Liam Gillick

Liam Gillick

The exhibition What if is compiled by Moderna Museet’s supervisor Maria Lind but is “filtered” by the British artist Liam Gillick. His particular role in the exhibition work can best be explained with his interest for the moments before ideas, visions and structures have taken shape and been presented by society as absolute values. One keyword in his art is “the middleground – a sphere where art positions itself in relation to social, political and economic frameworks and that among other things is expressed through architecture and design.

Liam Gillick is preoccupied with how our society is constituted and how its ideology is presented through architecture, design, news journalism, the political agenda and other channels for value systems. His work takes different shapes but the interest in social scenarios is constantly present irrespective of if it is a book he is publishing or an installation he is producing. It concerns how social conditions and values are the results of a long row of choices that just as well could be different – and that consequently would create a completely different society.

Liam Gillick is in other words interested in the phenomenon that how we imagine our future also changes the future, and how we imagine our history also changes our history. Therefore the small shifts of meaning are important in his work – subtle alterations of conditions and categories in our constructed existence that suddenly demand a re-interpretation of the surrounding world.

In the work that preceded the exhibition What if Liam Gillick had the function of a kind of filter that changes the normal exhibition procedure. It is a task that is difficult to define but that among other things means that the relationship between the commissioner, the museum and the participating artists slightly change through Liam Gillick’s participation and influence on the work.

In What If Liam Gillick also participates with the works Big Conference Center Limitation Screen (1998) and Big Negotiation Screen (1998). Screens are a spatial element that also stands for a kind of ambiguity of meaning and function. In the field of architecture, he explains, the screen is the object that lacks fundamental meaning in a building – screens are temporary, non-carrying and moveable. In a public environment like in the room where art is exhibited screens can instead function as markers to make us think of something else and both emphasise and conceal certain parts of the art that is exhibited. Screens balance in that way on the verge of several identities – as surface for contemplation, a simple background material, a designed object or a metaphor for something completely different.

Liam Gillick means that architects, designers and artists have many common fields of interest but – yet again – that the cultural and social expectations on their work mark the difference. What if shows how contemporary art’s relation to architecture and design can function as a starting point for discussion on existence and society. Liam Gillick points out that the exhibition has room for both scepticism and enthusiasm towards social utopias – with their successes and failures – but hardly irony. It is rather about that contemporary art contribute with meaningful and useful parts that is put together according to new expectations and generates new questions.