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The Nominees Catherine Yass | Fiona Banner | Keith Tyson | Liam Gillick Liam Gillick: space for thought Liam Gillick (38) was born in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire and studied at Goldsmiths College between 1984 and 1987. In 1989 he had his first solo exhibition at the Karsten Schubert Gallery in London. In Ancient Rome, the Forum was the place where the victorious legions held their triumphal marches, and where transactions took place - commercial, political and philosophical. So much was the space connected to its use as a place for discussion that we now use the word more in its abstract sense than in its original architectural one. Gillick's highly coloured pavilion-like structures and his open-air 'sculpture-as-furniture' installation in the gardens of Tate Britain, Annlee You Proposes (2001), seem designed to operate in the same way. The work is a site at which the passing spectator can pause and think of other things, so providing the content of the piece. In a Whitechapel exhibition earlier this year, The Wood Way, we are invited to 'lose ourselves' both in the labyrinthine design of the exhibition - a path through which we encounter work made in coloured Plexiglas, aluminium and timber - and in our own thought or discussion. Is this work then in itself 'about' anything? Or is it simply there to create space for thought? Gillick does not see the art he produces as a puzzle to be deciphered. However, in the materials he uses and in his parallel practices as a writer, critic, curator and collaborator with other artists, he does give us some clues about what he would like us to be thinking about. Echoes of modernism A quick rewind of visual-art and design history reminds us that these fabricated panels resemble the modernist slabs of colour used by the 'De Stijl' group of the 1920s, in the paintings of Piet Mondrian, for example, and in the architectural decor of Theo van Doesburg. Similar decorative elements are also seen on the facades of 1960s council estates. Such estates, often by now run-down social nightmares, were built from the idealism of those earlier artists and socially minded architects such as Lubetkin or the Bauhaus designers. Gillick sees the battle fought for the social concerns and Utopian dreams of the early modernists as having been well and truly lost to speculators and corporations. The modernist project (and its architects) was taken away from social housing and given the money to realise its formal aspirations in the corporate sector. That same sector would plan and profit from the future, designing the physical, political and informational space we now inhabit. In his writing, Gillick uses various minor historical and invented characters to amplify his ideas. In the Tate garden installation, the 'Annlee' of the title is a computer-generated character, created and copyrighted by a Japanese company that licenses such characters to comic-book publishers or animated film-makers. The copyright was bought by two French artists, who in turn licensed it to their friend, Gillick. The artist gave Annlee a new persona and set of memories. In a computer-animated part of the installation at the Tate, Annlee commented on the installation and its origins in a Japanese artist-in-residence project Gillick had undertaken some time earlier. Annlee You Proposes reflects Gillick's multi-faceted interests and his practice as an artist, in which he questions not only the politically constructed space in which we live, but also - in the way content is provided by the viewer - makes serious play with how artworks are made and received. |
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