Liam Gillick & Philippe Parreno

Our scenario details the attempted overkill of a potential victim, who offers violent yet always inconclusive retaliation. Our take on the story begins with the realization that the cat has finally killed the mouse, leaving us in a gap akin to that between the Second World War and the Cold War, or between the Cold War and the so-called War on Terror. We decided to develop a work that could somehow critique a given relationship between law and creativity but also crucially make a pointed reference to the idea of asking us to develop an exhibition in relation to law and creativity in the first place. […]

We are ‘riders’ to the main event of the conference, not the subjects, reference points or a side attraction. We deliberately wanted to marginalise ourselves. We are very conscious that historically marginalised groups have not necessarily sought out the most transparent relationship with the law. […]

Philippe drew the initial test sequences, which were then elaborated upon by a young Hungarian artist based in New York, Ivan Orkney. Everything was edited and finalised between us. In Lund we carried on the process even further and now we are developing new versions of each episode to be secreted on each commercial DVD release by Anna Sanders Films founded in 1998 by Charles de Meaux, Pierre Huygue, Philippe Parreno and Xavier Douroux. […]

The typeface Alien Gothic was originally designed for Philippe Parreno by M/M, the Paris based design agency who work between a semi-mainstream design world and collaborative projects with artists. We just used it and told them about it later. The font is called Alien Gothic and always causes complications as there are no numbers or punctuation, so you have to work around a lack. The music is extremely specific. For the Anna Sanders identity clip at the beginning of each episode, the music was produced in 2003 when the clip was originally made. The clip itself is a further collaboration between Sean Dack and myself, exhibited at Corvi-Mora in London in 2003 and now used at the beginning of each Anna Sanders movie release. […]

The body of each episode has new music produced at the time that the film was edited in order to give some pacing and metronomic rhythm to each episode, it is not definitive. The credits sequences feature a short segment of the beginning of a specific track by a specific group, used in terms of valid academic research only, as a citation of a precise value structures. […]

The work is a proposition, a provisional structure and something a little stupid. […]

In relation to the broader issue of copyright it is quite clear that the onus is upon mainstream corporations to find elegant ways to continue to overcharge for their output. The issue of downloading music is not clear-cut as it is something of a phantom clarification of the way things already were in terms of the exchange of music and ideas. […]

It is possible that the rise in file sharing merely creates new desires and more production. It provokes a desire for more of “the new”. It highlights what cannot be borrowed or shared or found. Any simple search for something extremely specific results in a large number of false trails and failures. If you really need something fast and now, you have to actually purchase it in a straightforward way or create the content yourself.

Working collectively is not inherently radical, however it does carry potentials that are suppressed in the ongoing conservative pressures that surround the art world. It depends why you are working together and what you are saying via the collaboration. Copyright is an issue that artists are generally relaxed about in relation to their own work as they are protected by most international laws on moral and intellectual rights in terms of the production of art. Every day the artist comes from an excessively protected legal environment into a situation where everything is up for grabs and the assertion of copyright is used in a corporate environment to protect profit and brand status. […]

The work plays with ideas of authorship and identity within a sequence of small gestures and overplayed jumps. It brings forward drunken notions of morality back into the sometimes dessicated discussions about the free-floating sequence of images and values that surround us. To produce a work that is episodic rather than an edition, multiple or workshop structure indicates a desire to play with ideas of production in a way that goes beyond the self-limiting tendencies of the art world and produce something where the end point is unclear and inconclusive and the art is therefore both clearly defined within the boundaries of each episode but potentially endless or at least open to endless late night re-runs. […]

Liam Gillick

Kunsthalle Zürich thanks:

Präsidialdepartement der Stadt Zürich, Luma Stiftung