The Night of Red and Gold is a fictional nightclub event described by French philosopher Gilles Châtelet in his complex and passionate book To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Economies (1998). In the first chapter, we are taken to Le Palace in Paris on a night in 1979 where a new constellation of social relationships is falling into place.
For this exhibition, a series of new abstract forms are presented alongside various films made by Gillick since 2008. The works are archetypes of the various structures that have appeared in his work over the last few years, precisely engineered abstractions that are all silver anodized and wall-based. The titles of the works, from Festive Self Regulation, 2019 to Resentment Industry, 2019, pay a tribute to Châtelet’s insights and his prescience. The main focus of the films and the structural works is cultural production and workplace aesthetics under the conditions mocked and raged against in Châtelet’s book.
Since the mid-90s Gillick has consistently deployed forms that offer a critical reflection upon the aesthetic underpinnings of our tertiary economies. These have been combined with writing, graphics and films that explicitly outline his interests. The films also question the position of the artist in relation to this a productive context. This exhibition is focused and precise. There are no lights, music or dancing. Instead, we are invited to reflect upon the smooth surfaces of the contemporary interface and the circling narratives that evoke conditions of production rather than consumption. The Cyber-Wolves and Gardeners of the Creative of Châtelet’s book have long moved on from the nightclub where they first met. Everything has been cleared away and the lights are bright white. We are left with a space where everything is infrastructure.
LIAM GILLICK The Night of Red and Gold Maureen Paley 29 September – 17 November 2019 private view: 29 September 2019, 5.30 – 7.30pm maureenpaley.com
The films within the exhibition are also currently on view at Liam Gillick, Standing on Top of a Building: Films 2008-2019 at the Madre Museum, Naples, 22 June – 14 October 2019.
About The Artist
Liam Gillick lives and works in New York. Selected solo exhibitions include Standing on Top of a Building: Films 2008-2019, Madre Museum, Naples, Italy, 2019; The Lights are No Brighter at the Centre, CAC, Vilnius, Lithuania, 2017; Campaign, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal, 2016; All-Imitate-Act, Stedelijk Museum/Holland Festival, Amsterdam, 2015; From 199C to 199D, Le Magasin, Grenoble, France, 2014; From 199A to 199B: Liam Gillick, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, USA, 2012; Museum Stzuki, Lodz, Poland, 2011; One long walk… Two short piers…, KAH, Bonn, Germany, 2010; How will you behave: A kitchen cat speaks, German Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2009; Three Perspectives and a Short Scenario,Witte de With, Rotterdam, The Netherlands / Kunsthalle Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland / Kunstverein Munich and MCA Chicago, 2008; A short text on the possibility of creating an economy of equivalence, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France, 2005; The Wood Way, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK, 2002.
Collaborative projects include Gelatin and Liam Gillick, Stinking Dawn, Kunsthalle Wien, 2019; ?(No,12k,Lg,17Mif) New Order + Liam Gillick: So it goes.., Manchester International Festival / OGR, Torino / Halle E, Vienna, 2017-2018; Development, Okayama Art Summit, Okayama, 2016; Confessions of the Imperfect, 1848-1989-Today, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2014; To the Moon Via the Beach (with Philippe Parreno), Luma Foundation, Arles, 2012; Liam Gillick and Lawrence Weiner: A Syntax of Dependency, M HKA Museum van Hedendaage Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp, Belgium, 2011.
Selected group exhibitions include BAU [SPIEL] HAUS, Neues Museum, Nuremberg, Germany, 2019; The Log-O-Rithmic Slide Rule: Trix and Robert Haussmann, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK and ETH, Zurich, Austria, 2018; True Faith, curated by Matthew Higgs, Manchester City Art Gallery, Manchester, England, 2017; 2116, Shanghai Project 2016, curated by Yongwoo Lee and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Shanghai Himalayas Museum, China, 2016; 14th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey, 2015; Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract art and society 1915-2015, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK, 2015; Swiss Pavilion, 14th Architecture Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2014; DLA Piper Series: Constellations, Tate Liverpool, UK, 2013; Looking Back for the Future, Kunsthalle Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland, 2012.
*To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Economies, translated by Robin Mackay, Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2014
