A contemporary artist came to speak with students and faculty at the University of Connecticut about his lifetime of work on Wednesday, Feb. 26.
Liam Gillick, a British artist of Irish decent, has been in the art industry for over thirty years. Gillick has lived in the United States for the last twenty-five years and currently resides in New York City. He produces unconventional art across many mediums, including installation, video and sound.
Invited to speak by the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute and faculty from the School of Fine Arts at UConn, Gillick is currently examining select archives of the Nuremburg Trials, which are located at the Dodd Center for Human Rights on campus. He is not currently sure what he will produce with this information, but something is potentially in the works.
Gillick’s initial calling to art school was the desire to “not work.” He was born in the 1960s, a time of modernism and, shortly after, the emergence of post-modernism. Despite disagreeing with its strict, conservative ideals, Gillick was drawn to the concepts of modernism — the ideas in a post World War II world of creating architecture and art to make man subject to goodness, particularly captured Gillick’s interest.
“I was drawn towards this thing that I had missed. This modernism that was being rekindled in its second form,” said Gillick.
Gillick attempts to “take creativity back” with his art. At the presentation, he provided a brief background of his past before discussing his work. The goal of the event, titled “Reservoirs of the Imaginary,” was for Gillick to describe three of his major projects.
The first major work of Gillick’s career was an exhibition produced in 1994 called “McNamara,” which stems off complex research Gillick conducted surrounding Robert McNamara’s influence on the U.S. during the era of the Vietnam War. Gillick described McNamara as an Elon Musk figure in politics of the past, as he was appointed the secretary of defense and was heavily involved with Ford.
The exhibition featured a script written by Gillick in 1992, aiming to produce a film surrounding the interactions of several real-life historical and fictional characters with McNamara. Gillick’s primary drive to write the script was exposing some unknown truths in politics through art.
“I never heard of [Robert McNamara] before and I thought it was cool how Gillick made these pieces because he was so passionate about learning about him and all his mistakes, and that he fully like wanted to switch the perspective and show everyone his errors,” said Lily Denver, a sixth-semester photography and art history major. “He is trying to show it to society, but also not trying to like cancel [McNamara], though everyone does this. It was just interesting seeing he was trying to impact people.”
Following this piece, Gillick showed audience members the concept around another piece, called “A Volvo Bar, which is a play that Gillick wrote about a bar next to a Volvo factory, delving into concept of capitalism.
“A Volvo Bar” became a theatrical installation in the late 2000s that allowed people to act in the structure and understand mirror and flipped images that represented the discussion of production. Rather than holding a Marxist view regarding the means of production, Gillick aims to prove that the conversation of production can easily be flipped by any person of any perspective. Gillick suggests that it just must be examined in different ways.
“I thought his work was really interesting and a lot of the things he was saying about artists trying to figure out a way to do the right thing, or a human being in general, I guess,” said Nyay Aye, an eighth-semester finance and fine arts major. “I thought a lot of what he was saying was relatable in a way, because as artists ourselves, I think we go through a lot of challenges of just trying to explain ourselves to other people.”
The third and final piece that Gillick described is potentially the most unique and shocking. Gillick and Gelatin produced a film named “Stinking Dawn,” which was produced in 2019 and featured at a film festival in Copenhagen.
The film is a proper tragedy, as described by Gillick. He wished to bring the forgotten genre back to cinema, labelling this film as his “ultimate contradictory project.”
“Cinema and architecture are the two great disappointments of the 20th Century,” said Gillick.
Gillick recognizes that the film is very strange but is the story of man on a trajectory of life. Each character has a specific, very strange desire, representative of today’s world. In the end, each character meets their desire, but they also engage in a huge battle between their desires and politics, which ultimately end up destroying them.
“Stinking Dawn” closes with a man covered in blood, writing of what happened and his ideal return, symbolic of a wartime narrator that is surrounded by death and loneliness.
Everyone today is concerned with artists having to constantly explain themselves or people having to justify their actions, but “to talk clearly is to give yourself away,” said Gillick.