Introduction

The State Itself Becomes a Super Commune relates to Liam Gillick's recent research into developments within European social democracies in regard to production rather than consumption. Working initially from Brazilian research into Swedish car production methodologies he has been developing a series of scenarios that do not create a sequence of images, but propose a mise-en-scene where the implications of alienated capital may be reconsidered.

Experimental production methods, developed in the 1970s in Sweden, have become part of the standard rhetoric of Western industry. These developments have been challenged, however, by the increasing globalisation of production and outsourcing away from the site of consumption. In the continually deferred "book" Constucción de Uno Gillick creates a scenario where workers in a northern European car factory return to their former work place and discuss the potential of eco-political exchange systems and alternatives production models.

The exhibition includes a large text that announces the completion of a project of reconsideration combined with physical structures that might be considered as the first step in finding new uses for the factory environment. As with much of Gillick's recent work, earlier investigations into non-place, the ambient effects of applied modernism, historical attempts to encourage communal working environments while avoiding classical models of Communism and the gap between the processes of modernisation versus the critical potential of modernism are combined in a series of works that work in parallel to the potential of a critical text.

In the rear space of the gallery a new video is presented that plays with time. Originally shot in 1997 the video is documentation sent to the artist by two curators in order to show the adjustment of a large electronic clock in Kassel. With the addition of a timing chip the clock was set to flick between the time in 1810 and 1997, an approximately 20 minute difference due to the earlier existence of "local time" rather than the "unified time" that came with the railway. The straightforward hand-held film of a precise gesture is further complicated by the addition of new arrangements of Italian "Early Music" which both echoes the times shown in the film (1427, 1447 etc) and introduces an element of temporal order into a chaotic sequence of images.