The Singularity Problem

© Francois le Diascorn/Rapho/Eyedea

Liam Gillick, 2009

Sol LeWitt Donald Judd Philippe Parreno Lawrence Weiner Liam Gillick Rirkrit Tiravanija Carsten Holler Live from Italy, It’s Artissima

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There is a breathtaking scene at the beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s anarchist film from 1967, Weekend. The camera tracks a seemingly endless car pile-up. Wrecks are abandoned. Children and adults pass the time in games of catch, others shout in frustration, and as the scene ends the corpses of car-crash victims are laid out on the side of the road without the slightest interest, let alone sympathy and sadness. The film’s heroes are en route to murder one of their parents and take their money, and the film reaches its climax in an orgy of half-farcical cannibalism, which rhymes in Godard’s mind with capitalism. The profligacy and soul-emptying greed of the modern state is worthy of one thing only: flames and ruin.

A little more than 40 years later, no film is more savagely to the point as the juggernaut of global capitalism tumbles in free fall, imploding as it goes. Yet capitalism’s epic meltdown brings new possibilities, and Liam Gillick is one of the most visible artists in the world today whose art is fixed on the subjects of capitalism and other modern forms of social organization, along with social instability and the possibilities that instability offers. He is no less insistent on interrogating political society than Godard, but he moves in the opposite direction: not toward polemical condemnation and closure, but toward polemical open-endedness.

This month Gillick, who is 45, mounts the world stage in a somewhat bewildering, ambiguous, and altogether typical fashion. A Englishman of Celtic lineage living in New York, he is representing Germany in its Fascist-era pavilion designed by Albert Speer on the grounds of the 53rd Venice Biennale — though he isn’t German nor has he ever lived for any length of time in Germany. Nicholas Schaffhausen, the curator of the pavilion and a previous collaborator with Gillick, chose him. And in doing so he embraces a philosophical and political position utterly in keeping with Gillick’s mind and practice: subversive, dead serious, and entirely playful in the ambition to liquefy the rigid matter of social and political structures. Here is one of the artist’s core beliefs: Authority of all kinds and social bureaucracies in particular, whether of the state, the community, or the corporation, are meant to be disassembled and reassembled and disassembled over and over again. Gillick is an absolutist of antiabsolutism.

Working primarily with language (critical essays, fictions, wall texts) and minimalist sculptural installations, Gillick has had more than 80 solo exhibitions in Europe and North America since 1989 and has published scores of texts — a broad sampling of which were collected in his Proxemics: Selected Writings 1988-2006. He is long associated with the group of artists gathered by the French curator Nicholas Bourriaud in his 1998 book Relational Aesthetics, which attempts to lasso artists as diverse as Philippe Parreno, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Jorge Pardo, Carsten Höller, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Bourriaud summarizes their practices as essentially an art that draws people into improvisational dynamics that engage them collectively, blurring the lines between an object-based art and a communal expression that is in itself the work of art. You would think that an art of communal expression might foster a sense of transparency — a value largely esteemed in social relationships.

But Gillick’s notion of the communal and of social relations in general goes another way. For him improvisational dynamics are symbolic of a greater sense of instability and oscillation, a certain fuzziness blooming on the boundary. He assumes the role of what the literary theorist Wayne Booth has called the "unreliable narrator," a trickster whose imagination favors unlocking rules and rearranging borders — witness his presence in the halls of Germany. A social theorist in a fabulist’s coat, or perhaps the other way around, he applies this idea of creative unreliability, of destabilization, to speculations on the way that societies behave in relation to economic, social, and political pressures — and the ways they might behave were the rules and the circumstances canted to one angle or another.