“Your website hurts my eyes.”
“There seems to be too many things going on.”
“All those colours are crazy.”
“Portfolio websites should be simple and show your work.”
“It’s hard to read some of the pages.”
“I don’t get it.”
All of the above statements have been said to me regarding my website – this website. I’d like you to remember them as I’ll be addressing each of them in this attempt at explaining my work and discussing my inspiration.
On December 9th, 2009 Meredith Carr mentioned that Liam Gillick was doing an artist talk at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and suggested we go. Liam Gillick’s name rang a bell but I couldn’t quite place where I’d heard it first. I did know that he’d recently been commissioned by The Fairmont Hotel to create a public art piece for their new Waterfront location in Vancouver but I was certain I’d heard or read about him earlier.
The work Liam Gillick created for The Fairmont is a text-based piece that repeats: “Lying on top of a building the clouds looked no nearer than when I was lying on the street.”
Around the same time I had made a plan to redesign my portfolio site. I’d been conceptualizing, planning, and thinking about the direction I wanted to take, how I wanted to present my work and, more importantly, how I wanted to present myself. As an Interactive Creative and Front End Developer my online presence is what I do. It represents me and what I bring to a company and is therefore extremely important. The portfolio site I had up at the time was made in 2 days out of necessity and had no concept and didn’t reflect the uniqueness of what I do.
I knew I wanted my website to be intuitive, clear, and easy to use … those are pretty standard goals. I also knew I wanted my site to have an evolutionary aspect, a sense of change, a feeling of a willingness to not be in total control but was struggling with how I would do so.
I’m at the point in my career where I’m removed enough from my college learning that I can recognize that my design won’t change the world (but it can make it better). I’m aware my design style isn’t better than everyone else’s and I’m able to identify my strengths and weaknesses. My strength’s are conceptualization, interaction design, art direction, and front end development. I’m mature enough to admit that though I am competent at visual design and have solid typographic skills there are people that are faster, better, and enjoy visual design more than I do. I know there are people that get as much satisfaction from creating imagery, developing colour palettes, and bringing web concept to life as I do when I create a clever interface or think of a fresh way for a User to accomplish what they’re trying to do. In hopes of completing this train of thought I’ll end with this: I’m at the point in my personal development where I admit that there are a lot of people that can come up with ideas that are just as good or better than mine, but it’s where these ideas overlap that greatness happens.
Prior to deciding to re-conceptualize, redesign, and redevelop my website I’d been working on my understanding of colour. I’m excited by colours, I enjoy using them but felt that it was one of my weaker areas and knew I had no mastery over it. I’d read a lot of Josef Albers, specifically “Interaction of Color” and felt that I was improving my understanding.
Liam Gillick is a professor at Columbia University in New York City as well as an established and recognized artist. To quote Dr. Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith, “Gillick’s practice to date has encompassed a wide range of media and activities (including sculpture, writing, architectural and graphic design, film, and music) as well as various critical and curatorial projects, his work as a whole is also marked by a fondness for diversions and distractions, tangents and evasions.” Central to this multidimensional practice is the artist’s ongoing research of past and present evaluations of the aesthetics of social systems with a focus on modes of production rather than consumption. His work focuses on capitalism, current forms of social organization, and social volatility and the possibilities that instability offers. Through his own writings and the use of specific materials in his artworks, Gillick examines how the built world carries traces of social, political and economic systems”
As I listened to Gillick speak I soon discovered that a lot of what he was saying and a lot of what he had done were answers to questions I had started to ask of my work, of the world, and of myself (granted in a much less refined manner than Gillick due to his extensive pursuit and exploration in these arenas). My acceptance of my own limitations and my desire to focus on my strengths in the interactive space coincided with the production methods of Liam Gillick’s work. Gillick’s work is primarily fabricated, constructed, and/or assembled by people other than himself. Our world – today’s world consists of specialists and once a person embraces this fact the level of work that is attainable is increased. I felt that my thoughts and realizations about myself and my desire to work with people that have unique abilities that balanced out my own were in sync with Liam Gillick’s practice and what he was saying.
Works such “Literally” wouldn’t be possible unless embracing modern production techniques that require a specialized skill set and knowledge that extends beyond the Artists ability.
Liam Gillick addressed the fact that he didn’t create most of his final products by hand which I felt proved his reasoning that the concept, the work is the idea – not the construction.
As a quick side note, it was at this point halfway through the talk that I remembered that I’d first read about Liam Gillick two years earlier in Nicolas Bourriaud’s book “Post-Production” which I recommend to anyone.
Gillick continued to talk about his relationships with some of the people that had created his work. Specifically he recalled a man that was asking him about his colour choices. This man went on to express his own thoughts on Liam Gillick’s process and colour selection only to be answered by Gillick with, “actually I sort of just pick the colours like you would in Photoshop. I don’t put much thought into them at all.”
This blew my mind. Was he saying that his work that I liked the most due to it’s form, it’s vibrancy, and it’s extreme use of colour were just picked at random like ink dropping colours in Photoshop? Yep, he did say that, and went on to explain that he didn’t really understand colour but was excited by it – just as I was. At this point I remember my mind racing, I was listening to an artist whom I respected and even better I was relating with. Thoughts began forming in my head about randomness, about a lack of control, and then Liam Gillick started talking about the work he did for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
This piece is my favorite work by Liam Gillick, I think it’s beautiful, visually stimulating, and exceptionally well crafted. It’s this work that I’ve used as the inspiration for my website. Using Photoshop I cut about 30 of the most interesting panels from this image and wrote some PHP that randomly chooses one as an overlay for each of the thumbnails on the homepage of my site.
To be honest, after listening to Liam Gillick speak for a couple hours I feel I have an understanding of what his work is about – not a complete understanding but an idea. There are a lot of things that I don’t understand but still like … for example my friend Cameron Reed’s music Babe Rainbow I don’t get but I like, my friends Matthew Robertson’s and Wesley Cameron’s Until We Have A Helicopter Curatorial Project I don’t get – but I love. So to the people that have said, “I don’t get it” regarding my site – that’s ok, maybe it might make a little more sense now but maybe not: that’s ok.
The idea of randomness had been formulating in my head before listening to Liam Gillick speak but afterward I had an idea for the colours of my website to randomly generate on each visit of every page. Press refresh right now and you’ll see this … using javascript I’ve coded my site to pick colours at random. Thus achieving my goal of creating a site that is evolutionary and has a lack of control. The results are always a surprise … sometimes the combination’s are interesting, sometimes the combination’s are bad – I’m ok with that. I believe it represents the progress of my work and the growth of my creative thought process – I’m not sure where it’s going but it’s evolving and I’m constantly refining it.
To anyone that has said, “Your website hurts my eyes.” or “All those colours are crazy.” Thank you, I think you’ve confirmed my intentions and validated my efforts yet missed the point. I believe that your portfolio site is where you should push yourself, you should stretch your concepts and not be afraid to take chances or even fail. Moreover any company I work for or with I hope would be striving to create authentic, inventive, and exceptional work.
Liam Gillick also spoke for a bit about the work he made for the Venice Bienalle that was deemed failure. The concept of the work was interesting and the final product was well constructed but the overall impression was weak. Gillick spoke humorously about the work and sort of inferred that failure is a part of creating and that he knew that it wasn’t his best.
The piece at the German Pavilion featured a cat that would talk – a silly idea. The night before the show Gillick realized something needed to be done so he shoved a piece of paper in it’s mouth. This did little to reconcile the many issues with the work.
I also accept failure or the possibility of failure as part of my process. I take as many precautions to avoid failure and would be very wary about making any decisions that would doom a project but I am willing to discuss and propose such ideas. So to the people that have said, “It’s hard to read some of the pages.” or “There seems to be too many things going on.” I say, maybe … maybe sometimes it’s hard to read and maybe sometimes it’s not. Maybe sometimes there are too many things going on and maybe sometimes there aren’t … it’s a chance I decided to take.
Which brings me to the final point I will conclude with: to the very few people that have commented, “Portfolio websites should be simple and show your work.” I could not disagree with you more – but I won’t try to change your mind or convince you otherwise. As I stated before, as an Interactive Creative, as an Interactive Designer, as an Interactive Developer … my portfolio is where I can try new things, it’s a place I can learn, it’s a place I can succeed or fail with no consequence. My portfolio is a place I’ve decided to take chances and see what happens. I believe anyone who is working in the interactive space should use their portfolio site to represent what they can do and what they’re about – so if you think websites should be simple and show your work, cool! I won’t argue with that, if you choose to use Indexhibit or a pre-built WordPress Theme and it works for you – that’s awesome! If you feel it represents your work that’s great … as well as becoming more mature with my work I’m also becoming more technology agnostic … instead of scoffing at the use of Flash or people that prefer to work on a PC I believe if it works for you and is the right decision or the correct technology for the problem then there is no reason not to do what works for you or the project.
Deciding to go to Liam Gillick’s artists talk with Meredith was a huge point in my year and helped me distill and define some of my thoughts. I’ve created this website and am happy and proud of it. I do recognize that Liam Gillick’s work is mainly conceptual then constructed or fabricated by a third party. I feel that this website is truly my own but there is a part of me that wonders whether Gillick has inadvertently inspired me to create one of his projects. This website is the closest to art that I’m willing to go – I’m extremely happy that I’m not an artist. I’m an Interactive Designer and am comfortable with the limitations and rules of the interactive space (screen resolution, user interaction options, business needs, hardware limitations etc.)- the freedom and chaos of the art space scares me. In any case, to have identified and related with a man with such an advanced manner of thinking and a body of great works – it’s cool with me either way.
Liam Gillick is represented by the Casey Kaplan Gallery
Read this excellent interview from Vancouver based art publication Fillip: It’s Interesting that You, with Your Values, Would Ask Me a Question Like This
