Why do artists write novels? What does the artist’s novel do to the visual arts? How should it be experienced? In recent years, there has been a proliferation of visual artists who create novels as part of their art projects. They do so in order to address artistic issues by means of novelistic devices, favoring a sort of art predicated on process and subjectivity, introducing notions such as fiction, narrative, and imagination. In this sense, it is possible to speak of a new medium in the visual arts. Here, artist and researcher David Maroto examines the intersection of visual art and literature through the work of Liam Gillick.
Liam Gillick is a pioneer in the use of the artist’s novel as a medium in the visual arts, rather than a literary genre. His work—which includes installation, video, and collaborative projects—reflects on issues of production and the dysfunctional aspects of modernity. Writing holds a central place in Gillick’s work: He has published numerous essays, as well as several novels, including: Erasmus Is Late (London: Book Works, 1995); Discussion Island/Big Conference Centre (Derry: Orchard Gallery, 1997); Literally No Place (London: Book Works, 2002); Underground (Fragments of Future Histories) (Brussels: Les Maîtres de Forme Contemporains; Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2004), and several other short books of fiction.
From April 1 to July 21, 2022, Gillick took part in an exhibition at Bozar, Brussels, called “Project Palace, a Centenary.” His contribution was threefold and offered some insight into his approach to the novel as an artistic medium. First, Schaakspel, a chess set by Belgian artist Vic Gentils, a version of which had been exhibited at Bozar in 1967. This piece sat alone in a glazed room that visitors could not enter. Second, a film called A Max De Vos in the form of a title sequence that was the result of research into the history of Bozar. And third, an artist’s novel, also titled A Max De Vos (Brussels: Bozar; Ghent: MER. B&L, 2022). On the opening day he also washed the steps leading to the main galleries with a mixture of glitter and vodka, a scene from an earlier book enacted in real time.
Gillick’s current exhibition at gallery Casey Kaplan (New York), called “Fact Structures Amount Structures Language Structures” (April 29–July 26, 2024), is the final part of three related shows at gallery KIN (Brussels) and Esther Schipper (Berlin). Each exhibition presents unique prototype book covers for a forthcoming artist’s novel titled The Alterants. The interview took place on February 26, 2024, at the first of these exhibitions in gallery KIN, in Brussels. KIN is located a few meters from Bozar, which constituted an ideal context to revisit his latest artist’s novel, A Max De Vos, and discuss how the three elements (sculpture, film, artist’s novel) are connected in the same project.
THE TWO THINGS THAT I STARTED WITH at Bozar were the novel and the film, which is almost like a cliché. The relationship between a novel and a film always has a particular connection and disconnection at the same time. As a kid, I would look at novelizations of films. Or find the book that became the film. And I was always fascinated by the gap in between these two things: the fact that the novel (if the novel was written before the film) bore no relationship to the film that I saw. And vice versa: that it could work the other way around, that a novel written after a film can often be almost a transliteration of the film. So for this particular exhibition at Bozar, which has to do with the weight of history, I did fall back a little bit on the story structure, on the idea of someone who cannot enter, who cannot arrive, who’s always on the outside. And the novel and the film had the same name in this case—A Max De Vos—but their content was completely different.
And within a show of some depth and clarity in relation to the history of the place, it would also reflect my indifference to the institutional frame—meaning that, despite the fact that I’ve been to Brussels a lot, I don’t really know or understand Bozar; I never felt comfortable in that place. And I’ve often used the artist’s novel as a method to express these points of inside-outside, inclusion-exclusion, to take you away, to literally bring you away from the focal point to another environment. That’s how I’ve often deployed the novel as an artwork, as a kind of structural work, by using it as a way to gather together unresolvable components—intellectually, structurally, literally, and of course, most importantly, geographically, meaning about location.
On the other hand, the film is as it appears to be. It is based on hours and hours of going through the documents that Bozar sent me. And yet, in a weird way, it tells you no more than the novel does. By its gradual quality and its reference to all sorts of people in historical moments, it kind of overloads the viewer. I actually used a copy of a credit sequence from a major international film. It has exactly the right length, an incredible condensed quality, and yet, at the same time, a sort of feeling that you’re not really finding out anything.
As for the chess set, I was looking for something that, for me, would signify a quintessential kind of Belgian artwork, of a certain period, which would carry in it certain presences or symbolic moments that, if you never knew anything about the artist or about that work, within a few guesses, you could have probably come up with something like “Belgium between 1950 and 1970.” And so it’s got everything that it needs: It’s got a touch of polite Surrealism; it’s chess, which already is supposed to symbolize something about art; it is made in a certain way; it’s a particular scale. There was also a big, full-size version made that was played during the 1967 São Paulo Biennial.
A lot of the self-consciousness about that work is, of course, the problem of chess in relation to art and culture, which somehow has come to be seen as something significant and important. However, artists playing chess was a not-working gesture, not an artistic gesture. It was a gesture of not making art. It was partly a kind of private joke with myself, in a way. Vic Gentils’s work is a stand-in for all artists who think they are cleverer than they are, and they think that they can use structures and symbols and ideas that maybe they shouldn’t be using. It was a kind of mea culpa for myself. It was like I was identifying with him. But I also think that he’s somewhat overlooked and rather important in an eccentric sort of extension of Belgian art. I think he needed to be seen.
Within the exhibition, there was no insistence or literal presence of the artist’s novel, A Max De Vos. The fact that it was in the bookshop was enough for me. It was published and distributed by a small publisher in Belgium (MER. B&L). This was a question of trust, and I did it that way as a deliberate gesture, but I slightly regret it because the problem is that, if you don’t take more control over the moment of passing the novel to a person, or the availability of it, you kind of lose something. And this is always the tricky part. At what point does the book itself enter the space of exchange and at what level? And this is also a bigger conceptual question about what the function of the artist’s novel is, in the way we understand it. I think I should have done something more. I was convinced and seduced, as I always am, by the idea of the Ghent publisher—it seems to go back to medieval times, to the long history of Belgian printing and publishing—and by giving it to them and trusting them, that they would know what to do. But, of course, it ends up in the museum a little bit as if it’s the catalogue of the exhibition, or something like that. And that was probably an error. In the past, I always took much more care to manipulate the distribution and reception of the book. In this case, I trusted the institution. But they didn’t do anything wrong. They just treated it like another product.
A Max De Vos appears thirty years after my first artist’s novel, Erasmus Is Late, and the main character is directed toward a new generation, people who are thirty years younger than me now. I think about the function and the role of the artist within this last novel as a much more self-absorbed, maybe Dionysian, but also sincere and perhaps lost figure. When writing A Max De Vos, I thought about the idea of a peculiar narcissistic fragility of the male artist. And it’s written in the great tradition of satire, a soft satire, like Jonathan Swift. I’m trying to play with this sort of figure but, at the same time, also look at the disjunction between what the artist is allowed to represent, or what they’re supposed to be representing within the culture, and what the institutional frame, the ethical demand and the moral positioning of the institutional frame is at the same time suggesting.
In this project, I was literally taking one mental space of ideas that emerges in the three different gestures of the sculpture, film, and artist’s novel. One is the kind of implicated artist as the person who turns to chess as a source of seriousness, and Surrealism, and history, and endlessness. And then, the film, which is the rolling credits. Then the artist’s novel itself. These three distinct elements have the same starting point in a way, but they come out in multiple ways. And that’s a bit more determined than I have been in the past. Usually, things in my work are more speculative and more incomplete, and usually they generate things which are way further away from the main idea. This project at Bozar, however, was done with a sort of institutional seriousness.
—As told to David Maroto
