Liam Gillick’s brightly colored geometric constructions prompt the viewer to participate in a Utopian experiment in manufacturing. Both sculptural and architectural, his works incorporate effects of light on transparent, colored Plexiglas panes. Aluminum ribs of the structures have impeccable corners and...
[more]Liam Gillick’s brightly colored geometric constructions prompt the viewer to participate in a Utopian experiment in manufacturing. Both sculptural and architectural, his works incorporate effects of light on transparent, colored Plexiglas panes. Aluminum ribs of the structures have impeccable corners and lines, and are powder coated in bright candy colors like purple and aquamarine, yellow and orange. Their formal characteristics are reminiscent of works by Donald Judd, but Gillick’s project has conceptual roots in an imagined future economic and social scenario.
Several of his projects revolve around the idea of a post-capitalist society, one which has the tools and factories to produce cars, furniture, commercial products mass marketed to a global audience. These works tell stories from an imagined future where workers and designers reinvent objects out of the defunct material and processes of industrial capitalism. Gillick points to these works as ‘prototypes’ that embody a sense of indecision and uselessness, while also embodying great creativity and production value. Gillick limns a potential rehabilitation of industry and production by reclaiming space, structure, and material into what he calls a “post-productive situation”. The grids and structures of his sculptural works manifest units of intellectual and physical effort as measured increments, panes of Plexiglas and lengths of aluminum. “[The workers’] days get consumed attempting to evaluate new models of production towards an economy of equivalence, where one unit of input, whether intellectual or physical can produce one unit of output.” He is concerned with reframing the economy of production through an idea of the built environment that reappropriates industrial or intellectual tools and processes.
Gillick's works owe much to modernist notions of architectural transparency advanced by Mies Van der Rohe, and subsequently the ways technology redefined architecture in the twentieth century. Gillick’s use of colored glass follows in the footsteps of Le Corbusier, who employed brightly colored glass (as well as text) in buildings such as Notre Dame Du Haut in France, in which irregular recesses hold panes of red, blue and yellow glass. As with Le Corbusier, Gillick is motivated by a desire to challenge the way architecture has traditionally shaped human experience or served as a carrier of ideology. Gillick’s immaculately balanced structures and his use of color also recall the ideals of the De Stijl movement, which promoted Utopian ideals of harmony and order through the balance of form line and color. In the presence of Gillick’s constructions, we are asked to consider not only the Utopian framework for their creation, but the conditions of their production.
Further reading:
Birnbaum, Daniel et al. Liam Gillick: The Wood Way. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2002.
Gillick, Liam. Five or Six. New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2000.
Haberer, Lilian; Gillick, Liam. Factoriesinthesnow. Zürich: JRP/Ringier; New York: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 2007.
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