Liam Gillick: Art and Functional Utopias

By Ernesto Menéndez-Conde

(originally published by ArtPulse Magazine March/May 2010, pp. 26-29)

What is social about art is its intrinsic movement against society
                                       Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1)


This commune is a place in which the design of the trays is better than in the outside world.
                                       Liam Gillick, Literally No Place (2)

During the last fifteen years, the British artist Liam Gillick has created parallels between his personal shows and his own writings. Many of his exhibitions have run simultaneously with the publishing of a book. Frequently, the books are included in the installations, along with flat-color panels, text sculptures, architectural structures, videos, and designs. For “Three Perspectives and a Short Scenario” -the retrospective currently showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) of Chicago- there was the release of an anthology of essays titled Meaning Liam Gillick. Seventeen scholars attempted to define Gillick’s works, or offer hints for understanding his creations from a wide variety of topics. Meaning Liam Gillick somehow works as the catalog of the show. Even though this time Gillick’s texts were not included in the anthology, the parallelism of installations and writings remains the personal seal for his artistic events (the show at the MCA of Chicago was also accompanied by a curatorial project of the institution’s collection, also created by Gillick). Last year, while the retrospective was held in some European institutions (3), there was the release of All Books, a collection of the scripts and novels he has published since 1994.

For the artist himself, it is a mistake to over-determine this simultaneity (Gillick, 2006 167). Nevertheless, this parallelism seems to be a self-conscious artistic practice (Gillick 160-161) and it is at the core of his artistic production. The books are neither merely supplementary materials, nor incursions in a quite different field of creation. Gillick’s exhibitions, on the other hand, cannot be reduced just to his installations. Even if the artworks or books can be enjoyed as autonomous pieces, isolating Gillick’s artistic productions or underestimating the structure of the whole looks like a rather deceivable approach. The structure of his works seems to be precisely this parallelism between the writings and the visual images. He provokes the search for dialogue among the installations, novels, scripts, and essays he writes.

Liam Gillick, Three perspectives and a short scenario, 2008, installation at Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam. Courtesy of the artist. Photos by Bob Goedewaagen.

This peculiar practice turns Gillick into a hermetic artist since it raises the need to find connections among his whole set of creative productions. The viewer/reader is challenged to produce meanings through attempts to establish a coherent system from a variety of sources and means of expression. This task, which even seems difficult to avoid, is one of the most rewarding intellectual adventures in Gillick’s body of works. However, it looks as if the interpretation must remain open, since there is always room for conflictive points of views in the quest for unity or even parallelism among his heterogeneous fields of production. As Julian Stallabrass has asserted, “Gillick is an artist that offers possibilities rather than holds a position.(4)” Gillick’s works, seen in their simultaneity, are always metaphorical, suggestive, and even enigmatic.
However, it could be argued that this hermetic character is very eloquent in its own right, at least if interpreted the way Theodor Adorno understood the social resonance of art. As the author of the Aesthetic Theory noted:

“Hermetic works bring more criticism to bear on the existing than those that, in the interest of intelligible social criticism, devote themselves to conciliatory forms.” (145)

These words, written more than forty years ago, are still crucial in order to understand the possibilities of art as a mean of resistance in contemporary society. Actually they are particularly relevant today, in a Post Utopian World, when not only, as Adorno states, the direct treatment of social conflicts in artwork is the weakest, and most superfluous link between art and society (229), but also at a moment when tolerance has become genuinely repressive (Jameson 110), and the opposition to Neo-Liberalism seems to lead nowhere. The critique of Contemporary Capitalism lacks a social project, which somehow could be envisaged as a paradigm, or could provide a direction to the unconformity. Since the fall of Socialism in Eastern Europe, all progressive thinking risks being dismissed as “Communism,” or as reminiscent of a repressive, authoritarian Modernism.

In Gillick’s works, the criticism of Neo-Liberalism also implies a critique and a redefinition of Utopian thinking. In his novel, Literally No Place, he talks about grasping the “idea of a commune, a functional rationalistic commune that can really work and be productive” (Gillick, 2009 204). He also insists on being “communal, but not communistic” (Gillick, 2009 206). Some of his artistic experiments could lead to these types of experiences. Instead of Utopias, Gillick proposes developing the notion of “functional utopia,” which would be displayed throughout time, and would be intrinsic to the structure of the exhibition. A “functional utopia” is a participative one. It must create a “better place, and actually have a better time, rather than just providing soothing images of experimental architecture and a mish-mash of interactive structure” (Gillick, 2006 282). Instead of projections into the future, functional utopias are an alternative present. Art institutions themselves, while the exhibitions last, could be spaces for implementing these “functional utopias.” The collective show A Viable space: Der Umbau Raum (Klünterhous, Sttugart, 1996) -for which Gillick wrote a text and also participated as an artist- could provide an example of these attempts. In A Viable space, the artists were using the gallery as a site for research, hanging out, viewing and production (Gillick, 2006 103).

Liam Gillick, Rescinded Production, 2008. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Gift of Mary and Earle Ludgin by exchange. Photo courtesy of Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York.

Functional utopias are in many ways related to Modernism, from Neo-plasticism to Bauhaus (some members of the Bauhaus movement, like Josef Albers, Kurt Schmith, and Marcel Breuer could be seen as precursors of Gillick’s installations), but the aims are quite different. Unlike Modernist conceptions, art is not pointing towards integration into life; it intends to maintain a critical distance from the social system.

By appealing to the hermetic, or by producing what the Spanish scholar Peio Aguirre has called “elusive social forms,(5)” Gillick takes advantage of artistic practices in order to create a social critique that also contains the conditions for exploring alternative means of social exchange. He places art in opposition to society, while, at the same time, conceiving it as a form of social consciousness.

Notes

1. Cited by Peter Bürguer in Theory of the Avant-Garde, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2002: 10.

2. In All Books, London: Book Works, 2009: 205.

3.The title “Three Perspective and a Short Scenario” has to do with the institutions in which the exhibition was shown. It is an itinerant project which was presented at the Kunsthalle Zürich (January 25 to March 30, 2008), Witte de With in Rotterdam (January 19 to March 24, 2008), Kunstverein Munich (June to August 2008), and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (October 10, 2009 - January 10, 2010).

4. Cited by Chantal Mouffle, in Meaning Liam Gillick: 101.

5. See Peio Aguirre, “Social Elusive Forms,” in Meaning Liam Gillick: 1-27.

Works Cited

Adorno, W. Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Gillick, Liam. Proxemics. Zurich-Dijon: JRP/Ringier & les Presses du Rėel, 2006.

___________ All Books, London: Book Works, 2009.

Altermodern?

By Ernesto Menéndez-Conde

Altermodern? was originally published by ArtPulse Magazine October/November 2009, Vol. 2 No 3, pp. 26-29

Altermodern is the new term the French curator Nicolas Bourriaud proposed for understanding our present. The recent Tate Triennial (London, February-April, 2009) was devoted to consecrating, or at least putting this concept into circulation. In the introduction to the catalogue Nicolas Bourriaud wrote:

“The terms ‘MODERN,’ ‘POSTMODERN,’ ‘ALTERMODERN’ do not define styles (save as ways of thinking), but here represent tools allowing us to attribute times-scales to cultural eras.” (16)

Therefore, our contemporary culture would be, according to Bourriaud, that of the altermodern. The term attempts to “delimit the void after the Postmodern.” (12) The words for the catalogue, and even the whole show, are a sort of avant-garde manifesto, in which the definition of altermodern is displayed, demonstrated through the artworks and other supplementary texts and discussions. Altermodern would be a sort of constellation, in which art “needs to reinvent itself in a planetary scale.”(12)

At the risk of simplifying Bourriaud’s description of the present a little bit, his viewpoints could be summarized as follow: 1) In our cultural era, art is heterotopic. It goes beyond nationalities, immersed in global dialogues and creolization. contemporary art is essentially a hybrid. It is related to the experiences of migration, displacement, exile, and traveling to the point that “trajectories become forms.” 2) As a result, there is a fragmentation of the work of art, whose unity consists in being a network, a collective creation, or a process that generates forms. 3) Contemporary art assumes heterochrony. That means, it wanders through history, unable to understand time – as Modernity did – as a lineal progression, or conceive of it as an exhaustion, in which history and metanarratives come to an end (as it was perceived from the postmodern perspective). In the altermodern, there are multiple experiences of time (Bourriaud mentions anachronism, delay, anticipation, and the immediate) coexisting in a sort of web, articulating meanings with the purpose of revealing the present. 4) Contemporary art is a displacement of signs, in which materials are interconnected, developing a chain of references that are dialoguing with each other in order to produce a narrative, and in which storytelling plays a main role. 5) Altermodern is marked by exodus, by deterritorialization, and the nomadic. Staying away from traditions, the new art turns to a strategic universalism, creating a language which goes beyond nationalisms, or regionalisms.

The Tate Triennial illustrated all these points through the display of artworks and debates devoted to the postcolonial world, exodus, and travel. The series of pictures shown by Rachel Harrison are a good example of these altermodern practices. In Voyage of the Beagle, Harrison worked in a series of portraits that starts and ends with images of menhirs. The pictures are suggesting the idea of a circular journey (Kelsey, 2009). It is also a planetary voyage, a trajectory through signs, and history – including allusions to the future, as depicted by science fiction – since the portraits are references to cultural icons taken from all over the world, from mass-media images to avant-garde sculpture, from classic statues to African masks. The title Voyage of the Beagle was taken from the memoirs of Charles Darwin’s expeditions to the coasts and islands of South America. The title proposes an analogy between today’s global world (which the artist traveled through the images) and archipelagos. That fits Bourriaud’s intentions perfectly. In fact, he also uses the archipelago as a metaphor for the present:

“Here we are back with the image of the archipelago: instead of aiming at a kind of summation, altermodernism sees itself as a constellation of ideas linked by the emerging and ultimately irresistible will to create a form of modernism for the twenty-first century.”(12)
However, Voyage of the Beagle could be seen as well as an example of the postmodern aesthetic. The travel through space, signs, and history is related to postmodern strategies of parody, pastiche, and transvestism. In one of Harrison’s pictures, what seems to be a Japanese mask evokes Elvis Presley’s face; in another one, Gertrude Stein is portrayed in the manner of Buddha representations. It is hard to delimit heterotopy and heterochrony from postmodern artistic appropriation. All the references are aiming to produce a carnivalesque effect. As in carnivals, the idea of the mask, zoomorphism, wigs, disguises, corny crowns, and kitsch figurines can be found everywhere in Voyage of the Beagle. The two levels of reading enunciated by Charles Jencks – the eclecticism, and the use of kitsch with artistic intentions – which typify the postmodern aesthetic, are quite notorious in Harrison’s pictures.

Rather than evidence of an altermodern stage, Voyage of the Beagle could suggest that the theoretical hypothesis launched by the Tate Triennial lacks further development. It can be argued that, as Bourriaud says, neither postmodern nor altermodern are styles, so the same artwork features could be interpreted in one way or the other. However, after reading the catalogue, the difference between what Bourriaud sees as a “time scale of a cultural era” and the postmodern remains unclear, and it even seems to be supported by aspects that were already noticed by many theoreticians of the seventies and eighties.

The concept of art as heterotopia, for instance, was already circulating by the late eighties. In his book Hybrid Cultures (1989), Néstor García Canclini noticed that Latin American modernity was not only about national borders, ethnicities, and class distinctions. Latin American modernity was also an experience in which the sociocultural frontiers were erased, mixed, and interwoven, producing what Canclini called hybrid cultures. Postmodernism was not just a nostalgic complaint about the death of almost everything, but it was also a moment of travel and displacement. In his essay “Dall’utopia all’eterotopia” (1989) Gianni Vattimo used the word heterotopia in order to describe a universal and communitarian culture.1


When Bourriaud talks about the generalization of the hypertext (one sign directs us to a second, then a third, creating a chain of mutually interconnected forms), he seems to describe what was one of the main topics of postmodernism, which was strongly associated with intertextuality and the use of old signs with a new logic (Foster, 1984).

Postmodernim is over. Postmodernism is dead. Since 1989, if not earlier, some scholars and art critics have been arguing about the need for going beyond the term, not to mention the ones who, from the very beginning, remained skeptical about the word. There is no doubt that the debate about postmodernism was already fading away during the early nineties. Still, attempts to define this concept not only produced a significant amount of seminal texts about the emergence of a new sensibility and a new system of cultural production, but also, in a broader sense, they succeeded in creating a distinction between a previous past (modernism), and a new cultural moment (postmodernism). As Fredric Jameson has observed, from aesthetics to economics, from social relations to science, fashion and ideology, postmodernism has affected every single aspect of society (1999). Is this postmodernism, understood as a cultural dominant, actually over? Can we talk about a qualitatively different cultural stage? If so – and this is already arguable even though it seems globalization is generating a new set of complexities – how can we define this cultural present?

Globalization is an unprecedented phenomenon, and Bourriaud is trying to explore how it has transformed cultural production. This was the main – provocative and speculative – challenge of the show at the Tate Triennial. However, in my opinion, as a theoretical hypothesis, the description of the new term fails to establish a differentiation from the postmodern.

What if, by now, the death of postmodernism is, paradoxically, one of the many death certificates issued by the postmodern? Néstor García Canclini is cautious about the idea of labeling the new cultural moment with just a single word. Perhaps the new cultural developments cannot be subsumed in a system yet, at least not without falling back into postmodernism’s webs. In the end, we are not that far from postmodernism, and perhaps the new cultural era is still about to come, showing new symptoms, or new signs, but without being born yet, still germinating in its mother’s womb.

Note

1. Author refers to: Vattimo, Gianni. “Dall’utopia all’eterotopia.” Trans. into Spanish. Desiderio Navarro. Criterios 30 [Havana] Jul-Dec, 1991: 121.

Works Cited

Bourriaud, Nicolas. “Altermodern.” Altermodern, Tate Triennal. London: Tate Publishing, 2009.

Kelsey, John. “Rachel Harrison.” Altermodern, Tate Triennial London: Tate Publishing, 2009: 114.

Foster, Hal. “Re:Post.” Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation. Ed. Brian Wallis. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1999.

García Canclini, Néstor. “La globalización: ¿Productora de Culturas Híbridas?” .

Ernesto Menéndez-Conde is finishing a PhD in Romance Languages at Duke University. He has published in magazines in Havana, Spain and New York. He has also collaborated with Marlborough Gallery and Sotheby’s in New York.