Jeff Wall

At the Vancouver Art Gallery until January 29

If curiosity compels you to visit the Vancouver Art Gallery's current showing of its Jeff Wall holdings, do not approach its third-floor locale by way of the stairs. For if you do, the first thing you'll see will be eight large, circular, backlit photographic transparencies of children, shot from the waist up against blue sky or clouds. And these images are so banal, so glib, that one's immediate impulse is to walk back down those stairs and into the dizzying tumult of WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution.

Which, we should mention, is well worth a few hours of your time.

The Wall show is more problematic. Despite being the VAG's first major exhibit of the Vancouver photo-conceptualist's work since 1990, it is not the career overview that Wall deserves. Instead, it's a rather dowdy presentation of pieces that are not necessarily Wall's best, linked only by the fact that they have been purchased by or donated to his hometown art museum. And even if the works on view were universally first-rate, they'd still be a rather hard sell for casual viewers, in part because much of Wall's work is engaged in a critique of the banal, using banality as its medium.

This ordinariness is what's wrong with 1988's Children, and why it's so off-putting that it's the first thing you see if you enter by way of the rotunda. I'm sure Wall can present an elegant philosophical and aesthetic defence of these images, which were originally produced for an as-yet-unbuilt "Children's Pavilion" designed with conceptual artist Dan Graham. The structure was intended to be a kind of secular church celebrating every child's intrinsic potential; Wall's transparencies were meant to fulfill the iconic role that stained-glass windows do in places of Christian worship. But even given this information, they come off as pedestrian—the kind of art that marketers for, say, milk might employ to give their product a wholesome, fresh-scrubbed image. All that's missing is white mustaches.

The irony, of course, is that a strong thread of social criticism runs through Wall's work. In Selected Essays and Interviews (MoMA, 2007), he expounds at length on the relationship between his work and Marxist theory, and discusses the "unfreedoms" that are the inevitable consequence of a market-based economy. But as with Children and other works, honourable intentions do not always result in memorable art. In 1984's anticapitalist Bad Goods, for instance, he's piled rotting lettuce—we're immediately reminded of severed heads—in the middle of a muddy urban wasteland, while from the middle distance a young Native man stares challengingly at the viewer. Whether critique of consumerism, environmental statement, or intimation of genocide, this tableau is almost comically forced.

Nonetheless, there are a few pieces here that justify Wall's near-canonization by the critical establishment. The Pine on the Corner, a colour transparency from 1990, and War Game, a black-and-white image from 2007, both address notions of home—whether carved out of the rain forest or improvised from folding tables, plywood, and used tires. But where the utilitarian homes and solitary tree of the earlier image tell a single story—farewell rain forest, hello Vancouver Special—War Game asks us to consider a multiplicity of narrative possibilities. Are the prone figures sleeping or dead? Is the lone watchful child, cradling a plastic Super Soaker, their playmate or their warden? Do expansionist states—and expansionist economies—claim turf the same way these kids have taken possession of their vacant lot? Or are Wall's young protagonists practising for a future in which "home" will be provisional, yet guarded with steely determination?

Once you entertain the possibility of several interpretations, even some of Wall's least promising images open up. On the surface, 1994's River Road is, again, unremarkable, depicting as it does a marginal landscape somewhere between suburban, industrial, and agricultural. In the foreground there's a charmless, boxy house and a couple of weatherbeaten vehicles; the composition seems almost accidental, as if the photo had been taken on a whim from some passing bus.

Look twice, though, and you'll see that the converging lines of utility cables and roadway create a tension that is both formal and felt. And then there's that typical Jeff Wall light, a flat, grey, seaside luminescence that's simultaneously drab and evocative, and that recurs again and again in his work. It's very Vancouver—but, not coincidentally, it also links Wall's photography to a European tradition of landscape painting that's rooted in the fens of East Anglia and the polders of Holland.

This doesn't make Wall a 21st-century old master, but his work is not easily dismissed—and it deserves a more comprehensive showing than this flawed and sketchy retrospective.