Interview

GILLICK: Right.

BRANNON: Yes?

GILLICK: Yes.

BRANNON: Can you change a spare tire?

GILLICK: Yes, of course.

BRANNON: Did you name your son after Orson Welles?

GILLICK: No.

BRANNON: Do you make entire shows on your laptop?

GILLICK: Yes.

BRANNON: Have you ever been to Los Angeles?

GILLICK: No.

BRANNON: Did you once open for Gang of Four?

GILLICK: Yes.

BRANNON: I’ve often been given the career advice to not wear too many hats—which, of course, has just encouraged me to wear other hats, such as being a writer, being a curator, or just doing anything outside of the definition of an artist . . . What’s the question here?

GILLICK: Well, what do I think?

BRANNON: [laughs] Are we really so constrained?

GILLICK: No, but that has made me anxious, too. Of course, I remember when I first met you, being much younger than you are now, and people worrying about me at that time. They’d actually say, “I worry about you . . .” [laughs] But I always knew exactly what I was doing. I have to say, though, there have been times when I’ve thought, not that I’m worried about what you’re doing as an artist, but that you could be so good in so many contexts that you could easily slip away from the problem of making art—which, in the end, is a problem, whether you like it or not. It’s like a philosophical problem.

BRANNON: My definition of art is whatever an artist calls art. Us speaking could be an artwork—us sitting in the near-dark in your kitchen beside the dirty dishes and smoking, me thinking of what to say next . . .

GILLICK: Sure.

BRANNON: Making your bed could be a piece of art, and writing a book could be a piece of art. You could also write a book that’s not a piece of art, but that is a book, and it could be a book that was written by an artist . . .

GILLICK: Absolutely. Your definition of art—which is, if I say it’s art, then it’s art—is kind of the basic definition of modern art, right? But something that I thought fairly early on was, Okay, what if I say this is a book, but I still want it judged and valued within the terms of art? In fact, when I did a book, I wanted it to be understood as a book—not as an artwork as a book, or as a book as an artwork, but as a book. I had this problem in a group show at the -Lisson -Gallery in London in ’95. I’d just published Erasmus Is Late, and I didn’t want it to be stolen, so I designed an enormous table and put the book in the middle so that people couldn’t reach it. For me, this was just a perfect example of my mentality. The table exists because it’s a way of stopping people from stealing the book, so it’s a pragmatic thing because it’s a well-designed table. I haven’t turned a table into a work of art, but if you want to buy the book and signify it as an artwork, then it goes very well with this enormous table, which stops your bourgeois friends from getting their grubby fingers on it. I remember Adrian Searle [the British art critic from The Guardian]walked into the opening and said, “Oh, I understand . . . So I have to read the book to understand the table.” And I said to him, “Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t need to read a book to understand a table.”

BRANNON: Do you ever have any anxiety about art?