The history of modern art is often told through aesthetic breakthroughs that sync well with cultural and political change. From Courbet to Picasso, from Malevich to Warhol, it is accepted that art tracks the disruptions of industrialization, fascism, revolution, and war. Yet filtering the history of modern art only through catastrophic events cannot account for the subtle developments that lead to the profound confusion at the heart of contemporary art. In Industry and Intelligence, the artist Liam Gillick writes a nuanced genealogy to help us appreciate contemporary art's engagement with history even when it seems apathetic or blind to current events. Taking a broad view of artistic creation from 1820 to today, Gillick follows the response of artists to incremental developments in science, politics, and technology. The great innovations and dislocations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have their place in this timeline, but their traces are alternately amplified and diminished as Gillick moves through artistic reactions to liberalism, mass manufacturing, psychology, nuclear physics, automobiles, and a host of other advances. He intimately ties the origins of contemporary art to the social and technological adjustments of modern life, which artists struggled to incorporate truthfully into their works.

Industry and Intelligence: Contemporary Art Since 1820 (Bampton Lectures in America)

Arts & Photography

Gillick, Liam

History & Criticism

Columbia University Press

The history of modern art is often told through aesthetic breakthroughs that sync well with cultural and political change. From Courbet to Picasso, from Malevich to Warhol, it is accepted that art tracks the disruptions of industrialization, fascism, revolution, and war. Yet filtering the history of modern art only through catastrophic events cannot account for the subtle developments that lead to the profound confusion at the heart of contemporary art.In Industry and Intelligence, the artist Liam Gillick writes a nuanced genealogy to help us appreciate contemporary art's engagement with history even when it seems apathetic or blind to current events. Taking a broad view of artistic creation from 1820 to today, Gillick follows the response of artists to incremental developments in science, politics, and technology. The great innovations and dislocations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have their place in this timeline, but their traces are alternately amplified and diminished as Gillick moves through artistic reactions to liberalism, mass manufacturing, psychology, nuclear physics, automobiles, and a host of other advances. He intimately ties the origins of contemporary art to the social and technological adjustments of modern life, which artists struggled to incorporate truthfully into their works.

Raised in Albania, Sala relocated to Paris, and then moved to Berlin in 2003. In a relatively short time, he developed a vision that addresses the issues of a posthistorical world with a haunting simplicity that transcends cultures and borders. This book provides an overview and analysis of the artist's entire career.

Anri Sala (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

OBRIST, Hans-Ulrich

Godfrey, Mark

Phaidon Press

five or six

Lukas & Sternberg

five or six contains texts selected from more than 100 reviews, articles, and catalogue essays published by Liam Gillick since 1989. The book includes some of the formal, social, and ideological concerns that have merged in Gillick's “What if? Scenario.”
“What's the scenario? A constantly mutating sequence of possibilities. Add a morsel of difference and the results slip out of control, shift the location for action and everything is different. There is a fundamental gap between societies that base their development on scenarios and those that base their development on planning. It could be argued that the great Cold War divide in socio-economic structuring was rooted in the different kinds of results that you get if you apply either one or the other technique to working out how things might end up in the future. And it is claimed that scenario thinking won. Our vision of the future is dominated by the 'What If? Scenario' rather than the 'When do we Need More Tractors? Plan.'” Liam Gillick 
This book has been published on the occasion of the exhibition “David,” Frankfurter Kunstverein, September 17 – November 21, 1999. 
Contributors Nicolaus Schafhausen, Frankfurter Kunstverein, and Caroline Schneider

Five or Six (Sternberg Press) (English and German Edition)

Sternberg Press

Featuring a collaborative installation by Jonah Freeman, Justin Lowe and Alexandre Singh, the acclaimed 2008 Ballroom Marfa exhibition Hello Meth Lab in the Sun was comprised of diorama-like depictions of a hippie commune, a meth lab and other sites of modern industrial production. It was also shown in part at The Station during Art Basel Miami 2008.

Hello Meth Lab in the Sun

de Lima Greene, Alison

Hollander, David

Malasauskas, Raimundas

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Ballroom Marfa

This volume documents the first U.S. solo exhibition of Colombian-born, London-based artist Oscar Murillo (born 1986), held at the Rubell Family Collection in Florida in 2013. Over the course of a five-week residency in the summer of 2012, Murillo took over a 60-foot space at the Rubell, as well as its sculpture garden, to create 32 works, including five massive paintings, all of which are reproduced here. These works were informed by Murillo's exposure to Miami's Latin culture, as well as a weekend visit to his native Colombia and the gigantic proportions of the exhibition space itself. Two of the largest works are abstract; three are inscribed with words evoking colonial and/or Western appropriation ("mango," "chorizo" and "yoga"); all display the heavily worked surfaces for which Murillo is well known. Also included here is photo documentation of the exhibition's preparation and an interview with the artist.

Oscar Murillo: Work

Watts, Jonathan

Lees, Nicola

Rubell Family Collection

A catalogue designed to accompany Richard Deacon's 1999 exhibition at the Tate Gallery, Liverpool. He is one of Britain's leading contemporary sculptors with an innovative approach to materials that extends to graphics. Language, both spoken and written, is pivotal to much of his work.

RICHARD DEACON NEW WORLD ORDER /ANGLAIS

Allthorpe-Guyton, Marjorie

Sanches, Rui

Zacharopoulus, Denys

Reference

Tate

Liam Gillick's process in building a functioning weather station for Fogo Island, Newfoundland as part of the World Weather Network. In 2022 Liam Gillick installed A Variability Quantifier (The Fogo Island Red Weather Station) on Fogo Island, Newfoundland. An artwork intended to function as an operational weather station, it gathers local weather data and is a place for education, reflection, and discussion. The site and work are open and people are encouraged to visit. In 2023 Liam Gillick returned to Fogo to make a documentary film about his work and interview islanders on all aspects of how the climate emergency affects their lives. This book is a record of the documentary and includes a fully illustrated account of the working process and the discussions that took place. Not the first work that he has completed to address the issue, with earlier projects in Paris, Japan and Australia, Gillick is engaged in representing the science of the climate crisis. His project is to collect data to feed into the global system. As with earlier projects, it is the maths and science that he attempts to elevate. Copublished by Fogo Island Arts and National Gallery of Canada.

A Variability Quantifier

Individual Artists

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Books by Gillick, Liam