Industry and Intelligence: Contemporary Art Since 1820

by Liam Gillick

The history of modern art is often told through aesthetic breakthroughs that sync well with cultural and political change. From Courbet to Picasso, from Malevich to Warhol, it is accepted that art tracks the disruptions of industrialization, fascism, revolution, and war. Yet filtering the history of modern art only through catastrophic events cannot account for the subtle developments that lead to the profound confusion at the heart of contemporary art.

In Industry and Intelligence , the artist Liam Gillick writes a nuanced genealogy to help us appreciate contemporary art's engagement with history even when it seems apathetic or blind to current events. Taking a broad view of artistic creation from 1820 to today, Gillick follows the response of artists to incremental developments in science, politics, and technology. The great innovations and dislocations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have their place in this timeline, but their traces are alternately amplified and diminished as Gillick moves through artistic reactions to liberalism, mass manufacturing, psychology, nuclear physics, automobiles, and a host of other advances. He intimately ties the origins of contemporary art to the social and technological adjustments of modern life, which artists struggled to incorporate truthfully into their works.

208 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2016

Reviews

[Hayden J Amaro · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some interesting ideas in this book(!), but the book has a few problems.

Gillick tries to use words in a precise, technical way, like they are used in academic philosophy but fails to define his use of such terms.

This results in key theses being unknowable unless you're in his classroom at Columbia to ask "Wait, Liam - what do you mean by your use of 'Supernormal Dysfunctional Infinite?'"

Similarly, Gillick will often state some grand, vaguely defined thesis, but fail to defend/argue/explain his position in a compelling way. It feels like an appeal to authority, or maybe when you talk like that in his social circles everyone just takes a drag of their cigarette and nods along.

Here's an example from the text in an essay consisting one of two mystifying paragraphs;

"You find that a lot of structures within the art world veer toward the idea that the default state will be an endless and infinite projection. The suggestion here, then, is that ASAP is more positive and problematic than infinite projection. If you defer continually, nothing happens, nothing changes. Everything will be fine, but you will flounder within a state of permanent projection. The difference between projection and displacement is political. One model accepts things the way they appear to be; the other moves things around to find a better arrangement. Displacement always differs from projection. Projection is always supernegative or superpositive, in the sense that it removes the subject from immediate action. It is the speculative tool of choice. So we should be more interested in reclaiming the speculative as a critical problem and using displacement as a tool toward taking it apart. The speculative is a concrete version of projection. Dialectical positions have to be affected by pleasure and psychosis. There are necessarily some human qualities in play here that are not pure. Look at people's behavior in an educational environment, and you can see that they often become psychotic, or they become pleasure seekers - because of their desire to continue an endless dialectical relationship with their own projection. After that, it is all just industry and intelligence."

Basically my problem is that while I think I can reconstruct something of what the author meant to say above, I don't think this type of paragraph should have left the editors desk unchecked for clarity. There are wildly different semantic and factual interpretations of what is said above, which is not an ideal quality for a lecture - maybe this would be better released as a series of Koans.

[J Murnaghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Occasional flashes of brilliance amidst an excess of art-world jargon. Kept intentionally general, but it truly would have benefited from more specific examples (aside from the mass of plates). His insights are often highly original, but they appear diluted here by his prose style, which features a great deal of reiteration and subtle variation.

There are a few recent Gillick lectures & interviews on YouTube in which he touches on the most compelling aspects of the same topics more convincingly, to me. The ICA conversation with JJ Charlesworth comes to mind... That said, it's great to see Gillick think through, at length, the historical conditions that have enabled a practice such as his to exist.