ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the work of Liam Gillick as an exemplary case of artistic attention to capitalist production, marked by a reflexive engagement with art’s relationship to design as well as with the broader dynamics of contemporary artistic labour. Gillick’s practice, however, amounts to more than merely another move in what Yve-Alain Bois described in the ‘Endgame’ catalogue as a form of endless ‘rejoice at the killing of the dead’. Gillick has emerged to become one of the most practically and intellectually restless international artists currently working. Gillick’s aversion to critical transparency and oppositionality speaks to his impatience with the apparent authoritarianism of an art modelled on the critical ‘revelations’ and ‘exposures’ of ideology critique. Gillick’s objects thus cannibalise the material environment of post-Fordist society and render its forms awkward and inert. Gillick stages the liquidation of the resistant possibilities of abstract form, only to once more place postmodern resignation and historical closure in question.
