I came along to the Liam Gillick show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in order to consider a feature on the artist as ‘builder’, which I haven’t yet fully worked out how to tackle. I’ve waited for the yoga class to end (the wall-to-wall crash mats make entry into the space all but impossible). I’ve waited for the public talk to finish (a lecturer stood without moving in the middle of the installation with a group of about 40 adults clustered around her). And now, finally, the ratio of space to people is as spare as it needs to be for my own purpose.
The show consists of a series of horizontal
platforms (held in position by cables from the ceiling) and vertical screens
(for the most part free-standing); in both cases these are Plexiglas panels
set in aluminium frames. In the work there is no sign of the artist’s hand –
these units are industrially perfect. Also present in the gallery are wooden
boards stretching towards the ceiling, which play a supportive role for the
platforms and screens. There are gaps between the wooden boards, and, now
that the gallery is quiet, I find my eye passing in and out of the gaps and
the transparent panels, blocked here and there by an opaque panel or a blond
wooden plank, but always able to wriggle free and on. The individual pieces
are from two related series: The What If? Scenario and Discussion Island/Big
Conference Centre. The standard interpretation of this stuff is that it both
provides examples of, and facilitates discussion about, modernist and
postmodernist aesthetics: corporate and communal architecture of the present
can be simultaneously (if obliquely) experienced and critiqued. Curators of
major public spaces can’t get enough of it – Gillick has shown at Tate
Britain, the Hayward, the Arnolfini in Bristol, Tate again, and now at the
Whitechapel, as well as regularly over the years at commercial galleries in
London, first Robert Prime and now Corvi-Mora.
Yet this is supposed to be the country in which Gillick’s work is not
appreciated. In the past this artist’s work has left me cold. However, I
know already that today it is hitting the spot. Whether because it’s here in
consistent bulk, or because something has just clicked from ‘closed’ to
‘open’ in my mind, I’m not sure. I hate to admit it, but it looks as if
those seminar-attending curators were right all along!
It’s the platforms I’m gravitating towards: standing under one with my back
to the wooden structure, looking up and through the semi-transparent panels
which run across my line of vision. The colours could be described as a
bath-oil pink and a shampoo yellow, and maybe that accounts for why I’m
suddenly feeling so physically comfortable standing here under Resolution
Platform (2001). And I think: when an artist builds walls and ceilings,
constructs or refers to rooms rather than objects within rooms, then they
differ from the walls and the ceilings an architect might construct because
they don’t have to function in the same way.
Everyday function – year after year – is what tends to keep architects from being particularly abstract, or imaginative, or minimal, or off-the-wall. Whereas, by and large, an artist’s work has to function only for the month-long duration of a show. And the kind of function is altogether different. Sure, the ‘building’ has to stand up, have physical presence. But an artist’s construction has to really go to work in the recesses of the visitor’s mind for the hour-long visit to the gallery.
I go walkabout within the installation, and try not to focus exclusively on the Gillick. Perhaps the most effective built works in the last couple of years have been the installations by Mike Nelson. From London’s Matt’s Gallery, the ICA and the Turner Prize show at the Tate to the Tramway in Glasgow and the last Venice Biennale, he put huge effort into creating real-seeming rooms and corridors within the gallery, completely transforming the visitor’s experience of the spaces. Indeed, that was the main impression the visitor received: ‘Jesus, where am I? If I go through this door will I end up back in the first room again? No, this is not the place I came in through. I’m lost...’ In each of his installations, Nelson demonstrated a commit-ment to hands-on work, a wide knowledge of used building materials, and terms of reference that took in the Muslim world, communism, and a distinctly sordid version of capitalism. Everything was dark, and complicated, and unique, and mysterious... and yet somehow I’m getting the same vibes from Gillick’s light-filled, minimal-seeming, and standardised component installation. Maybe the thing in common is depth of vision.
I realise I’m standing under Discussion Island Dialogue Platform (1997), which is comprised of two layers of grey opaque panels. It’s hard to say whether they make it easier or more difficult to think of the installation Ross Sinclair produced for the South London Gallery
(1 June – 8 July 2001), but I do that anyway. Fortress Real Life (Peckham) consisted of a lot of low-ceilinged rooms made entirely of identical cardboard boxes. Each room contained previous work by Sinclair on a theme (e.g. the individual against organised religion). But after wandering through the interconnected rooms the visitor came across a watchtower which could be climbed and which allowed a view down on the cardboard roofs and out towards the true walls of the gallery. A number of political points were being made through installation-cum-architecture. Above all, standing on the watchtower you suddenly felt distant from the ‘real life’ concerns of the people in the humble cardboard – resolutely modernist – rooms below: you cared about the people in a warm but abstract way.
Where is this thought taking me? Well, it’s taken me to stand under the Post Discussion Limitation Platform (1998), which is bigger than the other platforms, where the coloured panels – all transparent rather than opaque in this case – run parallel to my line of sight rather than across it. And it takes me to the thought ‘Can Art Save Architecture?’‚ a question posed at Camden Arts Centre for a round-table discussion involving Gavin Wade and Kathrin Böhm, both builders of sorts. Well, of course art can stop its fellow profession from taking itself too seriously, as can be demonstrated by reference to The Sally Barker Gallery. This high-tech space, based on the artist’s signature and sited on a mountain, exists only as a scale model, though proposals for shows in a life-sized version have been put forward by fellow artists at Barker’s instigation. Art and architecture at its most fanciful: Simon Faithfull’s proposal involves drilling a hole in the gallery roof, so that a special rod could be installed that would stretch all the way from the gallery floor to beyond the earth’s atmosphere. Attached to the upper end of the rod would be the artist’s car (a Ford Fiesta, or something like that), allowing electricity to pass through in order to light the car’s headlights. Perhaps the idea being that visitors from space would see the car – with maybe even the window wipers going full tilt – and be reassured there was intelligent life on our planet... Blast! It seems I have temporarily dodged the art/architecture question and gone straight to: ‘Can Art Save Humanity?’
I take a break by going into the café which has been designed and refurbished by Gillick. I buy a calming transparent water rather than risk a black coffee, and I sit down. On one wall is a text that the artist has used before in his work, a joke which ends with the sentence: ‘THAT’S NOT STANLEY KUBRICK, THAT’S GOD – HE JUST THINKS HE’S STANLEY KUBRICK.’ The letters aren’t that easy to see, and you could be forgiven for reading ‘Gillick’ for ‘Kubrick’ every time it crops up. Perhaps the most obvious design feature in the café is the orange flowers floating in glass dishes, singly for the most part, but with a big bowl containing lots of the lotus-types in the middle of the long central table. It has me thinking again of The Sally Barker Gallery and Bob and Roberta Smith’s proposal for a 50-foot carrot which may have necessitated knocking down one of the gallery walls. But then, if art really is going to save architecture, such drastic action is sometimes going to be necessary, as several of Richard Wilson’s works have demonstrated (not least when he bulldozed and smashed the walls and the floor of the Serpentine Gallery in 1996).
Atelier van Lieshout has also designed a
communal eating place, in his case within a lime green shipping container
(featuring a giant frying pan which gave me a really sociable feeling when I
came across it in Bournville). And I have just seen a whole show of his
thought- and smile-provoking architectural work at Camden Arts Centre.
I am also a fan of Artlab’s creations. Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine
Richards have made several cinemas; on one occasion, I sat on a sawn-off log
and watched a home-made road movie, with the option of getting up and
walking around the cinema which fitted snugly inside the Mobile Home
gallery. Similarly, their Portable Suitcase Library, stocked with the help
of Paolo Plotegher, is designed to be a ‘walk-in space’ located within a
public library, thus giving the everyday library-going public practical
access to artists’ books and pamphlets – intriguing access to an imaginative
realm.
Back out in the gallery again, I stand under Discussion Island Moderation Platform (1997), a set up of similarly sized and regularly spaced opaque black panels. In front of me is a cube made up of the metal struts and transparent coloured panels that are all around the gallery. It’s called Filtration (2001) and I see it as a ‘think tank’ in contrast to the opaque panelled cube alongside, which is much denser, much thicker, and much less inspiring. (I can imagine Homer Simpson living within it, so maybe it is inspired in its own way.) But anyway, back to the think tank because one of the see-through orange panels emphasises the closing line of the largest wall text. The gist of the text is that businessmen in their homes are surrounded by bric-a-brac and random objects that totally contradict the functional perfection of their work environment, making them appear like tigers in a cage. ("DOH!" roars Homer from the thick tank.) The wall text triumphantly concludes: ‘WE CLAIM IN THE NAME OF THE STEAMSHIP OF THE AEROPLANE AND OF THE MOTOR CAR THE RIGHT TO HEALTH LOGIC DARING HARMONY PERFECTION.’
Still standing under the black panelled
anodised-aluminium platform, I’m thinking again of The Sally Barker Gallery
and the first Ford in space. And simultaneously – looking through the
Lucozade-luminous Plexiglas – I’m considering all the qualities I’d like to
be able to take for granted from the contemporary built environment, the
exact same qualities this feature must have – or at least aspire to – before
I can possibly submit it to contemporary.
Liam Gillick: The Wood Way was at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London,
3 May – 23 June 2002.
www.whitechapel.org
Gillick has been shortlisted for the 2002 Turner Prize. His work will be on
view at Tate Britain, 30 October 2002 – 6 January 2003.
www.tate.org.uk
The Sally Barker Gallery is a semi-permanent installation at 291 Gallery,
London. The next show at the SBG will open at 291 Gallery in late
September 2002.
www.291gallery.com
To become a member of the SBG, email
sally@sallybarker.org
or call + 44 (0) 7876 070956.
Artlab’s Portable Suitcase Library will open at Whitechapel Library, London,
in September 2002.
Please call + 44 (0) 20 8983 4586 for exact dates.
Duncan McLaren’s The Strangled Cry of the Writer-in-Residence was recently
published by Grizedale Books
Liam Gillick, Filtration, 2001, anodised aluminium, Plexiglas,
240 x 250 x 240 cm. Courtesy: Galerie Hauser & Wirth & Presenhuber