LIAM GILLICK
17 January – 8 March 2003
Installation Views
Press Release
In Parallel to:
Hills and Trays…
Schipper & Krome
January 18 to March 15, 2003
Galerie Max Hetzler, in conjunction with Schipper & Krome Gallery, is pleased to present new work by British artist Liam Gillick. The two exhibitions, titled "Hills and Trays…and Punctuated Everydays" are intended to work 'in parallel'. That is to say, while the installations share many characteristics, they operate on different levels and should be viewed as related but separate strands of an idea. Although Gillick has worked with parallel structures before, this is the first time the artist has done so in dual gallery settings within the same city.
This new way of working forces the viewer to consider Gillick's numerous structures and wall diagrams separately and invites comparison between the objects on view in each gallery. In fact, both shows are related to the book Literally No Place, written by Gillick in 2002. Just as the characters in the book experience the world according to the mores of their environment, so the objects in the exhibition address the varied ideologies that form the built world. In short, the text sets the scene for the artist's installations. It is important to note, however, that Gillick's installations are not narrative; the text and the objects are interconnected, but not directly related. Likewise, although the work on view was created with the intended viewing spaces in mind, the work is not site-specific.
For further information on the exhibition, please consult the artist's statement on this new work.
Liam Gillick was born in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, in 1964, and studied at Goldsmiths College in London between 1984 and 1987. Since the early 90s he has exhibited internationally in both group and solo shows, including a major survey of recent work at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London (2002), and a commissioned installation at the Tate Britain. Upcoming exhibitions include a project for The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Gillick's contribution to No Ghost Just a Shell: The AnnLee Project is currently on view at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and was recently purchased by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Gillick has also acted as a designer, critic, author and curator, roles that enable him to reach a broad public without art world values interfering in the perception of the work.
For more information, please contact the gallery at 030.2404.5630, or visit our website at www.maxhetzler.com.
Open Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.
Text by Liam Gillick
"Hills and Trays…." "…and Punctuated Everydays"
The book Literally No Place (Book Works, London, 2002) articulates a complex way through certain parallel moral and ethical structures as they stand in relation to the post-utopian meanderings of our current situation. Various tools are used in order to achieve this. At the heart of the text is a structural and recurring reference to Walden 2 (1948) by B.F. Skinner, who presented a flawed attempt to provide an image of a communal model of living without acknowledging the potential of communism or broad political strategy. A sequence of parallelities are drawn out between Literally No Place and Walden 2 in order to play with the relation between speculation and planning; public and private non-places; and the dominant socio-political middle ground or 'opaque zones' that are the inevitable result of the neo-liberal consensus. Skinner's attempt to visualise a productive communal environment from a rogue individualist perspective prefaced both the hippy communes of the 1960s and the campus style working environments so common in the wounded territory of 'new media' such as Microsoft Corporation.
Literally No Place is a populated book. For example, it introduces a relationship between a young boy and his cousin, one living in an urban environment and the other in a rural environment. Both are brought up under the same broad cultural conditions but have slightly adjusted moral relations imposed upon them by their context. Another character wanders Japan in a drugged attempt to understand managed solutions in a situation of stalled progress. Locations shift from a bar in a border zone to a communal environment where the members go on a circular journey in order to see their situation from a distance.
While it has been necessary to produce parallel structures in relation to public spaces (notably Dedalic Convention and Dedalic Convention (Du und Ich) at the MAK, Wien and Kunstverein Salzburg respectively) I have not previously corrupted the linearity of exhibition structures in relation to private galleries. The inherent parallelity of the spaces articulated in the book Literally No Place lends itself at least to a 'doubling' of scenarios and contingent spaces.
There are some precedents however. In my first solo exhibition in Berlin, I placed two structures side by side in a single gallery. "Erasmus is Late versus The What if Scenario" (Schipper & Krome, Berlin, 1996) placed an unravelling and increasingly didactic structure connected to the book Erasmus is Late (Book Works, London 1995) in relation to a contingent and speculative structure that was the first stage of thinking towards the text Discussion Island/Big Conference Centre (Kunstverein Ludwigsburg/Orchard Gallery Derry, 1998). For the Berlin Biennale in 2000 I split a singular text element between the attic space of Kunstwerk and the information panel in the foyer of the Allianz insurance building on the other side of the city.
"Hill and trays…" "…and Punctuated Everydays" places two event spaces in a shimmering temporal relation to each other. In broad terms the exhibition at Max Hetzler structurally addresses the exterior space of the commune from a diagrammatic and abstracted perspective. The exhibition at Schipper & Krome brings things into an interior thought space that provides an environment to reflect upon some of the implications of the text. On the wall is a fragment of the book Literally No Place that refers to a factory, the only factory in a rural area that attempts to work along Taylorist lines but is prevented by the fact that it never produces the same thing twice.
Hills and flowers provide a backdrop to provisional structures. Pots contain a rolled diagrammatic analysis of how to work on a potential expansion/translation of the book. They are mirrored in form but contain subtly different content in each environment.