Liam Gillick and Clemens en August

A classic pair of mens shoes

Black leather. A digital brogue. In the text "Discussion Island/Big Conference Centre" (1997) an attempt was made to address how the future is determined when there is no concensus. "However hard you try it’s always tomorrow. And now it’s here again. Across the other side of town trauma had overwhelmed personal exchange. Something self-willed and determined had cut through the dusk. Pain in a building. We all called it The Big Conference Centre. It probably had another name in honour of somebody seriously compromised, but to us it was just The Big Conference Centre. And up on top there was a room. Twenty-second floor. Big, airy and false ceilinged. Windows down to the floor. Clad in silencing carpet." A series of images, structures and ideas were deployed towards writing the text. At no point in the text was any clothing described. But these would be the shoes. Individual shoes. To be worn on silencing carpet. The left foot and the right foot bearing a precise grid. Slightly different in each case.

Liam Gillick 2010

Biography
Liam Gillick is a British artist based in New York and London. Numerous solo exhibitions since 1989 include ‘Literally’, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2003; ‘communes, bar and greenrooms’, The Powerplant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, 2003; ‘The Wood Way’, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2002; ‘A short text on the possibility of creating an economy of equivalence’, Palais de Tokyo, 2005. Selected group exhibitions include ‘Singular Forms’, Guggenheim Museum, 2004; 50th Venice Biennale, 2003; ‘What If’, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2000 and documenta X, 1997. Numerous public projects and interventions include Ft. Lauderdale Airport in 2002; the new Home Office government building in London in 2005 and the Lufthansa Headquarters in Frankfurt in 2006. Since 1995 Liam Gillick has published a number of books that function in parallel to his artwork including Literally No Place (Book Works, London, 2002); Five or Six (Lukas & Sternberg, New York, 1999); Discussion Island/Big Conference Centre (Kunstverein Ludwigsburg, Ludwigsburg, and Orchard Gallery, Derry, 1997) and Erasmus is Late (Book Works, London, 1995). Liam Gillick has contributed to many art magazines and journals including Parkett, Frieze, Art Monthly and a regular column for Metropolis M in Amsterdam and has taught at Columbia University, New York, since 1997.
Frieze Foundation

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