In my view, Liam Gillick is a realist artist. Thus, the subject matter of the work can be found in a precise location, at the invisible centre of his discourse: the end of utopia, the entropy of the imaginary, and the attempt to chart the real. But what? In view of the consideration that history, structures, and ideology form the three pillars of Gillick’s aesthetic, then one might conclude that the imaginary appears in the form of a residue or spark arising from the clash between the ideological, formal, and historical materials that mark it out. The structures, plans, images, narratives, and labelling which constitute his work are not converging lines, but, on the contrary, lines which play with their very parallelism in order to depict a landscape from which there is always something missing. The work you see in the gallery or in specific applied situations is functioning in parallel, both to itself, other similar works and to the texts I use.” 1 Parallel: another keyword. “The writing and the retinal work”, as Liam Gillick explains, “all deal with different aspects related to issues of compromise, strategy, negociation and renovation. However, as in the poems of Stéphane Mallarmé or Blaise Cendrars, and in some of Jean-Luc Godard’s films or Samuel Beckett’s plays, his protagonists congregate on empty stages or in fragmentary frameworks, thereby effecting a permanent toing and froing between the text and his topological structures that serve as supports, stages, or as recipients – a context in which the questions emerge of who determines the organisation of human society and how is this done. Gillick’s oeuvre is by no means limited to the purely ‘conceptual’, but proves to be a narrative reference work scattered with stage directions. With the aid of a formal vocabulary predicated upon minimalism and conceptual art, Gillick exposes the problem of the existential conditions for the globalised individual at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – thereby referring with this project to comparable studies that arose in modern painting almost a century before. In order then to derive that very sense of reality he wants to describe: in this case, something essentially real, not far removed from Jacques Lacan’s definition, that is to say, a space that cannot be reduced to mere symbolisation and thereby be apprehended solely via a topology. And yet isn’t this also the case for Titian or Sandro Botticelli when one tries to understand the work and not just look at it? And isn’t this exactly the same contract, for example, that Marcel Broodthaers’ work proposes to the viewer?Ī better way to access Liam Gillick’s multidimensional universe would be to examine his concept of realism within a broad historical spectrum, starting with Gustave Courbet. For an oeuvre considered to be ‘conceptual’, austere rigorous, or even sparse, Liam Gillick’s work is certainly densely populated – both by conceptual personages as well as narratives, dialogues, biographies, and landscapes.Ĭonceptual? Such a hasty judgement can undoubtedly be traced back to the fact that texts play an important role here and underpin the forms on show, rather like the libretto for an opera. First published in One long walk… Two short piers… Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, Snoeck Verlag.įirst of all, the personnel: the ticket clerk at the railway station who still refers to you as a ‘customer’ instead of a ‘passenger’ the employees of a large corporation and then the members of its think-tank subcontractors self-governing workers who decide to switch production in the factory activists, who can’t think of anything better to do than to play the tuba for immigrant workers the firms Ikea, Volvo, and Sony materials, such as aluminium or glitter finally, the cofounder of Sony himself, Masaru Ibuka Charles Darwin’s libertarian brother, Erasmus the American politician Robert McNamara Robert Buttimore, etc.
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