Being there: Michael Fried on two pictures by Jeff Wall.(Slant)

THINKING ABOUT Jeff Wall's most recent exhibition in New York, a show of light-box pictures at Marian Goodman Gallery last spring, has led me to reflect on the more philosophical or, say, ontological turn his work has taken during the past four or five years. The central image in the show was Fieldwork. Excavation of the floor of a dwelling in a former Sto:Io nation village, Greenwood Island, Hope, University of California at Los Angeles, working with Riley Lewis of the Sto:Io band, 2003. For all the information the title provides, it doesn't quite say everything. The picture offers us a largely downward view into and across a clearing in a forest where two men are at work. One of the men is seated cross-legged on the ground (actually, he sits on a wooden "mat") before a squarish hole, perhaps a foot and a half deep, which even without the title is recognizable as the product of meticulous excavation. A second man, Lewis, stands about fifteen feet away, looking on as Graesch concentrates on his task (taking soil samples, apparently). The clearing itself gives the impression of being partly man-made: Certainly, some preliminary ground preparation and digging have taken place, and the site has been tagged with bits of orange plastic that make vivid color accents against the deep green of foliage. Orange and yellow plastic pails and a blue dustpan are also crucial to the pictorial effect, as are the wooden mats that radiate outward from the hole for the practical purpose of keeping workers from disturbing the ground but which here serve the pictorial function of directing the viewer's attention to the central motif. There is also a second squarish hole, farther away and to the …