Liam Gillick — Sit in the Machine — Air de Paris Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 21 → December 3, 2011

The first, at Air de Paris, comprises two new films and a series of new structures. The first film is derived from a filmed tour, in idealised form, of the Kalmar Volvo factory, shot in the early 1970s. The second film is developed from a short clip of a group of car workers sitting inside a metal machine press, having to bend over each time the press bears down on the metal forms they repetitively place into the mechanism.
In contrast to the idealised vision presented in the Volvo film, the car workers in this case have literally become part of the mechanism of production.

Adjacent to the two films is a “relaxation area”, modelled after the rest areas that were provided for each team at the Kalmar plant. Posters for the two films and the artists ongoing draft text of the book Construction of One, now 45,000 words long, will be located in this area.

Throughout the artwork over the last twenty years, the question of doubling, parallels and apparently unresolvable relationships has been a structural tool deployed as a fractured mirror of questions around production rather than consumption.

“You can see that in my work that there’s a constant dualism, which is between the desire to retain a ghost of a broken structure — to maintain some kind of semi-autonomous art object that can be differentiated from everything else by its ‘art’ quality, and at the same time, to use many of the things that we’ve used, like research, project-based structures and stepping out into documentary methodology to think about questions of production in the broader context.”

Interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2011