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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Like any Venice Biennale, this year’s is not merely a curator’s egg (good in parts, rotten in others) but a veritable battery farm of them, with more ill and excellent specimens gathered together than one might wish to contemplate, let alone summarize in a thousand words.

The good news is that the signature event — the main exhibition, convincingly curated by Okwui Enwezor, divided between the Padiglione Centrale, in the Giardini, and the Arsenale — is carefully structured, intellectually engaging, aesthetically rewarding and, for so vast an exhibition, unusually coherent. The bad news is that the majority of the national pavilions are pretty lousy, only a handful worth the effort or long queues. Venice is also enlivened, as always, by numerous satellite events, group exhibitions, solo shows, performances — several outstanding, many atrocious, all providing added incentive to survey La Serenissima before the fun ends in November.

Enwezor’s exhibition title, ”All the World’s Futures,” sounds like the sort of waffle cobbled together by a committee and hardly suits a show more about the past than the future. Unless, that is, Enwezor meant “futures” in the financial sense, for his stated intention is to bring a Marxist analysis to bear on the current context. This “return to Marx” might be compared to Lacan’s “return to Freud,” an extension and elaboration of the franchise unrecognizable to purists. Such commitment includes a full reading of Marx’s works, every single word recited in architect David Adjaye’s central performance space, which even features a bearded lookalike dressed as the great man. The paradoxical contrast between this Marxist rhetoric and the billionaire collectors and well-heeled gallerists swarming the opening events was a source of bitter mirth to local anarchist groups who continuously heckled and attacked the proceedings, even launching physical protests against the Giardini and the Guggenheim.

A more engaging anarchistic intervention was the “Sinking of Venice,” performed by veteran Fluxus poet Alain Arias-Misson, who appeared on the Grand Canal in a boat towing the word “VENICE,” the giant letters inevitably sinking to the applause of enthusiastic onlookers. Throughout the main exhibition various soi disant Marxist figures lay out the territory, especially an older generation of radical filmmakers such as Jean-Marie Straub, Chris Marker, Chantal Ackermann, and Harun Farocki, whose works provide rigorous ideological backbone. And the extensive program of events scheduled for the performance arena, involving a dazzling range of thinkers, composers, performers, academics, show just how intelligent and sophisticated Marx’s theories remain, even if it is more about “the enchantment of the physical object” than class warfare.

“The trouble with the internet is that there is not enough Africa in it,” Brian Eno said a decade ago, and much the same might be true about the contemporary art world. Enwezor has rightly pushed a wider African (or at least black) participation, to a perfectly judged degree. While certainly not color-blind, Enwezor has engaged with a wide range of Diaspora artists whose varied practices are far beyond the banal rhetoric of previous “identity politics.” Among all this it is interesting to see how well painting fits the agenda, with key spots given to works by the likes of Ellen Gallagher — set next to the Aboriginal abstraction of Emily Kngwarreye — Wangechi Mutu and Chris Ofili, with the Arsenale culminating in a display of new towering canvases by Georg Baselitz, a man open in his loathing for “the revolution” (including, notoriously, the sexual revolution). Yet there is no sense that these paintings and sculptures (including many works by the late lamented Terry Adkins) are in any way token, obligatory inclusions, but rather embody a new level of sophistication in the art world, exemplified by Lorna Simpson’s latest work, paintings that extend rather then refute her conceptualist origins. In a final room of the Arsenale, Chinese laborers are working throughout the Biennale to craft individual decorated bricks, for sale for 20€ each, this being a work by Rirkrit Tiravanija, while next to them a paid actor reads out his book, gainfully employed by conceptual artist Dora Garcia. Adjacent to all this local art school students (half of them, revealingly, Asian) have signed up to create assembly-line monochrome paintings under the aegis of Maria Eichorn — some of which are actually quite beautiful. Global factory cultural production, minimum wage performance art thus providing a perfect Marxist dialectic for today’s pan-international economy.

Despite the seamless integration of painting into Enwezor’s theoretical argument, it was still shocking to see the Romanian Pavilion entirely given over to paintings and a few drawings, by just one artist, Adrian Ghenie, this most straightfoward display entirely radical today but standard practice for most of the Biennale’s history. There is no need to even mention the worst pavilions (France! Austria!) so let’s rather celebrate the few successes: the weird dark world of Fiona Hall in the Australian, the obsessive microlabor of Marco Maggi chez Uruguay, a sort of digital Gustave Doré by IC-98 at Finland’s Aalto-designed pavilion and that heady poetic hex cast by Joan Jonas on behalf of the USA. The Armenian Pavilion, titled “Armenity” was a rightful winner of the official prize, not just because this year marks the centenary of the Armenian genocide, but because the whole experience of visiting the island of San Lazzaro with its 18th-century Armenian monastery is a delight in itself. The beauty of the cloisters, buildings and historic collections are discretely, judiciously accompanied a range of current Armenian artists, and best of all there are no crowds. But in the end perhaps one outstandingly bad pavilion does warrant mention, the Italian, which is just so kitsch, as every year, that it may well be time that they had their Arsenale space taken away from them just as they previously lost their main pavilion in the Giardini.

Within the curator’s egg principle it is hardly paradoxical that one of the best group shows and the single worst solo exhibition should both come thanks to François Pinault. At the French collector’s Dogana there is the exemplary “Slip of the Tongue,” curated by Dahn Voh, so rich in contrasts and curios, whether medieval illuminated manuscripts next to Hubert Duprat gold maggots, or actual Bellini wooden panels and a wonderful assembly of all Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud. But over at Palazzo Grassi there is a stinkingly bad Martial Raysse show (even the poster is truly nasty), which undoes all the good of his recent Pompidou retrospective. Other painters are to the fore around town, not least a lovely floor of Twombly at Ca’Pesaro, (don’t miss the marvelous rare outing novocento magic realist Cagnaccio di san Pietro on the floor below, by the way) and an impeccably tight small show of recent work by Peter Doig at the low key Palazzetto Tito.

The issue of winners and losers, and whether one is allowed to make such judgments in the art world these days, is central to Biennale practice: after all, they give out Golden Lions, so national pavilions are in principle battling one another. The show that most perfectly sums up such cultural competition is the long overdue retrospective of Charles Pollock at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, which grants as much visual delight as it does larger existential doubt. Here is the question: is it better to die at 44, a bald alcoholic, having enjoying five years of fame and then future immortality, or to live to 85 with a full head of magnificent hair making very nice abstractions, no money, and no reputation? It was through his older brother Charles that Jackson studied with Thomas Hart Benton, moved to New York, persisted in trying to become an artist. He owed Charles everything but wiped him clean off the map. All art students should be obliged not just to go and study the latest Biennale but also to visit the Charles Pollock exhibition and ponder its real meaning, to ask themselves exactly what they want in becoming an artist.

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Inspired by Marx’s Communist Manifesto, and bringing in elements from Russian Constructivism as well as Modernism, Ohad Meromi ignites a passion much needed in today’s commercialized art scene. In his current solo show at Nathalie Karg Gallery on Great Jones street, Meromi presents works in mediums such as sculpture, installation, and video, creating a space oriented towards participation and gathering.

When entering, the gallery’s raw space seems quasi-empty. In the center of the room a 75-inch totem titled Grave Digger #23 (Primitive B, 2014) stands solitary. The totem is a gray primitivist female figure made of cast aluminum and mixed media, sitting on top of a plinth made of carved wood. The figure is in a squatting position; its eyes, brows, mouth, and nose are painted black, as well as its nipples and genitalia.

Meromi’s series of figurative “Grave Digger” sculptures was initially presented in 2010 at Gallery Diet in Miami, and was inspired by Andrei Platonov’s novel The Foundation Pit (finalized in 1930 but published only in 1987 due to censorship). The iconic novel traces a group of workers who are digging a foundation for an ideal building that epitomizes a picture-perfect future. In the novel, the pit becomes a political commentary towards the brutalities of Stalin’s collectivization of Russian agriculture, and is eventually revealed to be a grave for the diggers themselves. According to Marx and Lenin, the term “grave diggers” refers to a rising revolutionary class that will overthrow the ruling bourgeois order. The symbolic sculpture stands silent and erect and serves as guidance for the possible revolution of the proletariat, or as we will soon recognize — of the cultural producers in contemporary capitalist society.

Further in the gallery is Half Modular Dome (2010) made of wood, industrial paint, and concrete. The structure appears as a behind-the-scenes theatre construction. On its backside (facing the viewer entering the gallery) are yellow stickers of numbers and letters as well as assembly and re-assembly instructions that trace the dome’s previous functions. When built a few years ago, the dome was designed to transform Meromi’s studio into a rehearsal space, and to adapt to different venues to create a performative stage. Here, the dome divides the gallery space in two: a primitivist presence on one side and an improvised amphitheatre on the other. The centerpiece of the show, a 20-minute-long single-channel video called Worker! Smoker! Actor! (2010-2013), is situated behind the dome. The video combines stop-motion animation with recorded participatory performances from workshops held at Meromi’s 2010 solo show, “Rehearsal Sculpture,” at NYC’s Art in General. Meromi meticulously created all the elements in the film: the props, the architectural models of the protagonist’s hangouts, and even the complementing electronic video-game music and graphic intertitles. The story is pretty simple: a factory worker (performed by Jessica Lin Cox) wakes up in the morning, goes to the factory to produce American Spirit cigarettes, goes to the supermarket to get groceries, and then goes home to rest. The cycle of “production” is completed when the worker finds out she has lung cancer and is sent to a healing facility.

The notion of “work” and “rest” preoccupies Meromi and is addressed in a theatrical manner in this video in the form of the worker’s cigarette breaks. The cigarettes themselves then play various roles: they are the central element in the “working” process, they are the “resting” tools, and they are the toxic hazard that leads the worker to the resting resort. Meromi also uses text in the film in the form of placards based on Vsevolod Meyerhold’s actors-training method, called “Biomechanics.” These short texts, rewritten by Meromi to suit his narrative, raise questions regarding the existing division between labor and rest, and whether this division can be transformed. In one of the placards Meromi writes: “Every worker tries to expend as few hours as possible on labour and as many as possible on rest.”

House of Culture (2010), a 15-by-14-inch architectural model made of glass, concrete, and mixed media, is situated in the front gallery’s windowsill. The miniature building’s colorful stained-glass windows bring transcendent light into the gallery and a glow of utopian idealism into the exhibition space. In the last scene of the featured video, the worker gazes at the House of Culture from afar, and Meromi writes: “The very craft of the actor in an industrial society will be regarded as a means of production,” bringing the show’s vision to a final conclusion.

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