Institutional Critique

…the "culture of transgression" involves a sort of romantic binarism. Law exists, and the soul is crushed by it. To obey the law is to live in bad faith. Transgression is the beginning of authentic existence, the origin of art’s truth and freedom. But modern societies are constitutional; they have written, deliberately, their own foundations, and are continually rewriting them. Maybe it is a sense that it is the writing of laws, and not the breaking of them, that is the most significant and characteristic artistic act in modernity. Avant-garde art certainly operated this way, writing new laws as quickly as it broke any old ones, thereby imitating the constitutional state. The maturation and aging of modernist art maybe brings this aspect more into focus. In any case, the gesture, or act, of transgression seems far more ambiguous in form and content than it has seemed in concepts of art simply based upon it. I feel that art develops through experimentally positing possible laws or law-like forms of behaviour, and then attempting to obey them. I admit this is a completely reversed view, but it interests me more than any other.

[…] In my opinion, the triumph of the avant-garde is so complete that it has liberated what previously had to be seen as the anti-liberating elements in art, or in the process of making art. There are transgressions against the institution of transgression. I think the pictorial has come to occupy this position to a certain extent.

Jeff Wall interviewed by Arielle Pelenc. London: Phaidon, 1996, pp. 16-17.

Jeff Wall, The Giant, 1992