlies his recent practice – neither painting nor photography but graphic design, particularly the design of the pages of a book.

Actually, it would be more accurate to say that graphic design is the matrix within which both photography and painting can take their places in his work, in a classic modern strategy that reinvents tradition through the forms of mass culture. To say that graphic design is a minor art is to explain its attraction for an artist as sophisticated as Wallace, because he understands that in the modern period innovation has always proceeded from the articulation of high ambition and minor forms. A good example is the set of nine very important pieces from 1995 called Clayoquot Protest (Aug. 9, 1993). These are Wallace's history paintings. Wallace documented an historic confrontation over forest use on the West Coast, an event at which he was present. Here the great tradition of the history painting and the lesser tradition of the documentary photo are nestled into Wallace's characteristically-measured and intelligent distribution of rectangles on the open page of the book. But his real intention is to test art's role in the social realm that we all share. Wallace believes in the autonomy of art, in its need to formulate its own problems and create its own values. He also believes it has a place in the polity.

In retrospect it is another work of the seventies, Image Text (1979), that is most prophetic of Wallace's mature phase. The most explicitly book-like of all his works, it seems to encapsulate all the themes that have so far been mentioned. It also reinforces for us the essential literariness of Wallace's project. Whether his work is documentary or fiction, whether it takes on a political or personal or purely aesthetic flavour – all these possibilities are present – its origin is always in the objectivity of the artwork proclaimed by Symbolism, particularly the poetry of Mallarmé.

In a period in which the masters of modernism are subject to an often-unbalanced critique, Wallace has proved the utility of this position, as embodied, above all, in its flexibility, its ability to enable a wide range of practices. As a poet of images, Wallace demonstrates that a work can have meaning without being loaded with didactic messages, that it can be visually striking without surrendering reflection, that it can use the mundane and everyday without succumbing to banality, and that it can be completely up-to-date without losing touch with the past.

Robert Linsley is an artist originally from Vancouver currently teaching at the University of Waterloo. He is currently completing a book-length history of art in British Columbia.

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