LIAM GILLICK
MARGIN TIME
Maureen Paley
21 Herald Street - London
8/10/2012 - 18/11/2012
Maureen Paley is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Liam Gillick.
For his exhibition at the gallery, Gillick adopts an aesthetic more often associated with the bureaucracy of social systems, which he examines through a broad spectrum of media. An installation consisting of wall texts and pin boards is combined with an architectural construction that surrounds a projector screen, displaying a film that interweaves three specific sites of social and architectural history in New York. Through situating the film within this physical framework, Gillick illuminates the motives behind the structures depicted in the film.
Margin Time is centred around a film of the same name by Liam Gillick. Shot during the lead up to his work for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2009, the film considers three specific sites of power in a form that deconstructs specific approaches from developed science fiction in the 1960s and 1970s –– specifically the writings of Stanislaw Lem (Solaris) and Christopher Priest (The Inverted World). While thinking of what to produce for the German Pavilion, Gillick considered the production of a science fiction film. To create a working habit –– he woke early every day to film workers arriving to construct a temporary building on the site of the United Nations Headquarters’ sculpture gardens in New York. This temporary building now houses the offices of the U.N. while the original Wallace Harrison led complex by Niemeyer and Corbusier is undergoing complete interior renovation.
The film also takes in the adjacent Roosevelt Island master plan for middle class modern housing and shopping arcades by Philip Johnson and the recently completed F.D. Roosevelt monument by Louis Kahn at the tip of Roosevelt Island that points past the U.N. complex itself. The link between these three sites is made by a cable car shuttle. The film is a narrated series of shots that develops a revised language that reconsiders representations of power, memorial, connections, renovation and the temporary displacement of bureaucracy. The erasure of the United Nations gardens with its sculptures donated by various countries –– all exemplifying particular projections of ideology from the depiction of an Irish Famine boat to a thrusting young Stalinist pioneer –– sits as an important absence within the film. The narration slips between historical references to aspects as varied as Louis Kahn’s tragic death in the toilets of Penn Station to the now completely erased original interior of the United Nations via a story of continual displacement and anxiety that forms the core of the science fiction story. The presentation of the exhibition coincides with the first installation of the final Venice Biennale work as part of the permanent collection of the Guggenheim Bilbao.
Born 1964, Aylesbury, United Kingdom, Liam Gillick lives and works between London and New York.
Selected solo exhibitions include: From 199A to 199B: Liam Gillick, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, USA, 2012 (ongoing); Museum Stzuki, Lodz, Poland, 2011; One long walk… Two short piers…, Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, Germany, 2010; How will you behave: A kitchen cat speaks, German Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Venice, 2009; Three Perspectives and a Short Scenario, Kunsthalle Zürich, Zürich, 2008, travelling to Witte de With, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 2008; A short text on the possibility of creating an economy of equivalence, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France, 2005; McNamara Motel, CAC Centro de Arte Contemporaneo Malaga, Malaga, Spain, 2005; The Wood Way, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK, 2002.
Selected group exhibitions include: Liam Gillick and Lawrence Weiner: A Syntax of Dependency, M HKA Museum van Hedendaage Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp, Belgium, 2011; 8th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai, China, 2010; The one hundred and sixty‐third floor, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA, 2009; The Shapes of Space, Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA, 2007; Extreme Abstraction, Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, USA, 2005; Off the Record/Sound Art, Le Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France, 2004; No Ghost Just a Shell, Kunsthalle Zürich, Zürich, 2002.
