Not surprisingly, Gillick has made the declaration that he has a suspicion of transparency as the only correct way to expose "the machinations of the dominant culture." In its place, he applies a kind of blockage to continuous comprehension. The effect is often a mischievous blandness underneath which lies a rich undecidability touched by moments of tenderness for the foibles of human need. There are many routes to follow in his narratives, which are rife with suggestions of flexibility, negotiation, and invention. He speaks of them as "scenarios," schemes that lay out the what-ifs of social and economic order, of what he calls "functional utopias."

Witness his most recent exhibition in New York at the Casey Kaplan gallery, in 2008, with its amusing but ultimately earnest proclamation for a title, "The State Itself Becomes a Super Whatnot." The title was a variation on a theme inscribed on the gallery’s walls, of which other variants served as titles for earlier shows in London and Milan: "The Commune Itself Becomes a Super State" and "The State Itself Becomes a Super Commune." The sculptures were brightly colored in Gillick’s signature manner. They had the pristine formalism of classic Minimalist works by Donald Judd crossed with Sol LeWitt, perhaps, a pastiche of high modern industrial geometries in a more sophisticated version of the palette of LEGO blocks. Their construction was precise. Their visual message was of rational structure, of material clarity. Yet the willful equivocation of these different scenarios for social order provided a riddling contrast to that clarity. To find as a third category a "whatnot" is to offer that ludic open-endedness again: neither hierarchical state nor the egalitarian ethos of the commune, but a shapeless, unidentifiable social entity.

"A lot of my work is derived from how to get around the singularity problem and instead find multiple sources" as starting points for the work, Gillick has said. "I want to find those moments of flicker where ideologies and forms break down into a multiplicity of potentials." That flicker is Gillick’s door that opens onto alternatives in which society’s mechanisms of production and exchange find routes toward compromise that enliven its people and allow them what the social thinker Jürgen Habermas calls "arenas for individual self-realization and spontaneity."

Consider Gillick’s Reciprocal Passage Work (2003), a subtle intervention in a London passageway lined with shops, between two public streets and with gates at either end to be closed and locked if the commercial tenants wish. Gillick often uses colored Perspex or Plexiglas in his work, and here he covered the passage’s overhead lights with it — the slightest inflection can shift the terms of commerce’s rule toward creative individual agency and emancipation. But so slight was his touch that it was much like penciled notes in the margins of a book. It was a barely visible commentary in relation to the weight of the text, and yet its interpretive gravity is like ripples spreading outward from the smallest stone dropped into a pool: invasive, effective, and (however briefly) transformational. The idea that resonates from the work is once again the possibility of a parallel view, a redistribution of small nuances of private energy that tilt in their own ways against unitary power. This is Gillick’s means to create what he called in that significant text "Literally No Place" "a speculative situation, where speculation alone replaces other collective action. Speculation as collectivism."

The theme is common over Gillick’s career, though Reciprocal Passage Work is exceptional for its missing complement of a text. Since his first exhibitions in Europe, the codependency of meanings projected by his interdisciplinary marriage of texts and objects has been a way for him to elicit that sense of what could be called ambi-valence, a multiplicity of meanings. He intends to leave his reader-viewers with a sense of ambiguity that notes what he calls "soft" ideologies, meaning the pervasive and often ambient ways in which the influence of commercial, corporate, and political agendas slips into our lives.