The Stumbling Block, 1991. (You should see it larger; click on the picture.) Jeff Wall:
In The Stumbling Block, I thought I could imagine a further extrapolation of society in which therapy has evolved to a new, maybe higher stage than it has up to now. In my fantasy, The Stumbling Block helps people change. He is there so that ambivalent people can express their ambivalence by interrupting themselves in their habitual activities. He is an employee of the city, as you can tell from the badges on his uniform. Maybe there are many Stumbling Blocks deployed on the streets of the city, wherever surveys have shown the need for one. He is passive, gentle and indifferent: that was my image of the perfect “bureaucrat of therapy”. He does not give lessons or make demands; he is simply available for anyone who somehow feels the need to demonstrate—either to themselves or to the public at large—the fact that they are not sure they want to go where they seem to be headed. The interruption is a curative, maybe cathartic gesture, the beginning, the inauguration of change, healing, improvement, resolution, wholeness or wellness. It’s my version of New Age; it’s homeopathic. The ills of bureaucratic society are cured by the installation of a new bureaucracy, one which recognizes itself as the problem, the obstacle. I think there’s a sort of comedy here. It’s not really black comedy, though; there’s still a little black in it. It’s a sort of “green comedy” maybe—dark green.Oct 1, 2010
