Rewind: Liam Gillick
The Power Plant, Toronto
Liam Gillick's installation communes, bars and greenrooms began before it got started, in the entrance to The Power Plant's main exhibition gallery, where the floor was swirled with a spangle of sparkling black glitter mixed with vodka. The party is over; the party has just begun. In the centre of the main gallery a series of two-metre-high walls formed a maze-like architecture. Three supergraphic motifs—stripes (communes), squares (bars) and mazes (greenrooms)—were cleanly inscribed on the cubicle walls in varying combinations of light grey, medium grey and black. The low-hung lighting grid formed a ready-made impersonation of the numerous ceiling-hung aluminum and Plexiglas "platforms" that circulate throughout Gillick's various projects.
The cubicle walls were just high enough not to be overseeable but sufficiently low enough to be overhearable. They aped the partitions found in public spaces (washroom stalls, bank-machine kiosks, bar booths, etc.) that are designed to meet the minimum requirements of public privacy—be heard but not seen. Throughout the installation Gillick worked words culled from his book Literally No Place onto the walls in black vinyl lettering. Sentences and phrases were repeated and repeatedly clipped in stops and starts. The words ran on to one another with no space between them as: "withalltheattendantimplicationofthatcontinualtransferwithalltheattenda." If performed out loud, the words would be audible over the other walls. However, a cacophony of partially overheard conversation could only be imagined in the silent gallery.
The installation brings to mind a remarkable advertisement for the AT&T-sponsored "High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture" (a 1990 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art) claiming that the exhibition "eavesdrops on the conversation between private imagination and public communication." Gossip remains irrepressible in popular culture precisely because it persists within and around the routines of public imagination and private communication. Gillick's installation is an exercise in just this kind of eavesdropping and the attendant gossip that follows.
The installation collapses a corporate pastoralism where the halls of power beget the corridors of diffidence. The rural corporate campus has its origins in the worker communities of factory towns and far-flung resource-processing plants. The dislocation of workers from the world of modern urban distractions into self-made corporate communes serves not only to manage employee lifestyles for maximum productivity but also to control the potential for profit-damaging gossip to make its way to the competition. The functional ideology of the corporate utopia is "work as lifestyle." Every day is casual Friday. According to Gillick, artists generally mimic corporate and bureaucratic set-ups "through techniques of impersonation and intervention" rather than collapsing or destroying them. At the same time, to borrow from Hans Haacke, "...management elites have attempted to reestablish the aura of the artist's personality and artistic genius as a function of entrepreneurship" and thus enact their own techniques of impersonation and intervention.
Gillick invokes Joseph Pine and James Gilmore's invented "experience economy," wherein the customer (audience) fantastically becomes product (performer). For the philosopher Raymond Williams, "...any adequate description of experience must be more than simple transmission; it must also include reception and response." Gillick's communes, bars and greenrooms are positioned at the interstitial spaces between the ritualized commodification of experiences and the free exchange of ideas. These spaces are filled with gossip.
Spring 2004
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