Liam Gillick "POURQUOI TRAVAILLER ?"

Images of the interior pages here.

Published Winter 2011 - 2012

Text and design: Liam Gillick

Composition : Helvetica Neue Bold
and Gillick Helvetica New
Paper: Moulin Richard de Bas
Letterpress printing: Atelier Vincent Auger
Cover: goatskin parchment
Slipcase: fluorescent PLEXIGLAS® (3 different colors)

Limited edition to 30 copies
plus 2 artist's proofs
and 3 hors commerce copies

Each book is signed and numbered by the artist.
41 x 29,5 x 2,7 cm.

In his second publication with the team of Three Star Books, Liam Gillick offers a philosophical text entitled “Pourquoi travailler?” (Why Work?). His argument is presented materially as well as in carefully reasoned prose, to conclude that both different types of labor --and also less- might behoove those in the culture industry today.
Gillick’s text addresses the issue of production for the “knowledge worker,” and sheds a searing light on the forms of labor that cultural production now entails.
Professedly uninterested in art history, an atheist with a predilection for secular imagery (even when excavating medieval iconography), Gillick has produced what might even be considered a sacred text of his own. This is as much due to the form chosen as the content in which his thinking is framed.
Gillick's essay on labor began as a symposium contribution, was then printed as a small give-away publication, and is freely available in English on the Internet. In its Three Star Books manifestation, it is presented as a rarity. The text, typeset in the special Gillick Helvetica New that the artist himself designed, is printed in letterpress on the finest of Richard de Bas handmade paper. These sheets are gathered together in a bound cover created from white goatskin parchment, each cover pleated by hand. The resultant volume, fitted with over a dozen black and white images executed after woodblock prints, is held together in a near-sculptural form, by a fluorescent orange Plexiglas case.
Gillick's text did not begin this way. What once was a pamphlet in the hallowed tradition of the low cost offset artists’ book—and before that, just a concept, and an oral presentation—has now been enshrined in the most auratic of forms. However, Gillick’s play with all the possible manifestations his publication could take is a sign of his distance from the tyranny of any one medium.
“Why work” first appeared in New York as part of the Goethe Institut Wyoming Building series “WHAT IS THE GOOD OF WORK?,” organized by Maria Lind, Director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and Simon Critchley, Chair of Philosophy at the New Schol. The text was presented by Gillick in conjunction with the contribution of noted Italian philosopher, Gianni Vattimo.
Because of the French-language context of the publishing house, and because of a preponderant love for French intellectual culture, as well as his frequent work in France, Gillick has elected to have “Why Work” translated into French.
Precisely because Gillick is English, and more than familiar with the philosophy of William Morris and the Arts & Crafts movement, it is moving to see how he doubles back and forth between the crafted and the mechanically reproducible. Citing the earliest of printing traditions—woodcut—Gillick has selected images from the dawn of the mechanically produced book to go along with his both crafted and yet electronic book. These images are related to prints that he featured in exhibitions in Germany and New York.
Some of them clearly depict scenes of "labor." Others are difficult to fathom, and seem almost arbitrary or counter-productive to "illustration."
Gillick's musing might have been inspired by the writings of Walter Benjamin, in specific his writings on his personal library, and on the consequences of mechanical reproduction.
But most profoundly, as the artist himself said, the loose and dissonant collage of texts and images cannot be reduced into a simple discussion of text and image.
His real contribution is a melancholy insight into the life of the twenty-first century artist, whose every waking thought can be determined as work, whose every plane ride can be dedicated to drafting a powerpoint presentation, and whose every utterance is always hijacked into understanding and elucidating a greater project.
The advent of technology, the ubiquitous accessibility and elimination of difference between public and private, between home and office, is no more poignantly felt than in the life of the artist, yoked -- if successful -- to an ever-increasing spiral of demands and obligations.
The decision to stop and "not work," might be the only luxury still out of reach.
Thus the very choice of form is a final irony for Gillick, whose thoughts on labor, encased in this precious volume, contrast deliciously with the presence of his highly crafted, perfectly produced and utterly limited work.

***