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In Industry and Intelligence, the artist Liam Gillick writes a nuanced genealogy to help us appreciate contemporary art's engagement with history even when it seems apathetic or blind to current events. Taking a broad view of artistic creation from 1820 to today, Gillick follows the response of artists to incremental developments in science, politics, and technology. The great innovations and dislocations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have their place in this timeline, but their traces are alternately amplified and diminished as Gillick moves through artistic reactions to liberalism, mass manufacturing, psychology, nuclear physics, automobiles, and a host of other advances. He intimately ties the origins of contemporary art to the social and technological adjustments of modern life, which artists struggled to incorporate truthfully into their works.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Creative Disruption in the Age of Soft Revolutions
1. Contemporary Art Does Not Account for That Which Is Taking Place
2. Projection and Parallelism
3. Art as a Pile: Split and Fragmented Simultaneously
4. 1820: Erasmus and Upheaval
5. ASAP Futures, Not Infinite Future
6. 1948: B. F. Skinner and Counter-Revolution
7. Abstract
8. 1963: Herman Kahn and Projection
9. The Complete Curator
10. Maybe It Would Be Better If We Worked in Groups of Three?
11. The Return of the Border
12. 1974: Volvo and the Mise-en-Scène
13. The Experimental Factory
14. Nostalgia for the Group
15. Why Work?
Notes
Index
About the author
Liam Gillick, geb. 1964, studierte am Goldsmiths College, University of London. Liam Gillick arbeitet mit Architektur, Installationen, Design und Texten. 2002 wurde er für den Turner Preis nominiert.
Summary
The conceptual artist Liam Gillick writes a genealogy of contemporary art, arguing that we need to appreciate its engagement with history. He takes a broad view of artistic creation from 1820 to today, underscoring the industry and intelligence of artists as they have responded to incremental developments in science, politics, and technology.
Additional text
Forceful, persuasive and provocative, while Industry and Intelligence will no doubt find purchase as a set text in universities for those studying art history or curatorial studies, it would seem its most urgent readership should be artists themselves, whose struggle has been, and continues to be, one of finding a way to avoid being subsumed completely by the logic of the market: to escape the trap, as Gillick has it, of the 'capitalisation of the mind'.
Report
Read Gillick's book to find the packed sediment of conceptual art discourse undergoing metamorphic transformation - with the marketized artworld's slow heat, dull pressure, and surface torque leaving inevitable traces on an intelligent maker's mind. Caroline A. Jones, Critical Inquiry
