Talk

Liam Gillick’s work has been shown worldwide in venues ranging from international exhibitions to airports, and his engagement with modernity and the structures of post-industrial social organization has led him to work in a number of different media, including video, film, sculpture and text. Often addressing failed utopias and idealistic political organization, Gillick’s work tends to function parallel to the world around it, at once disrupting and channeling elements of power, exchange and routine. Through the interaction between text, space and the objects of daily life, his work invites viewers to engage the built structures of spaces like the bar, the home and the workplace. Gillick is also a prolific writer, and his installations frequently operate in relationship to his rigorous text work; for example, the research project Construcción de Uno documents the history of a closed factory to which the original workers return and begin developing new modes of economic production. This theoretical text inspired a number of installations, including The View Constructed by the Factory After it Stopped Producing Cars (2005), a metal landscape made from the same type of steel used in car factories, and Four Levels of Exchange (2005), a series of four text structures installed at Frankfurt Airport.

The Public Art Fund Talks is an ongoing series of discussions and presentations by some of today’s most influential artists, critics and curators. The program is organized by the Public Art Fund in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.