Born in 1940
Lives and works in Woodridge (NY, US)
1982
Oral work
Year of Purchase: 2008
Ian Wilson’s work does not avoid radicalism; it challenges every value of the aesthetic consciousness and attempts to subvert the idea that art finds form in the completion of the object. Moreover, Ian Wilson’s artistic object is limited to the immaterial, to the “dematerialized,” to “oral communication as an art form”: it is discussion.
“If we refute the idea that art is a sub-category of objects––a myth perpetuated by its function as merchandise––in favor of the view that it is a sub-category of information,” wrote Victor Burgin, “it becomes clear that the context of art is a complex of information in which the generative and transformative aspects of real-time experience must be taken into account.”1
In the early 1960s, Ian Wilson was initially a painter, only to move on to experiments with minimal formal language which, by 1966, would result in monochromatic work. He also conducted research that combined painting and sculpture, achieving greater and greater austerity. Wilson gradually abandoned all materiality in order to focus on the concept. Beginning in 1968, alongside such artists as Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, Douglas Huebler, and Robert Barry, Wilson took part in the principal conceptual exhibitions, namely those organized by Seth Siegelaub. Unlike Weiner’s, Ian Wilson’s work breaks free from enunciations in order to transform the act of discussion into the sole artistic form. Wilson’s intention is to put behind all relation to object or representation in order to bring out the materiality of language alone, which he now approaches as a subject to be sculpted: “I’m certainly not a poet, I’m a very bad writer; probably that’s why I’m talking about oral communication as a sculpture.”2 For Ian Wilson, the idea dominates over the object’s physical presence, and word can supersede materiality and absorb the essential traits of an object. In this sense, Wilson’s work presents itself as an organization of ideal forms. Starting from this assumption, the artist decided to create nothing else but the conditions of speech.
Wilson’s Time (spoken) (1982), acquired by FRAC Lorraine, is considered as one of his first works to be completely dematerialized and free from the artist’s own presence. Because it is simultaneously associated with shared and subjective knowledge, the notion of time became for Wilson an object of study and a pretext to initiate exchange. When questioned in an 1968 interview about the nature of his practice, the artist replied that he was interested in the spoken word “time”3.
If the origins of this work by Ian Wilson go back to 1968, the work as it presently appears at FRAC Lorraine dates from 1982. That year, Wilson installed for the first time, in the exhibition À Pierre et Marie, une exposition en chantier4, a version of this work no longer based on his physical presence, but on an instruction. Rather than go all the way to Paris, he asked the artists occupying an abandoned church building housing the exhibition to realize the work in his place. Whenever visitors inquire about the piece: “What is Time?”――they hear in return: “It’s the word ‘time’ being spoken.”
Time (spoken) (1982) thus comes to being through our curiosity with regards to the very nature of the work. Its apparent absence forces us to engage with our neighbor, to initiate a dialog, and to reflect on what makes up reality. The work undeniably occupies a particular place in Ian Wilson’s production as whole. First only discussion, the work breaks free from a certain form of authority in order to introduce itself into an act of sharing that surpasses the figure of artist alone. Whether the utterance of the word “time” constitutes a work or not is, in the end, of little consequence to Ian Wilson. What interests him is the fact that the work might be realized everywhere and by everyone. Only speech seems to count. Withdrawal into the background well describes the attitude of the artist who declares with perspicacity: “The act of discussion is undoubtedly more important than what I have to say.”
Guillaume Mansart
Art Critic
1 Victor Burgin, “Art and Language” in: David Lamelas, ed. Publication, Nigel Greenwood: London, 1970, pp. 9–12. [Article inaccessible at the time of translation].
2 in: Lucy Lipard, -Six years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object 1966 to 1972, University of California Press: Berkeley: 1973, p. 84.
3 “I would be at a gallery opening and someone would ask me: ‘so what are you doing these days?’ I would reply, ‘I am interested in the word time.’ Later, someone would ask: ‘But how can time be your art?’ And I might have replied: ‘As it is spoken, “time”.’ Another day, someone might have asked, having heard I was using ‘time’ as my art: ‘So what are you working with these days,’ and I would reply: ‘“time” I am interested in the idea’…. I like the word when it is spoken: ‘time’. And so the word was used over and over again.” Quoted in: Anne Rorimer, New Art in the 60s and 70s. Redefining Reality, Thames & Hudson: London, 2001, p. 91.
4 À Pierre et Marie, une exposition en chantier, a singular two-year-long project (1982–1984), designed by Michel Claura (who invited Ian Wilson), Sarkis, Daniel Buren, Jean-Hubert Martin, and Selman Selvi. À Pierre et Marie was based on time (time of foretold destruction of the place of the exhibition, time of the production of the work…) and on an approach, always in progress, breaking away from the traditional exhibition schedules.