On the Order of Things: Jill Magid in Conversation with Michaël Amy
Published in March 2025 in The Art Section
By Michaël Amy
In 1966, Bruce Nauman noted: “If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.” American conceptual artist, writer, and filmmaker Jill Magid takes this idea beyond the studio and into the world. To tweak Robert Rauschenberg’s saying of 1959, she blurs the boundaries between art and very particular forms of life, for her project is to engage systems. Magid’s creative strategy consists in finding legal ways to introduce herself into governmental or corporate entities, to see to what extent she will be permitted to fleetingly impact these, and what she will be allowed to glean from these. Magid’s performance-based work is about individual will versus established structures of power and control, a universal theme that this artist utilizes to highlight certain western capitalist political, judicial, economic, and social priorities….
Over her circa 25-year-long trajectory, Magid has worked in a variety of media (or has engaged others to do so on her behalf), taken on a diversity of organizations, and broached a range of themes, including surveillance, storytelling, desire, hierarchy, art, architecture, violence, the economy, the law, and the state. Magid’s work is not easy. By questioning the way things are, it makes us think. It’s not about surface appeal, although it can be visually stunning, photographs well, and has been displayed in conceptually and aesthetically compelling ways. Comprising relics of completed or ongoing semi-private performances, it makes us both ponder and interpret an only partially revealed sequence of events. Do we trust the messenger? If we, the viewers, are engaged, we do our best to fill in the many blanks. These are all added values in our age of ignorance and growing powerlessness.
Full article and interview can be found here.
Jill Magid (SMVisS ’00) is an artist, writer and filmmaker. Magid interrogates structures of power on an intimate level, exploring the emotional, philosophical, and legal tensions between institutions and individual agency. Her first documentary feature, The Proposal, premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival and was released in theaters across the US and Canada with Oscilloscope Laboratories. Magid has installed solo exhibitions around the world at institutions including M Leuven, Belgium; Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Berkeley Museum of Art, California; Tate Liverpool, UK; the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam; Yvon Lambert, Paris and New York; Gagosian Gallery, New York; Labor, Mexico City; and the Security and Intelligence Agency of the Netherlands. She has participated in Manifesta, as well as the Liverpool, Bucharest, Singapore, Incheon, Gothenburg, Oslo and Performa Biennials. Magid is the recipient of a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2021 VIA Art Fund Grant, a 2020 Creative Time Artists Commission and the 2017 Calder Prize, and is the author of four novellas.
Michaël Amy is a critic and art historian with a Ph.D. from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. He is a Distinguished Professor of the History of Art in the College of Art and Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology, working in Renaissance, Baroque, modern and contemporary art.
