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

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&Model
Crossing Lines
January 22 to February 22, 2014

Henry Moore Institute
Dennis Oppenheim: Thought Collision Factories
November 21 to February 16, 2014

The cultural center of the city of Leeds can be found in a pair of museums located on the Headrow, a prominent avenue adjacent to the majestic Victorian City Hall: the Leeds Art Gallery and the Henry Moore Institute. Around the corner is &Model, a rough-and-ready raw space gallery started by a group of art professors from the Leeds Metropolitan University, including the collaborative team Nathaniel Mellors and Chris Bloor, and James Chinneck and Derek Horton. Liam Gillick has in the past expressed his pet theory that Yorkshire has been singled out in the UK to produce the nation’s most notable visual artists: Damien Hirst, David Hockney and Henry Moore are all from the Leeds-Bradford region. Gillick’s theory is that each of these artists has a plain-talk approach to art that allows them to be more accessible to a British public that has always been a bit cagey about contemporary art. Despite Gillick’s assertion, the three venues above present a combination of conceptually challenging exhibitions, or cast shows involving traditional genres that don’t really play to a public merely comfortable with the status quo.

Nocturne at the Leeds Art Gallery (through April 2014) is much more than its simple premise suggests. A direct statement of an exhibition, it presents the work of John Atkinson Grimshaw, George Shaw, Jack Yeats, George Sauter and Walter Greaves. Set in a single room, the canvasses form a round-table discussion on the hazy boundary between night and day—the idolization of “verdurous glooms.” The conversation lies mostly between Grimshaw, the Leeds based Victorian painter who lends a gothic sensibility to his renderings of what were contemporary scenes, and George Shaw, a 2011 Turner Prize nominee whose images of desolate suburban ruins have a similar lyrical melancholy, sans the Victorian saccharine historicism. Tree Shadows on the Park Wall, Roundhay Park, Leeds (1872) is reminiscent of René Magritte’s series The Empire of Light (1950-54), in its surreal combination of brightly articulated shadows on a park path, against a twilit sky. Grimshaw uses the conceit of the Nocturne to play capriciously with light sources in his claustrophobic canvas. Meanwhile, Shaw presents a return to nature in his work The End of Time (2008-9). The nemesis of the nocturne, artificial light, has been rendered null and void with the demolition of a small suburban home, whose foundations now sit in the semi-darkness that was ubiquitous before Edison.

Curators Patrick Morissey and Clive Hanz Hancock presented a more polemical framework in the exhibition Crossing Lines at &Model. The curators have declared a general renewed interest in “the non-objective” in the 21st century, the exhibit feature sixteen British painters who work in this mode of abstraction. Artists such as Andy Wicks, Giulia Ricci, Frixos Papantoniou, Alex Dipple and Marion Piper take a multifaceted approach to image and object making, exploring pattern, line, edge and texture. The show is quite encyclopedic in its explorations of form, but most of the works resonate harmoniously; Ricci’s delicate, and ethereal honeycomb patterns provide a soft response to Papantoniou’s incisively colored sleek hard edge compositions. Add to this the injection of another fifteen artists in the form of a show reel of digital video and sound work in Parallel Lines that complements the visual mode of representation with extended forms encompassing extra sensorial interaction. Parallel Lines features the work of Anthony Braxton, Rebecca Hart, Jamshed Miah, Laura Eglington and Ad Reinhardt’s ironic manifestos, The Twelve Technical Rules (or How to achieve the Twelve Things to Avoid).

Two machines designed to embody idea production inhabit the galleries of the Henry Moore Institute. An exhibition of the American conceptual sculptor, Dennis Oppenheim, titled Thought Collision Factories presented the artist’s Rube Goldberg-like contraptions. Utilizing flares, fireworks and a cotton candy machine, these pieces are fascinating, even delightful to look at, but at the same time it is difficult to share/comprehend Oppenheim’s Cold War enthusiasm for archaic aluminum slides, gears, gaskets and wheels when every woman, man and child has access to all human knowledge in a pair of glasses or a wristwatch and can at the very least set up a basic operating platform on any computer. His interest in fireworks and flare-based outdoor installations is a different matter. The documentation of his various pyrotechnic projects, large scale ephemeral incendiary displays featuring pithy phrases such as “Go Further With Fiction” (1974) or “Mind Twist” (1975)—meant to be viewed from afar and integrate text into the landscape, exemplify the exhibition’s main goal of presenting Oppenheim as an artist whose practice inhabited and served as a nexus between sculpture, conceptual art and language. The exhibition is wonderfully thorough—sketches, maps, photographs and measured presentation drawings of the mechanical pieces and related works line the walls. The videos Machine-Gun Fire (1974) and Echo (1973) and the sound Piece Ratta-callity (1974) provide a simpler and more poignant representation of the artist’s process and his contribution to contemporary discourse than the oddly dated dinosaurs in the main rooms.

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Gillick animates the space in his recent show at Case Kaplan Gallery with colorful aluminum benches he calls “Discussion Bench Platforms” and with sixteen unique, inkjet prints which juxtapose traces of a verbal narrative with early woodcut imagery. A video in the back room, Everything Good Goes, shows the artist working on a 3D rendering of a building, which is understood to be the factory from the film Tout va Bien (Jean-Luc Godard, 1972); the soundtrack is a phone conversation between the artist and the Fly collective, elaborating on the challenges of representing Gillick’s process of building the 3D computer model of the factory. This is information one can only learn from the press release. Gillick’s show is cerebrally engaging and visually interesting, but the visual and cerebral components are inherently disjointed, never coming together to form a layered experience.

The Discussion Bench Platforms are reminiscent of Gillick’s red benches in the show last year at Parsons, Democracy in the Age of Branding, curated by Carin Kuoni. In that multidisciplinary show, Gillick’s benches were meaningful  and integral as they fostered discussions about surrounding works. The very concept of having benches in a gallery space where discussions and interactions could take place was significant. The benches were circular, creating a small, utopian space where “democracy” in a large sense of the word was represented and furthered.  Discussion Bench Platforms are not activated in the same manner. In the comparatively limited, sterile space of Casey Kaplan gallery (Parsons’ gallery has a window opening to 13th street, which was designed to create a more open, inviting environment ) the rectangular benches face the walls of the gallery. Thus, the benches function more as a place to take a break and view the drawings, rather than become platforms of discussion.

The graphic works are by far the most striking element in the show. With imagery appropriated from German renaissance woodcuts and ironically juxtaposed with contemporary dialog between a barkeeper and a customer, these establish a striking contrast to the aluminum benches, emphasizing the constructed nature of the situation that Gillick sets up in the gallery space. The tension between the form, in a printed, poster format, combined with words that are dissociated from the images, engages the viewer aesthetically and conceptually. The narrative is derived from Gillick’s play, A Volvo Bar and each image/text functions on its own, pointing to Gillick’s constructed world, in which he creates incongruities using time and space. The viewer, drawn into the work, can then produce a variety of meanings from this simple yet poignant body of prints, realizing the show’s premise of triggering thought and discussion.

The video, projected on to a wall in a connected section of the gallery is quite unwelcoming. The idea of becoming an accomplice to an artist, through seeing a quasi-document of the workings and makings of a thought, has potential, but the extremely dense recorded phone- conversation soundtrack frustrates engagement. The disparity between the sound and the visual components of the video works against the content that could be more accessible to the viewer. While the tension in the visual language of the drawings is poignant yet elegantly subtle, the video is incoherent and esoteric, preventing the viewer from interacting with and interpreting the work.

Gillick’s show of three such different bodies of work fails to achieve the kind of organized chaos that could trigger the viewers to discuss vehemently  and is impermeable through the very cerebral experience that it tries to engender. Sometimes, simpler is better.

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