In early 2013, Liam Gillick gave a series of four lectures at Columbia University entitled “Creative Disruption in the Age of Soft Revolutions,” part of the school’s Bampton in America series. These lectures and other writings, released in different publications in the last seven years (including several essays originally published in the online periodical e-flux), constitute a new book by Gillick, called Industry and Intelligence: Contemporary Art Since 1820, recently published by Columbia University Press.

While it goes unsaid, the book’s subject is the revolutionary potential of art, but this takes some unpacking. As he twists his way through the text, loosely bringing readers through a history of contemporaneity, Gillick muses recurrently on myriad topics, from the impact of cultural relativism on art, to what he refers to as “the discursive” but you might know as relational aesthetics, politics and economics, and many other digressions in many different directions. Generally, the book is Gillick’s opinion on what contemporary art is. To uncover more specifics we need to look at whom this book is for and why they might read it.

The book is intended for very serious artists with an intellectual bent. It also is important to be an artist who has made art for a while and spent much of that time considering the point and place of their work in our world. It takes a great deal of specialized knowledge to enjoy, like a car repair manual or theoretical astrobiology seminar; criticizing its limited audience would be like criticizing the astrobiologist for not attempting to communicate with mechanics. Gillick is not addressing a popular audience for his lectures: he was speaking to one of the most elite, exclusive graduate art programs in the world. His fundamental allegiance is to art and artists, and while he might fancy himself a writer, academic, and theorist, he reads best as none of the above.

Gillick starts the book with his attempt to define and frame the art of our time. He examines the trend of “super subjectivity,” art that focuses myopically on the artist who is making the work. This retreat to the self, he asserts, comes from cultural relativism, the prevalent idea that all values and prerogatives are relative, no one better than another, and the effective banishment of hierarchy. Thus, Gillick concludes, artists can only solipsistically focus their art making on themselves, in such a cultural climate, for fear of being wrong or imposing on others. This is one facet of what Gillick would like to start calling “current” art, instead of “contemporary” art. But he chronically refuses to make limpid, by providing any concrete examples, his descriptions of what he calls “current” art. He likely does this because giving examples and defining terms has come to be seen as totalizing and limiting, a tool of the powerful to maintain an advantageous status quo. It turns the book into a gymnastic exercise in obfuscation, and because it sacrifices readability is much like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But if the reader is willing, they might allow that they are the example he is talking about but not naming. This passage might describe, quite accurately, you or a contemporary artist you know:

[Contemporary artists are] marked by a displayed self-knowledge, a degree of social awareness, some tolerance, and a little bit of irony […] The attempt to work is the work itself […] In this case no single work is everything you would want to do […] Hierarchy is dysfunctional and evaded in the contemporary and, therefore, key political questions […] are supplemented by irony and coy relations to notions of quality.

This author found his descriptions (while dated in some ways) uncannily self-applicable, and if you don’t, or find the sentiment dull, you might consider sitting this book out.

The writing can be bad at times, and it seems like some of the lectures were not thoroughly enough translated into the written word. The book is riddled with paragraphs composed solely of subordinate clauses separated by periods, adjectives almost randomly used as nouns, a meandering, luxated argumentative structure, and an absence of metaphor or analogy. Warren Buffett is able to spin enlightening and evocative metaphors about the complexities of finance; the same should be possible for art. (Interestingly, these two disciplines share a similarity: they both have a lot of people who use endless wads of jargon merely to disguise their own lack of intelligence and to disenfranchise the uninitiated. Which is rude–but not entirely the case with Gillick.)

What this means is that to read and enjoy this book, one should have a casual familiarity with the writings and coded language of Marxism and Continental philosophy. An example of code it is very helpful to know: in the chapter “Projection and Parallelism,” he mentions that the labor battles of the “last 150 years saw the victory of speculation over planning” which refers indirectly to conflicts of capitalism and socialism. But, of course, because Gillick is well read and observant he tells us the reason for all this coded academic language: “by 1963 [education] was a locus for struggle […] This coincided with an emerging sense that artists should be part of an educational process through the production of objects that required understanding: art as an extension of advanced reading.” Maybe the book needs a disclaimer: ADVANCED READING REQUIRED.

But one purpose of advanced reading is to attempt to imagine and describe new and completely different modes of thinking, unconstrained by the pernicious rules of our contemporary world. This has to do with his most worthwhile concern: the revolutionary potential of art. Deep down, Gillick’s aim is to empower those who can understand what he is talking about and hope to, if even unknowingly, define the better tomorrow.

Artists often forget that there is a higher burden of proof for one’s speculations elsewhere in the university and routinely wander into the academy saying whatever comes to their mind, without challenge, much as they do in their practice. If in academia there is both “hard” science and “soft” science, most good art is neither, often unable to find conclusive citation outside of itself. But it is an important role for art to play, as a complement to the more rational seeming aspects of the Western world, articulating murkier realms of the humanity. I’m not being pejorative or crass when I say Gillick gets to a descriptive truth of our world by being opaque. While there are many barriers to entry, as his intended audience I found myself having real moments of revelation and identification with the book, Gillick giving form to something I had seen and felt on many occasions but never had the ability to articulate. In his prescient way he says, “The contemporary is always an internal thing expressed only partially in the external.” His writing is much the same: a rich internal thought process only partially expressed externally.

Gillick, Liam. Industry and Intelligence: Contemporary Art Since 1820. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). ISBN-13: 978-0231170208. 208 pages, $35

The post Pedagogy on the Loose: A Book of Lectures by Liam Gillick appeared first on artcritical.

The fall semester is underway, and incoming students can usually use some extra orienting material on how to function, well beyond where the academic advisor’s office is located and what hours the library is open.

Art school, if you work at it, can be way more taxing than maybe most people assume. You end up in the studio with all that youthful stamina, staying out till, like, 4 AM, covered in paint and probably coughing on the charcoal dust wafting in from the freshman drawing classes. Meals can be spotty, but they’re essential to surviving a last-minute productive blitz and the next day’s high-tension crit session.

So here’s a few sustaining snacks to get you through. They’re all low-responsibility, so you can make them easily and quickly without a lot of tools (like a stove or a blender or whatever). That way you can put them together even if you’re stuck in the studio building or live in a dorm or you’re just super busy with, you know, adding to culture. And almost all of these should fit any diet, since they’re meat-, milk- and flour-free, no added fat, low sugar, with few allergens to avoid — all that stuff. Plus they taste good.

The After School Snack
1 large pink apple (Fuji, Macintosh, Pink Lady, etc.)
About 3 Tbsp Nut butter of choice (peanut butter is great, but if you want to get really gourmet about it you can use almond or cashew butter)
1 Tbsp Honey or agave nectar
1/2 tsp lemon juice
Pinch of cinnamon (optional)

Prepare ahead of time or clear a space in the studio so you aren’t making food right next to a wet painting or your laptop. Using (preferably) a Victorinox Swiss army knife, cut the apple into slices, discarding the seeds and core stuff. Toss in lemon juice and cinnamon until evenly coated. Lump the peanut butter on top and then drizzle with honey. Alternatively, you can put the peanut butter in the middle of a bowl or plate and then fan the apple slices around the edge, dipping then into the honey like a chip dip.

Iced Coffee
3/4 cups coarse-ground coffee
4 cups cool water

In a jar cover coffee with cool water. Close and leave in the fridge overnight, at least 12 hours. Strain with a colander. Dilute as desired and pour over ice and add whatever you like with your coffee. It’s going to be rocket-fuel strong, but unlike chilling hot coffee it won’t get bitter and it won’t get so watered down with the ice. And it’s way cheaper than buying it at the local coffee place or cafeteria or whatever, so you’ll have more cash to blow on whatever art students buy… Cocktails I guess.

Chocolate Chia Pudding
1 1/2 cups unsweetened almond milk
1/3 cup chia seeds
1/4 cup cacao or unsweetened cocoa powder
2-5 Tbsp maple syrup
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon (optional)
1/4 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp vanilla extract (optional)

Add all ingredients except sweetener to a mixing bowl and whisk vigorously to combine. Sweeten to taste with maple syrup. Let rest covered in the fridge overnight or at least 3-5 hours (or until it’s achieved a pudding-like consistency). Serve chilled with desired toppings, such as fruit, granola or coconut whipped cream.

Put some goji berries on it, or bananas, or pecans, or, like, raspberry jam or something. Go totally nuts.

Guacamole
1 medium avocado
1 lime
Torn-up cilantro (optional)
Salt to taste

Juice the lime and mash it up with the avocado, with the cilantro if you use it. This should come out a rich cadmium green, with the fluffy texture if cheap oil paint (think Richeson brand). Eat it with chips, obviously, or by the spoonful of you really, really like avocados.

Cold Oats
1/3 cup regular oats
1 cup almond milk, and more if needed
1-2 Tbsp chia seeds
1 ripe banana, peeled and smashed
1/4 tsp pure vanilla extract

Mix ingredients in a bowl and place in fridge overnight. Like the chia pudding you can add all sorts of stuff, like dried mangoes, or blueberries with pecans and maple syrup, or whatever kind of color/flavor combinations your palate digs.

Green Tea Mousse
400gm silken tofu
3 1/2 Tbsp maple syrup
1 1/2 Tbsp coconut oil
1 tsp matcha green tea powder
1 tsp amchoor (dried mango powder, optional)

Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and whip together until smooth. Makes four servings. Put some strawberries or raspberries or roasted nuts on it if you like them. Pine nuts are great.

Fresh Vegetables
Cucumber with salt and pepper
Celery with peanut butter and raisins
Tomatoes with Spike seasoning
Haricot vert, with the tips removed
Carrots, bell peppers, olives and/or kale with hummus

And plus just a lot of nuts and fruit and stuff are always good to keep on hand.

These are freshman-level recipes. More advanced sophomore and junior-level culinary aesthetes can experiment with some actual cooking, baking and even fermentation.

The post Back to School Special: Recipes for Artists and Students appeared first on artcritical.

JESSICA HOLMES: Can you tell me something about the body of work in this show? Is there anything viewers might find surprising? 

BILLY CHILDISH: The paintings have been made over the last six months, so they’re very current. They are of subjects that have presented themselves and that I’ve worked through, or am still working through. People tend to have quite a lot of expectation, based on whether they are familiar with an artist or if they have ideas based on various misinformations that are available. Some people are surprised that I would work with the nudes. I painted nudes a great deal in the 1980s and 1990s and I haven’t painted them for the last five years or so — I think surprises are all down to expectations and knowledge.

I’d say that your paintings are deceptive because at first glance they are very straightforward, but there is great mystery once you really start looking. You frequently paint the natural world.

The natural world is a vibrating mystery of continual becoming and unbecoming. Within my paintings the bits that interest me are the abstracted parts. If I went round these pictures I’d say, “I like that bit.” It’s a love, an expression of my love of nature and an intense relationship with matter — vibrating, distorting matter, which is timeless and unable to be fixed in time.

I was going to ask you, since your work is so personal, how you feel when it’s released into the world, but maybe this is something that allows you to let it go.

My relationship with the art is making the picture and once that’s done, I don’t have much of a relationship afterwards. I’m not necessarily happy with my paintings when they’re finished. People hear my disregard for art and artists and they think I’m very satisfied with what I do. Not necessarily.

Does an idea ever morph into something else? Do you ever think you are going to make a painting and it becomes a poem, for example?

No, I know what I’m doing when I’m doing it. I paint on particular days of the week and I write poems in my notebook. I was in a British art show in the 1990s and they had some poems of mine painted on a wall, which is not something I would do, or which I considered to be art. And I said, “Well, I know what they are. They’re poems written on a wall.” I don’t see breaking down in categories as a freedom, I see it more as nonsense. There is nothing wrong with a poem being a poem. It doesn’t need to become a painting. I like all of my courses separate, so I don’t put my custard in with the roast beef. Not because I don’t like custard or I don’t like roast beef but because I do like custard and I do like roast beef.

Do you prefer painting to the other media?

Yes, it’s my natural ground. I’ve got works existing from when I was four or five, and I painted a great deal starting from when I was 12. I couldn’t really read and write until I was 14 [because of undiagnosed dyslexia], and I wasn’t involved with music until I was 17. Of all the other things, painting is the one where I don’t have those on/off buttons. I paint every Monday and Sunday, so I know what I am meant to be doing when I’m doing it. I had to discipline myself after I was expelled from art school, which fits my nature quite nicely. Going to art school doesn’t suit creative types.

Since you brought up your art school experience, which from what I understand was terrible, what would you say to somebody thinking of going to art school today, when there is so much emphasis placed on receiving an MFA?

When I went to art school, it wasn’t like the pressure now. Art schools these days seem to be there to try and create artists quickly, whereas I think an art school’s job is to give people stuff for their tool kit. I see it as much more craft-based or space-based. You’ve got to have quite a lot of self-will not to be run all over, or have them get rid of your real primal interests and send you on the course to being an Identi-Kit conceptual artist. What you need are the tools to actualize your vision. I’d say it might be better to be wary, ask questions, maybe not be like I was, and rather keep a bit of a low profile. I just fought with them.

What were some of the things you were made to do at St. Martin’s?

I had not been taught the type of obedience that they thought they should receive from someone as lowly as a student. I was required to take history of art and I found the person who taught it dull. You had to say things about canvas, or about art, using “art speak.” I told them I wouldn’t go, and they said I could sleep in that class if I wanted to, but I must attend it. I also refused to paint pictures at the college; I painted at home instead. I told them I didn’t want to become contaminated. I got into a lot trouble for writing what they called obscene poetry. I was talented and charismatic, which caused me more problems than if I hadn’t been. I was a good target.

You’ve stuck remarkably with your vision. How has that been beneficial, and how has it hindered you?

I think it’s in line with my nature, and it’s not an effort. I paint the pictures and, after the event, find out what psychological drive might be in there, which is far more interesting than having a prescriptive one. I just let it happen and then people can work out what fruitcake I am afterwards.

Or not!

Or not! Thank you!

[Laughter]

The thing is, there’s not many great thinkers in art. You have a few people like Picasso who always said smart stuff but you’re not going to get much intellectual stimulation from talking to artists. You can see how popular that opinion will make me! A curator asked me yesterday what I thought art was about, and I came up with a quote, and we wrote it down because I got the giggles. It was, “art is pornography and comfort food for the spiritually inept.” That doesn’t mean that’s true; that was yesterday’s definition!

Right! And what did she say?

She was in stitches!

[Laughter] 

Over the years you’ve used different names and pseudonyms. Do they represent different personalities?

In 1977, when I was 17, I was a punk rocker. I got the moniker Billy Childish from a friend of mine, which I used in bands. I didn’t like using that name in other areas so I always painted — and still paint — under my family name, William Hamper. When I was doing early exhibitions in German cooperatives, they knew I played music as Billy Childish, and it was forced onto me as a painter. Billy Childish has never made any paintings. Well, very rarely. When I was making films, I would use William Loveday. I was trying to compartmentalize so that I couldn’t be accused of trading off Billy Childish, a musician who now paints. It was self-preservation to stop people from categorizing me, but it didn’t work at all. 

I would love to hear you talk about your philosophy of Radical Traditionalism.

With Radical Tradition what I was trying to get across is that tradition, which I really like, is freeing because it is something you don’t have to invent. There’s this literal relationship with a history of painting, which used to be recognized and respected by artists as obvious. 

It’s a connection with antiquity in a way, right?

Yes. Nothing is as dated as the contemporary. Modern people want to lift the ego, but the ego is a block to creativity. Tradition is a way of subjugating the ego and allowing the thing to flow. Great artists, like Van Gogh for instance, wear their hearts on their sleeves. Van Gogh says whom he loves, and you can see whom he loves in his paintings. There’s no desperation for authorship. Really great art has got a timeless quality and it’s not narrow. You look at Van Gogh’s work, it looks contemporary, and it doesn’t look like it’s made in a mechanized age, either. When you are trying to be contemporary or relevant, to show us who we are, it’s like a rupture in time whereas if you give yourself to a tradition you dissolve time. With my music, we used to be pawned off as revivalists in the 1980s for playing guitar music and rock-‘n’-roll. Now people listen and say, “Your music doesn’t sound like any time at all.” That is what you want, for that thing to have a continued, timeless presence.

It’s got a life force.

Yeah. There’s still fight to it.

The post “The natural world is a vibrating mystery”: Billy Childish with Jessica Holmes appeared first on artcritical.