"Three Perspectives and a Short Scenario" is the midcareer survey of New York and London-based artist Liam Gillick. The show takes on the idea of what a mid-career survey is, as its subject. In dealing with institutions Gillick has a propensity for problematizing the relationship between artist and venue. For each stop of the exhibition, he “gifted” half of the space back to the venue. This forced the interactions between artist and curator out into the open. Gillick contributed four elements,  controls, if you will; the rest was the doing of each institution.

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.

Common to each iteration (the Kunsthalle Zürich, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam and the MCA) are the interior architectural elements: gray carpeting and slatted walls, a unit of display cases, also gray, containing Gillick’s publications and design work, a video and two posters that function as a binary self-portrait. The other elements, unique to each venue, make up the “Three Perspectives”.  The “Short Scenario” took the form of a theatrical performance at the Kunstverein München.

Gillick wasn’t always at ease, nor were the curatorial teams, with how each institution realized its part, making for an interesting tension. “’Collaboration’ always implies it’s nice or good, that it doesn’t have an edge. But this shows dynamic conversation, or arguments, more than a typical retrospective does,” said Gillick of the process. The Witte de With commissioned works from younger artists, some of which were unsympathetic, or outwardly opposed to Gillick’s practice. The Kunsthalle Zürich staged recreations of his impermanent and performative works. One artist had her boyfriend sing a text of Gillick’s while playing guitar. This exhibition-making process lays bare the truth of the matter: that the idea of the artist as singular author is becoming more and more of an illusion. It is a risk to have things turn out for better or worse by the artist openly giving up authority, but this move by Gillick is smart, to accept and foreground a situation that isn’t going to go away and to integrate it into the work.

The MCA was originally going to present its holdings of Gillick’s artwork (and does anyway), further short-circuiting the desire to resist a standard retrospective, especially after Zürich’s historicizing of ephemeral moments in his career.  Gillick’s sculptural works in the MCA collection are presented in a separate grouping of galleries, along with works by Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd and Jenny Holzer. All these artists bear more than a passing relationship to Gillick’s work, but given his wider practice and approach it is ironic to see the established museological course of action shutting things down. What is interesting in Gillick’s approach to this project, the mid-career survey, is to attempt a refusal of the traditional institutional model of establishing direct artistic lineage.

Installation view of Liam Gillick: Three perspectives and a short scenario, 2009. Photography © Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Photographer, Nathan Keay

The MCA’s half of the exhibition, rather than integrated within the maze of screens as in Europe, hovers above the whole thing in the form of colorful transparent Plexiglas ceiling panels, a work commissioned by curator Dominic Molon. The effect is tangible, providing a satisfying visual blast of color that offsets the slate grey of the carpeting and the partitions, and vice versa. “It was important it ended in Chicago, in the United States,” said Gillick. “I wanted to confront Modern artworks because of the collection. Exhibitions can test the artist to see where they’re at. I still haven’t gotten the courage to go upstairs yet and confront the Ryman again, though.” Gillick was attracted to each of the cities because they all are “not capital cities, but are places of exchange. They are also places of ‘Applied Modernism’ functioning in corporate and civic models.”

Gillick described seeing a Lawrence Weiner retrospective in the late 1980s and the effect it had on him for planning his own. With Weiner you have “the last painting [he painted]” and then the history. According to Gillick, with his work, “the further you go back, the less there is. You get dispersion.” The screens and carpet are a “pre-art aesthetic, if I don’t have an origin myth,” the way Weiner does. “It is the anchor of the show, going back to a 1981 aesthetic, it’s actually more mature and severe than newer stuff. It is a sincere tribute to the pretentious aesthetic of male, seventeen year-old suburban kids.”

The anxiety of a suburban background has formed a basis for his ongoing artistic position. Gillick’s youth left him with a perpetual sense of alienation and inauthenticity, a sensation that is palpably evoked when walking through the corral-like screens in the exhibition.

Within Gillick’s practice there has always been a tension between meaning (immaterial) and object (material). His extensive writing neither is directly linked to his sculptural output nor is it at odds with it. Rather than explain, the texts complicate any attempts to easily situate his production; at the same time they open up the possibilities of meaning.

Installation view of Liam Gillick: Three perspectives and a short scenario, 2009. Photography © Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Photographer, Nathan Keay

The palimpsest for the exhibition is the video consisting of a synthesized drumbeat that fills the exhibition hall with its hollowness and images of Gillick’s past work. The pictures cycle beneath a grid while text slowly appears:

“As the former factory was dismantled, a new production took its place [...] What felt like hard work in the former factory would look like almost nothing to someone used to the dynamic of capitalism. The level of work taking place was almost impossible to sense.”

--Erik Wenzel

(Images courtesy of the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago)