Interview

BRANNON: Yeah, I’m good . . . So I was thinking about your voracious output, and it reminded me of Woody Allen, who supposedly has three films going at any one time: one which is in the theaters; one which is being shot; and then one which he’s currently writing. Supposedly, Woody has done this for 30 years, and he swears that he’s never looked back. He swears that he hasn’t seen Annie Hall [1977] since he first showed the film.

GILLICK: Well, I think sometimes Woody ought to look back a bit more . . . But, you know, I identify with that completely. I did an exhibition in 2000 in Kitakyushu in Japan and, because I knew that the exhibition would never get out of Japan and no one would ever hear about it, I called it “Woody.”

BRANNON: I remember that one.

GILLICK: Maybe I told you about it. It’s very odd because I think that most people who make reference to Woody Allen concentrate on what he has actually done, but I was quite interested in his methodology, the way he keeps moving on to the next film relentlessly. I identify with that way of working, and I also recognize it as a weakness maybe. So in the little catalogue, I actually put at the very back an appendix of all of the films that Woody Allen had done up to that point.

BRANNON: Having this three-part retrospective is not the most comfortable position for you, because you’re someone who is very self-conscious about what it means to have a retrospective.

GILLICK: Yes. I mean, I don’t see why I can’t have one, although it doesn’t necessarily make sense . . . It’s related to what I think I identified in your work at Columbia, which was a feeling that you didn’t accept what other people were doing but that you didn’t have any other ideas either. [Brannon laughs] I had that feeling, definitely. When I left art school, I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t have any ideas. I didn’t have a vision. But I didn’t accept that I should just leave the art world to other people. I think when people struggle with the problem of trying to understand the art world as an idea, they misunderstand it. They think it’s a world of visionaries or opportunists. But it also includes people who want to take part in this cultural exercise but don’t have the required stuff—they don’t have the ideas or the production. It’s the same thing with this idea of retrospective. There are a couple of classic models of the retrospective. One is the Lawrence Weiner model. He’s an artist who is really interesting, and there’s a moment in his body of work where there’s a breakthrough. So you can always do a retrospective of Lawrence’s work because you can say, “This was the day he had an idea, and he did something.” And the alternative model would be the Gordon Matta-Clark model, where you can say, “Well, there’s no original idea, but here’s a photo of something happening somewhere else at another time, here’s a fragment of evidence of something that happened, and here’s a sculptural object.” And all of that is problematic for me. A lot of our understanding about the retrospective, or the origins of the artist, are based on Christian myths. They’re based on transubstantiation—the idea that water turns into wine or that something happens. And, of course, I’ve worked all my life to try to avoid those things. So, of course, you’re going to have a problem doing a retrospective of my work. Everyone will look around and say, “Well, where’s the moment where something happened?” And my intention has always been that people will ask that about themselves or actually look at the work and try to understand what it might be about. Then you can see real differences. But we’ve been in a period where critics have either been near-philosophical, which is quite good, or they’ve been hacks.

BRANNON: Maybe we should start with hacks . . .

GILLICK: I mean, I like hacks. I find them interesting. What they do creates this daily comparative Mad Money idea of how the art world is going.

BRANNON: Something I learned early on at UCLA is that there’s a difference between the first read of an artwork and the second read. You want the first to be very accessible—and perhaps even generous—and then you want the second to be more frustrating, more productive. And this is actually the reverse of what I see in a lot of art today. It tends to be that the first read is very confusing, as in wacky or dirty . . .

GILLICK: I think that’s a perfect way of looking at it. In the mid-’90s, in France, I had a show at Air de Paris, and they said, “Some man wants to talk to you.” So I said, “Okay, I’ll go meet him.” I went to the bar on the corner, and there was a nice-looking old man sitting there drinking a drink, having a cigarette. He didn’t speak very good English, and we tried to muddle through in the mixture of languages, and then he looked around and said, “I have a question: Is it okay to like your work?” And I said, “Well, of course it’s okay to like my work.” He went [gasps and puts glass down on table] and shook my hand and then just left. He’d been suffering from this feeling that there was something that he couldn’t get from the work—he was visually attracted to it, and he knew it had something to do with modernism, that it had something to do
with these ideas about finishing and projection. But he didn’t want to know anything about that. He wanted to know, from my perspective, if I was making a dogmatic work that was very didactic, or if it was okay to just like the work. I think that was a kind of great breakthrough for me because I realized that that question was urgent in a way . . .

BRANNON: Okay, I have some cheap questions for you. Just answer yes or no: Do you have a Porsche cell phone?