Visual artist Liam Gillick will discuss his art practice and his recent book published by Columbia University Press, entitled Industry and Intelligence: Contemporary Art Since 1820. The book takes a broad view of artistic creation from 1820 to today as Gillick follows the response of artists to incremental developments in science, politics, and technology. The great innovations and dislocations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have their place in this timeline, but their traces are alternately amplified and diminished as Gillick moves through artistic reactions to liberalism, mass manufacturing, psychology, nuclear physics, automobiles, and a host of other advances. He intimately ties the origins of contemporary art to the social and technological adjustments of modern life, which artists struggled to incorporate truthfully into their works.
