Frank Prattle with Zefrey Throwell

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Liam Gillick (artist and cat fancier)

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In the backstage green room of Creative Time’s Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice (which was a bright yellow), as a semi-fascist performance warmed up outside with stomping shovels and chanted power slogans, Liam Gillick and I stole away for a few moments over some free snacks and wrangled through the beautifully sticky morass of what it means to be an artist today.

The territory we covered was vast and yet focused, theoretical and yet personal, starting with progressive working practices and how the car company Volvo has indirectly/directly effected art production today and moving to the “hypocrsy equation” in social projects and even straying into Sabrina the Teenage Witch and monkey-wrenching talking cat toys.

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Liam Gillick presenting at the Creative Time Summit in the NY Public Library

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One of my favorite moments of the conversation came when discussing a question that Liam puts to his students, “What is your hobby going to be?”. In a world so focused on productivity and maximizing the multi-tasking potential of every nanosecond, the idea of a hobby has a slight smack of slander, especially in the high octane New York art world today. Precisely because of that and because eventually one will have some inbetween moments where their quotient of product will fall below the bar, “the hobby” is a vital question.

Find out what Liam Gillick’s hobby is, hear him say the words, “unicorns, planets, and falling down” and much more!  For full knowledge, listen to the titillating tell-all in it’s entirety!