Lost Luggage Depot (2001)

Jeff Wall

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photo Otto Snoek

photo Otto Snoek

photo Jannes Linders

photo Jannes Linders

photo archive BKOR

photo archive BKOR

design drawing

design drawing

The artwork

The artwork by Jeff Wall (Vancouver, 1946) on the Kop van Zuid is a lost luggage depot, a repository for found objects. The possible meanings of the cast iron sculpture can be directly linked to the history of Wilhelmina Pier, the place for which the artist designed it and where it was placed in October 2001. Here, for decades, emigrants boarded the passenger ships of the Holland America Line, in most cases never to see their homeland again. The departure hall and the shipping company’s office building remained even after the line’s service to North America ended, taking on new functions. The office building at the tip of the pier, appearance virtually unchanged, is now known as Hotel New York.

As a sculpture, Lost Luggage Depot has a special place in the oeuvre of Wall, who is sometimes considered the founder of conceptual photography. He once described the sculpture as a “material trace, just as a photograph is, a trace that refers to what once was.

Alexander Oey made the 2013 documentary Jeff Wall, in which he follows the Canadian photographer as he works in Hoofddorp, Rotterdam and Los Angeles. In the documentary, Wall discusses his principles, motivation and working methods in clear terms. He also highlights the creation of several works, including Lost Luggage Depot (from 28.22 min).

Year
2001
Location
Hotel New York, Wilhelminakade 88
Dimensions
860 x 860 x 183 cm
Material
cast iron
Client
Gemeente Rotterdam
Owner
Gemeente Rotterdam
Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall (Vancouver, Canada, 1946) is best known for his large-scale back-lit cibachrome photographs and art-historical writing. Wall has been a key figure in Vancouver’s art scene since the early-1970s. Early in his career, he helped define the Vancouver School and he has published essays on the work of his colleagues and fellow Vancouverites Rodney Graham, Ken Lum and Ian Wallace. His photographic tableaux often take Vancouver’s mixture of natural beauty, urban decay and postmodern and industrial featurelessness as their backdrop.

Wall received his MA from the University of British Columbia in 1970, with a thesis titled, Berlin Dada and the Notion of Context and did postgraduate work at the Courtauld Institute from 1970-73, where he studied with Manet expert T.J. Clark. He was assistant professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1974-75), associate professor at Simon Fraser University (1976-87), taught for many years at the University of British Columbia and lectured at European Graduate School. He has published essays on Dan Graham, Rodney Graham, Roy Arden, Ken Lum, Stephen Balkenhol, On Kawara, and other contemporary artists. In 2002, he was awarded the Hasselblad Award. In 2006, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Jeff Wall was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in December 2007. In March 2008, Wall was awarded the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement, British Columbia’s annual award for the visual arts.

Wall experimented with conceptual art while an undergraduate student at UBC. Wall then made no art until 1977, when he produced his first backlit phototransparencies. Many of these pictures are staged and refer to the history of art and philosophical problems of representation. The photographs’ compositions often allude to historical artists like Diego Velázquez, Hokusai, and Édouard Manet, or to writers such as Franz Kafka, Yukio Mishima, and Ralph Ellison.

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