"Despite all the good things that can be said about conceptual art — its critique of the commodity, its attack on mass cultural manipulation, and its negativity in the face of the remorselessly happy consciousness promoted by the mass media — the movement, “in its helplessly ironic mimicry not of knowledge, but of the mechanisms of the falsification of knowledge,” [Jeff Wall speaking] is only the mirror image of the commodification it rejects. In the end, the routine conceptual artwork turns out to be a “helpless, mute, decorative object . . . a witty piece of contextual virtuosity,” devoid of the life-changing, revolutionary energy it presumes to inject into the rigid and oppressive fabric of the capitalist city."
excerpt from 'the garden of subjection' by john bentley mays _ the walrus 12.2007


jeff wall _ A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) 1993

hokusai _ 36 views of mt fuji

jeff wall _ invisible man

ralph ellison
".. Wall believes “suffering and dispossession remain at the centre of social experience,” .. art can help provide something else — a counter-tradition, a new avant-gardism that points the way to the future. “It provides this complicated glimpse of something better,” Wall says. “The glimpse of something ‘other’ which you experience in art is always a glimpse of something better because experiencing art is, as Stendhal said, the experience of a ‘promesse de bonheur,’ a promise of happiness.”
“And how do you think your pictures, which are so attentive to the unfreedom and unhappiness of the present, give a promise of happiness?” Barents asks.
Wall: “I always try to make beautiful pictures.”"
from 'the garden of subjection' by john bentley mays _ the walrus 12.2007