His particular fascination is with the invisible middle — the place where most of humanity lives; the realm of largely unexceptional life, with its quiet, small pleasures, burbling below the frequencies of cognitive dissonance, even if its corporate homogeneity has the creeping pallor of beige. The invisible middle has a pathos, too, of the life passed over, of never coming into focus really, though this existential vagueness offers the promise of improvisation as well, of finding ways now and then to slip out of the frame, off the grid, into an emancipatory moment of self-determination and self-organizing collaboration. He speaks frequently of recognizing the key elements of difference and collectivity in contemporary life. Of course, the risk of creating representations of this invisible middle in texts and installations is that the work may seem too much like its subject, too chilly or undefined. The fluent ease with which Gillick shifts between voices in his texts, between levels of rhetoric and tone, and the abstraction of his sculptures, with their invocations of earlier formalist art and the content of postwar American abstraction which is now conventionally implicated in the exercise of imperialist power, only make this art more slippery. That is the challenge of getting what Gillick’s work is about. But his opacity, his strategy of difficulty, is also his point.

Gillick’s prose employs a curious abstractness that lies like a veil over its particulars of commentary and storytelling. At the beginning of one of his most ambitious and crucial texts, the 2000 "Literally No Place," which debuted with a show of the same name at the French exhibition space Air de Paris, he begins in the perfect pitch of picaresque fiction with what is in essence a long speculation on the idea of the commune. "They turned in the ravine and climbed to the top of a bank, just to see the place again." But within paragraphs the language shifts to more critical observations, describing the commune of his characters as a place "where their sense of ethics and conscience can be collectivized, where they can be both pulled together and gently teased apart." And quickly Gillick’s prose shifts again to a staccato stream of something that lies purposefully and uneasily between criticspeak, sociology, national security analysis, and a bland corporatism: "It is a loose connection that permits exposure of shifts in strategy toward appropriation of better conscience-based and ethically driven ideas. Not countercultures but the appropriation of an ethical language with a collective and fractured sense of progress."

The effect is unnerving, and unnerving in the specific tradition of high modernism’s creed of fragmented consciousness that Gillick is heir to. The fragmentation of modernism was a representation of a world shattered by cataclysm and overwhelmed by the advent of technological speed and the unassimilable density of global information. Difficulty and opacity are the hallmarks of a central strain of modernism, particularly literary modernism, from James Joyce to Gertrude Stein to Paul Celan and beyond, and Gillick is not finally a visual artist but a literary one. While he is often described (and describes himself) as an artist, critic, writer, and designer, all his work is in service to its stylized narrative arc. The discursive in both definitions of the word as reasoned argument and wandering digression are crucial to his narrative strategy.

The density of layers in Gillick’s practice is only increased by a third narrative element he often adds: words as sculpture. In the tradition of his friend Lawrence Weiner, he considers words as they’re applied to surfaces — gallery walls or facades — as sculpture in itself. And then there are numerous word pieces, such as Complete Signage and Four Levels of Exchange, both from 2005, that are three-dimensional, to be seen in the round. In both cases, these hybrid, sculptural words fuse the terms of the two other media, resembling things in the world and things in the mind; words as objects that have a physical presence, a relation to their functional use as everyday signage, and the abstract presence of language, streaming and free, an essence of the intellect.