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  • In Three Parts
  • Matthew Ritchie (bio)
Liam Gillick, Part 3, Basilico Fine Arts, New York

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Figure 1.

Part 3. Installation, 1995. Photos: Courtesy Basilico Fine Arts, New York.


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Figure 2.

Part 3. Installation, 1995. Photos: Courtesy Basilico Fine Arts, New York.

Consider the following elements: a small, empty, plywood booth, brilliantly lit from above by incandescent bulbs. Two nylon wall hangings: one, the “super-string theory” is electric blue and neatly razored into ribbons; the other, the “wormhole theory,” is lime green and carefully punctuated with circular holes. Two sets of tiny photographs: shadowy installations and cheerful logos. A foot high stack of yellow paper, purportedly Liam Gillick’s collected writings, tied with twine. A low, plywood table, whose corners are each differently shaped. Two books, respectively titled Erasmus Is Late and Ibuka!, The Musical stand in the center of the table with some excerpted pages from Ibuka! under glass.

The various elements seem provisional, disparate, allied only by a certain charmingly casual formalism. We have become accustomed to work that relies on the ingenious presentation of absence to prick the ascetic conscience of a greedy, guilty leisure class. But Gillick’s work does not deploy absence as a passive, negative force; he manipulates it as an active phenomenon, a dark ether allowing the participant (and it is participants he seeks, not spectators) to use his work as a springboard for a long, slow dive into the deep water of time, motive, and consequence. Like the missing matter that makes up most of the universe it is this series of withholdings that define the entire trajectory of his project, most notably the central and defining absence of Gillick’s alter ego, Erasmus Darwin, older brother of the more famous Charles and the dilatory hero of Erasmus Is Late.

Gillick is one of a generation of young British artists belatedly being discovered in this country. He already enjoys a somewhat cerebral reputation in Europe as a man of parts: artist, writer, curator, theorist, and contributor to numerous artistic collaborations. What makes Gillick’s work especially intriguing in this context are his differences from his contemporaries, such as Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas, rather than his similarities. Although, like many of them, he shares a diffident relationship to the idea of the artist as “maker,” he has not strategically deployed this to justify inactivity, grotesquerie, or incompetence. [End Page 68] Instead, Gillick uses a mismatched cast of historical individuals, political analyses, and forms of presentation to investigate certain relationships between the artist or “free thinker” and “society” in the largest possible sense of the word. Erasmus Is Late is the central text, the trunk of a family tree of media that Gillick shuffles through as quickly as he juggles his concepts. The book contains the material of “McNamara,” Gillick’s animated film; the story for Ibuka!; and the architectural and archival premise for his most recent show, Part 3, at Basilico Fine Arts in December 1995. All of these projects hinge on the intention of Gillick’s alter ego: “To quit the role of spectator within the spectacle and to start becoming part of the paradox and not just an observer of its effects.”

In Erasmus Is Late Gillick conjures up the ghost of Erasmus Darwin, an historian wandering the streets of London in an opium induced insomniac fugue. His addled state allows him to communicate with the members of a dinner party who have traveled through time and space to congregate at Erasmus’s house in eighteenth-century London. As Erasmus staggers towards home, he alternates between time zones, periodically surfacing in the twentieth century. His guests include Robert McNamara and Masara Ibuka, co-founder of Sony. They have been gathered in what Gillick describes as “an attempt to gain control over a set of ideas that have been appropriated by people with no interest in altering the way things are.”

To make this event happen Gillick has become a cartographer of the geography of time and a choreographer of the minuet of history. The use of what he calls parallel histories, linked through a series of...

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