“Redaction,” the current show by Liam Gillick at Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York, brings together a selection of key texts, abstract structures, and installations, spanning from the early 1990s to the late 2000s. It is a mini-retrospective of the artist’s career, timed to celebrate the gallery’s twenty-fifth anniversary. What’s striking at first is the consistency between the artworks: they seem to be from the exact same period, although they aren’t. Maybe this is what timelessness does… Gillick has created “societal disrupting devices” that he uses to depict a social function given by an improbable shape. With Gillick, the notion of “relational aesthetics” is born, meaning: architectural shapes in a public space create a specific response in the behavior of a group. For instance, he discovered that people instinctively gather underneath canopies, rain or not. Hence his Discussion Bench Platform Black (2010), a purple-stained glass canopy above a black bench. I noticed that the canopy and the bench are intentionally misplaced relative to one another (they should be placed perpendicularly in order to optimize shelter.) The same happens with Restricted Roundrail (2012), whose height commands painfully low use and defeats its purpose. Or again the Prototype Ibuka! Coffee Table/Stage (Act 1) (1995), which is too low and too vast a table to be used in a seated or standing position. These different structures act as anomalies, forcing an uncomfortable behavior. Their shape and their purpose are in conflict. The rigor of the design, of the material, and their production accentuates that conflict. What is the artist’s intention? When Donald Judd designs radical furniture, it is to convey a sense of discipline and rigor, an ascetic and elevated lifestyle in which style and shape become the pure manifestation of a function — and in which there is no “miserable” function. Gillick in that sense would be Judd looking away from an ideal, distracted from a coherent utopia. But furthermore, this survey challenges our definition of social comfort, both physical and mental, and redefines it through notions of freedom, detachment, self-reflection, agility, and resilience.
