After years of close friendship and close reading of each other’s work, Liam Gillick and Lawrence Weiner have finally made an artwork together. “A syntax of dependency:” occupies the first floor of the M HKA in Antwerp—a sort of indoor park interrupted by square columns and large wall openings from one room to the next. Nothing is on display here, at least not in the traditional sense: the only thing the artists have done is to give new flooring to this 1600 m2 space. Stretching out before the visitor like a strange empty basketball court, its wall-to-wall parallel strips of colored linoleum—red, yellow, black, white, gray—are covered sporadically with hints for the rules of the game played here: “That what / sets the stage / for what”; “Folded within itself”; “Outside of any given context.”
Those rules—and that is the catch indicated by the title—are never absolute. Nothing exists without help, support or resistance; it’s one great endless syntactic connection. Different meanings and interpretations walk hand in hand, creating chains of causality and possibility, chains that are as easily broken as created. It is certainly no coincidence, for example, that the colors of the Belgian flag (black, yellow, red) are prominent throughout the entire work. And indeed—as some local commentators were very eager to stress—the three sentences that are written on the floor in three languages (Dutch, French, and English) could be seen as stern clues hinting at the Belgian political class that has been trying despairingly and unsuccessfully to unite the different communities under one national government for more than eight months now. Of course, the artwork does not solely depend on this. If “A syntax of dependency:” is political, it would indicate a vital function in society—exactly because the game is impossible to interpret too easily. The title of this collaboration ends with a colon—and that’s no mistake; it’s merely an invitation to keep on making interpretive mistakes.
The famous aphorism of Derrida (“Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”) is addressed by this work in several ways—but most of all, it is translated to the context of visual art. The questions raised are in themselves nothing new, but their combination and the wideness of possible connotations are remarkable. “A syntax of dependency:” creates a new playing field of interlocking elements: curatorial (it proposes a “new” genre of the duo-exhibition, similar to a collaboration but relinquishing individual authorship); ephemeral (it is an artwork that will disappear after 4 months); architectural (it revalues the floor as a medium of expression); conceptual (it is completely horizontal and thus egalitarian); and theoretical (it once again questions the relationship between language and image). Most importantly, however, is how “A syntax of dependency:” remains wonderfully experiential: there is something in these spaces of the M HKA that certainly wasn’t there before, and that can never be taken outside. There is nothing outside of this work—so whoever wants to know what it is, has to step on it.
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