Liam Gillick
THE STATE ITSELF BECOMES A SUPER COMMUNE
24.11.2006 – 20.01.2006
THE STATE ITSELF BECOMES A SUPER COMMUNE relates to Liam Gillick’s recent research into developments within European social democracies in regard to production rather than consumption. Working initially from Brazilian research into Swedish car production methodologies he has been developing a series of scenarios that do not create a sequence of images, but propose a mise-en-scene where the implications of alienated capital may be reconsidered.
Experimental production methods, developed in the 1970s in Sweden, have become part of the standard rhetoric of Western industry. These developments have been challenged, however, by the increasing globalisation of production and outsourcing away from the site of consumption. In the continually deferred “book” CONSTRUCCIÓN DE UNO Gillick creates a scenario where workers in a northern European car factory return to their former work place and discuss the potential of eco-political exchange systems and alternatives production models.
The exhibition includes a large text that announces the completion of a project of reconsideration combined with physical structures that might be considered as the first step in finding new uses for the factory environment. As with much of Gillick’s recent work, earlier investigations into non-place, the ambient effects of applied modernism, historical attempts to encourage communal working environments while avoiding classical models of Communism and the gap between the processes of modernisation versus the critical potential of modernism are combined in a series of works that work in parallel to the potential of a critical text.
In the rear space of the gallery a video programme is presented that looks back at previous attempts by the artist to create both a corrupted over-view of activity and create a complex narrative base for an implicated yet non-didactic critical position. “Faction” was made for the Royal Academy in Copenhagen in 1995 and features a deliberate mish-mash of commercial and artistic video production from the early 1990s. Explanatory links for the programme were shot at Poster Studio in London where the main protagonists of that short lived space, including Merlin Carpenter and Nils Norman, created a setting for Gillick which explicitly attempted to both disrupt the smooth flow of the text and offer a direct critique of any attempt to package and clarify contemporary practice.
For further information and images please contact the gallery.