Drawing On and Gutting Your Bedroom Walls
By Jad Dahshan, third-year student studying Art History and Chemistry
As museums across the world transfer their programming efforts onto virtual platforms, museum “goers” are finding themselves in online viewing rooms, watching video tours, and downloading coloring book pages. Some conceptual art forms do not need to undergo this transformation and are more presciently suited to this moment. Featured in the Gray Center’s Another Idea exhibition, two instructional artworks by British, New York—based artist Liam Gillick bring the art to your home.
Artist Liam Gillick. Image via Artnet.
Five More Plans (1999), was first exhibited at a show that more broadly investigated the contradictions between individual and collective modes of artistic production. Five More Plans guides the reader through a set of spatial and material interventions within a building: setting up for a bonfire in the middle of the room, piling vodka soaked blankets in the corner, and squeezing lemons on door and window handles. The fourth instruction asks you to graffiti “Maoart/Sovietcong/Cinemarxism” on the interior or exterior of the same building in gloss white paint.Desperate to avoid getting into trouble with my landlord, I sadly did not execute this piece.
However, I did follow Gillick’s other instructional work in the exhibition, Wall Diagram #5 (1989). The piece instructs readers to use a pencil to loosely trace the metalwork behind a wall with the help of a cable and pipe detector. Lacking the required technology, I managed to find a few apps that would allow me to use my phone as a metal detector, and went along tracing thin graphite lines across my bedroom wall. It felt a bit like cheating to be using my phone to do this; like I was inflecting the work with connotations unintended by the artist. What does it mean to use a communication device to uncover the invisible innards of my bedroom wall, instead of a tool specifically suited to that task?
Although the straight, vertical lines of graphite now on my bedroom wall did not turn out to be the intricate network of cables and pipes I had hoped for, they nevertheless serve as a potent visual reminder of the unseen parts of my apartment, which I often take for granted. The silent currents, flows of water and electricity, the movement and energy that live beneath the surface are suddenly more obvious. Also more apparent is my dwelling’s embeddedness in different networks, those of electricity, of resources, of communications.
Gillick’s decades-long practice spans much more than these early instructional works and includes film, sculpture, music, and architectural installation. He is also a published critic of contemporary art and an author. His work often exposes the failures of modernism within our current globalized and neoliberal context, approaching a reexamination of the exhibition as a form. This seems particularly relevant in Another Idea.
In September 2019, I saw work by Gillick in person, when the Smart Museum led a group of 10 UChicago undergrad and graduate students on a trip to viennacontemporary, a contemporary art fair in the Austrian capital. The goal was to make an acquisition for the Smart Museum. Besides purchasing three works by Austrian artist Sophie Thun, we visited various art institutions across the city, including the Kunsthalle, where a collaboration between Gillick and the art collective Gelatin was on display. The Kunsthalle was exhibiting the remnants of a set used by the artists in their experimental film, Stinking Dawn. The installation turned the exhibition hall into a post apocalyptic landscape of graffitied ruins.
While my bedroom walls are far from post apocalyptic (despite my best efforts) In executing Wall Diagram #5, I was able to transform my bedroom from an opaque, enclosed space into a more transparent component of a larger web of materials and signals. Though I made no punctures with my pencil, the artwork allowed me to eviscerate my living space and expose a whole gamut of new questions.
Hello! I'm Jad and I am a rising fourth-year studying Art History and Chemistry at the College. I write for artmejo.com about global and Arab contemporary art and occasionally do some arts reporting for the Chicago Maroon. At school, you'd usually find me dangling off a rope in Le Vorris & Vox Circus's practice room at the Logan Center or filming an Instagram story at the Smart Museum. Since being quarantined though, I haven't really strayed beyond the edges of my laptop or sketchbook. Each week of “Another Idea,” I will explore and reflect one piece in the exhibition. Experience and explore the exhibition yourself at The Gray Center.