The Garden of Subjection

Having thrashed conceptualism’s claims to radicalism, Wall ends the 1981 fragment on an upbeat note. Exposed as the contradictory things they are, stripped of their pretensions, he tells us, the most effective conceptual artworks become “more interesting, complex, and productive than they have seemed in functionalist terms. This is, of course, because they have not completely dissolved their character as aesthetic objects, they have not resolved their position in society.”

Even under the most rigorous questioning, that is, the best artworks created in the name of conceptualism are saved from irrelevance by their continuity with art history, and by their resistance (however feeble) to absorption by capitalist culture. Wall does not slam the door shut on conceptualism, instead leaving it open a crack — with the expectation that what he calls “a new Conceptual art” might just emerge from the shambles of the recent past.

Such a new conceptual art — cured of the anti-art nihilism typical of classic conceptualism, unashamed of its family ties to the best critical painting, photography, and film in modern times, still fired by the desire to expose the everyday crises of the bourgeois city — is exactly what Wall was trying to make in the 1980s. The task, which he had undertaken just a few years before, entailed nothing less daunting than the establishment of a critical distance between himself and a century of avant-garde abstract painting and anti-object radicalism. It also involved the resumption of the historical task of advanced representational picture-making since Manet: the depiction, in impressively physical formats, of la vie moderne, the presentation of the new urban spaces and situations created by the churn and fragmentation of modernity, and especially the crisis of the body in the new city of machines.

“My work is based on the representation of the body,” Wall writes in the 1984 note “Gestus.” “In the medium of photography, this representation depends upon the construction of expressive gestures which can function as emblems . . . The ceremoniousness, the energy, and the sensuousness of the gestures of Baroque art are replaced in modernity by mechanistic movements, reflex actions, involuntary compulsive responses . . . more condensed, meaner, more collapsed, more rigid, more violent.”

Such are the gestures of the marginalized characters — poor suburban housewives strolling through a vacant lot, urban First Nations people under a highway overpass — whom we meet in the early masterpieces Diatribe (1985) and The Storyteller (1986), both set in orphaned, derelict Vancouver locations. These works symbolize what Wall calls, in a 1993 text on Roy Arden, the “historical process of conflict and dispossession” — the lot of the modern city dweller, the corrosive force he must contest in every waking moment.

Eviction Struggle, a ravishing work from 1988, similarly represents a crisis of ownership, dwelling, and belonging — a fight between tenants and landlord — in a frayed, rundown suburb. Yet again, this is a picture in which the drama of urban dispossession is played out, this time against a background of failed utopia — a garden of subjection for a lost proletariat.

In none of these works does Wall romanticize the problem of city life, or even slightly sentimentalize those who endure it. “Art’s aim,” he writes in the Arden essay, “is to remove the victim’s crown and to depict his wounds in a secular construction . . . an artist is not a doctor. In art, the past is not displayed as healed, but as being in the process of creating symptoms which we will experience in the present, or as the present, the present moment in which the work is looked at.”

The value of Wall’s art does not consist merely in its handsomely expressed sociological or urbanistic agenda. Unlike much of the political art produced in recent decades, it is not an instance of the Higher Social Work. Wall, from the beginning of his mature career, has also been deeply concerned with the issue that has exercised painters since the Stone Age, and photographers more recently: the redemptive project of making beautiful pictures.

It is often the great beauty of his works that makes bearable their depictions of urban alienation. While Wall believes “suffering and dispossession remain at the centre of social experience,” as he says in a 1985 conversation with Els Barents, 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.