Jill Magid, performance still from Woman with Sombrero 2022, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, courtesy of the artist
On the Order of Things
Jill Magid in Conversation with Michaël Amy
Jill Magid, Crown Imperial, 2022, Hardcover book (Redouté), cut pages, 8 3/4 x 13 1/2 x 1 3/4 inches, image courtesy of the artist
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.
A system is: “A set of principles or procedures according to which something is done; an organized scheme or method; a multiparty system of government / the public school system” (the New Oxford American Dictionary, 2001). In our western societies, most officially recognized systems, tied as they are to power and control, reflect the ideals of the patriarchy, which constitutes an overarching system of its own. By finding the loopholes through which she can first penetrate these systems––a masculinist verb, par excellence––and then interpret for us what ensued, Magid makes a particularly intriguing pro-feminist move, which gains in urgency at this very moment, as we see both our governmental and corporate systems being tried, tested, undermined, and shattered.
As is well known, the meaning and––thus––the relevance of the individual work of art and of the larger body of work, changes with time, and place. Jill Magid’s growing oeuvre reminds us why culture matters, as long as it lasts, as it helps us define where we came from, who we are, and where we are headed. It underscores that in the world of culture, those things that are not possible or permitted in other realms can be achieved, which are among the reasons why culture finds itself, all too often, in the crosshairs. Magid rocks the boat.
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.
Michaël Amy
March 2025
Jill Magid, Installation view of the exhibition Tender: Balance at the Renaissance Society, Chicago, 2021. In photo: Tender Balance, 2021, HD film with four-channel sound 28:00 minutes
Michaël Amy: Your work suggests to me that you may be working from home, or from a space that would not be mistaken for an artist’s studio.
Jill Magid: I spend time in my studio researching, writing, and engaging or negotiating with collaborators or potential collaborators, and fabricators. My studio looks like an art studio. Hanging from its ceiling are mock-ups for neon signs that will flash the utterances emitted, since the year of my birth, by the public in response to the U.S. Presidents’ speeches: Laughter, Chanting and booing, Mild cheering, etc., drawn from official publications cataloguing everything the Presidents ever said in public. I’m making a sound piece that appropriates the stenographer’s notes which sound like stage directions: At this point, the President tripped over an object on stage. There are cast concrete facsimiles of my heart on the floor, and marked governmental books on my table, with detailed plans on to how to get published inside. In these works, some of which I will show at Various Small Fires in LA, I’m looking at the ways in which my identity and subjecthood are expressed by the government and the Presidency. The gallerist is running for Congress, so I’m literally treating the gallery as a platform where art and politics converge.
MA: Do you delegate the making of some of your work?
JM: Not the writing, research, performance, ideation, or negotiation process, which is a huge part of the work and continues throughout its making. Writing and talking ideas through with people is a form of sketching for me. Once a sculpture, film, sound piece or object is ready for production, I search for the appropriate people to fabricate it. For me, the form the work takes and the person who helps me attain it are informed by the system I’m interrogating. I build a language and visual vocabulary for each project, which becomes a hybrid of the materials or defaults within the system, and my own interventions in them. Often, whom I choose to produce the piece is conceptually relevant to the work. For instance, I recently hired a botanical artist to draw the template for my neon flowers (2024-2025)––which are growth models, mathematical equations that represent the way to get the most capital out of that flower type—as a botanical illustration.
Jill Magid, A Model for Easter Lily Stem Elongation and Flowering Date where y is 41” 2023, neon, transformers, wire, 52” L x 16” W x 11” D, image courtesy of the artist, photograph by GC Photography
MA: Is that information shared?
JM: In the case of the botanical illustrations, the illustrator’s name, and, importantly, her status as botanical illustrator, is listed in the work. The treatment of the template as the flower it represents makes it strange and beautiful, but also clear. In other projects, the company, or type of company, that fabricates the work is even more prominent. For instance, Auto Portrait Pending (2005) is a work in which my body will be transformed into a one-carat diamond, after I die, and set into an engagement ring. The empty ring setting and a series of documents constitute the work at this stage. While the company, Lifegem, is not that important, both what its employees do and the materials through which they engaged me, the consumer, are. Those included an order form I filled out that included a page of legalese indemnifying the company if the diamond does not grow exactly as ordered. I wrote a postmortem love letter to Lifegem, addressing that legalese. Once my body is turned into a diamond, the company will send it to the Gemological Institute of America to be authenticated and rated, which produces another document, which will be included in the work. The forms, letters, and contracts are designed or filled out with as much attention as I give to the ring setting, ring box, and their display.
MA: How did the work involving the diamond come about?
JM: I told my gallerist in Amsterdam a story that had been circulating in my family, about my grandmother who, during the Great Depression, found a diamond ring outside of a party. It was said that she hid it in a safe deposit box for fifty years. No one had ever seen this diamond or knew if the story was true. When my grandmother died, my mother went to the safe deposit box and, sure enough, there was a very large diamond ring inside it. There was something amazing to me about this diamond: You sell a diamond because it is valuable, or you wear it as a status symbol, or symbol of love. Instead, this diamond was hidden away for half a century, in the dark. A diamond is cut to refract light, right? So, the two things that make a diamond a diamond, namely its ability to refract light and its value on the market, were negated. When I told my gallerist this story, he told me about a company that transforms human remains into diamonds, and I researched this company, thinking about value, death, and legacy. I realized that Lifegem had reduced the metaphors around diamonds into a commodity. I wanted to use that in a work of art. It took me a few months to figure out that the body that was to become a diamond had to be my own. I am often the protagonist of my own work, the subject that is added to the system to interrogate it. In this case, my body in the form of a diamond will become a commodity on the art market.
Jill Magid, Auto Portrait Pending, 2005, gold ring with empty setting, ring box, vitrines, corporate and private contracts, dimensions variable,
image courtesy of the artist
MA: You do not represent yourself in your work in traditional ways.
JM: I appear in the work all the time: In Evidence Locker (2004), as a citizen filmed by police CCTV cameras; in Failed States (2012), as the witness to the Capitol Shooter on TV in Texas; in my film The Proposal (2018), and in Head (2005), which I made in the same year as Auto Portrait Pending. Sometimes, I appear in the work as an absence. I think of Tender (2020) in those terms. If you look at the trajectory of my work, there are these periods in which my body is highly visible that are followed by an underlining of my absence. After Evidence Locker, in which I was followed by the Liverpool police department through their citywide CCTV system, I returned to Amsterdam and had a kind of existential crisis. It was as if I didn't exist anymore without the CCTV system recording my every move. I responded by making a series of works, such as Head, Composite, or Camera One Wester Park (all of 2005), in which I used the tools of police forensics to locate my missing body. I learned the police employed a 3D forensic artist to reconstruct an unidentified subject’s likeness based on his remains, such as a skull, tooth or hair sample found at a crime scene. I submitted a 3D print of my skull made by Cat scan with the filled-out forms forensic artists provide to the police, but wrote up the latter as if this woman, who was last seen in an ecstatic state, had gone missing. I included a sample of my hair, and the forensic artist, without ever having seen me, created my bust in ecstasy. In almost all my work, my representation is also a portrait of the system I enter. That process revealed me, how the system works, and what it values, in a new way.
MA: Which was your breakthrough work?
JM: One of the earliest was Lobby 7 (1999), which I made as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lobby 7 is the name of the main lobby at MIT, with an atrium a bit like the Guggenheim’s. An informational monitor hangs in that lobby, announcing the events that are happening that day at the university. I was, at that time, beginning to explore surveillance technology in my studio. I was moving a lipstick surveillance camera across my body and watching how it transformed my image. The informational monitor at the heart of MIT was a system I became interested in using the camera to interfere with. So, I bought spyware off spy.com, and got the model number off the TV, and ordered a remote for it. With these, I gained control over MIT’s monitor by switching the channel. I arrived in the middle of the day when the students were moving between classes. I stood beneath the monitor and watched as I moved this lipstick-shaped infrared camera in a masturbatory way over every part of my body that I could reach under my clothing, constantly going in and out of the openings in my clothes, so you'd see a breast, and then, all of a sudden, you'd see the students around me, or the balcony, so it's this kind of weaving of my body in the space, and the space on the information monitor, and it lasted about a half hour, and the cops were called, which I didn't know, because I was staring at the monitor. When I was finished, I turned the transformer off, put the camera away, and walked out. This was the first time I interrupted the feed of an existing system with my own feed. The other important thing was the cops. I was taught in my program at MIT, the heroes of which were Vito Acconci, Marina Abramović, Alfredo Jaar, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, that the authorities, and the state, are bad. The artist is the renegade good guy, and it's a cat-and-mouse game. I began to question the guerilla style, and wondered what would happen if I got permission to do things, instead. How would the situation change if we both became vulnerable? What would happen if power was more fluid? From that point onward, starting with System Azure Security Ornamentation (2002), where I was paid by the Dutch police to decorate their surveillance cameras with jewels, I gained permission. Permission is a material that changes the consistency of the work.
MA: Your work is often the result of a collaboration of sorts, a set of interactions, a pattern of calls and responses.
JM: When the work involves the police or agencies of the state, it is a type of collaboration, but not in the same sense as when two artists are working together on a piece. I am interested in how power and systems of control work, whether they are part of the government, or are corporate. I use the law and permission as a material in my work. The work comprises my calls and the responses of those inside the system. It is not as if I participate or drive all these calls and responses, and then there is the work. The work is part of these interactions and materializes along the way. With Evidence Locker (2004), my performance was firstly for the police. I performed for the cameras, then filled out the legal documents required to access the footage, as love letters to the CCTV observer, and the next day the police would give me the footage that included me. I would then watch the footage and restructure my behavior, pushing it even further, the next day. The work of art is a kind of tool, my body is also a kind of tool, and then the police respond, which determines my next move. All this manifests in the final videos, which I edited together cinematically, and I gathered the legal forms, as love letters, in an epistolary novella.
Jill Magid, Evidence Locker, 2004, 4 videos (edited CCTV footage), audio, books, image courtesy of the artist
MA: Your work amounts to a performance from which the viewer is excluded, and which she is invited to reconstruct based upon the clues you provide.
JM: I disagree. I think of the viewer as a series of positions. If you look at Lobby 7, for instance, I was the first viewer. I performed for myself, watching my image produced by the CCTV camera on the informational monitor. The second viewer is the passerby, the person in the lobby who stops and watches the images on the monitor, or the movements I am making while standing in the lobby. The third viewer watches the performance-documentation video. Lobby 7 is a performance, and then it is a video. I'm not leaving clues for someone to follow. Rather, there are different moments in which the viewer enters the work. The Barragán Archives (2013-2018), and certainly my feature film The Proposal (2018), is structured around the epistolary relationship between me and Federica Zanco, who directs the Barragan Foundation at the Swiss family-owned furniture company Vitra and controls the rights to Barragán’s work. The dialogue between us is real and performative at the same time; we are the first and second viewers. The letters also function for the art or film audience, when I include the hard copies, which I treat as both images and prose, as part of the installation or as voice over in the film. There were multiple points over the course of the three-year-duration of that project when exhibitions were mounted. The exhibitions included works that, in their very form, challenged copyright, like a framed open book showing an image I may not reproduce, or a lectern that I may not show in places, outside of the US, where there is not a fair use doctrine, and that is, therefore, hidden beneath a blanket. I think the beauty of a work is in its rigor, which accounts for all the formal, aesthetic, and conceptual choices I apply to it.
MA: You occasionally play the role of a whistleblower.
JM: A whistleblower comes from inside the system. Think, for example, of Edward Snowden. He was inside the system. He had access to information. He was supposed to be silent but spoke out. I am outside the systems I interrogate, until I find a loophole, or am invited in. But I am always potentially implicated by them, too, legally, as a taxpayer, or a citizen with privileges based on my identity. With The Spy Project (2005-2010), as an artist who was commissioned by the state to reveal the face of the Dutch Intelligence Agency, was I a threat? Was I visible to the spy agency before being commissioned to make a work for it? Within many of the systems I engage, I'm already
a––willing, or unwilling––participant: I am subject to the police (System Azure Security Ornamentation; Evidence Locker); I use money (Tender, 2020; Tender Balance, 2021). I didn't work for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York City when I made Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy (2006-2007), but the cop who let me shadow him could have searched me on the subway platform, in accordance with Mayor Guiliani’s orders. I wasn't a PhD in Art History when I made The Barragán Archives (2013-16) but was subject to the laws against reproducing images of Barragán’s work.
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Installation view: Jill Magid: Woman With Sombrero, The Barragán Archives, Contemporary Collection at Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2022. photograph by Audrey Laurans
MA: Are you an activist artist?
JM: Activism works best when it is not nuanced. My work is about asking questions and trying to understand the system to both reveal something about it and my agency in relation to it. For instance, with Tender, I engraved the edges of 120,000 pennies minted in 2020 with the phrase The Body Was Already So Fragile and then put the coins into circulation. Trump recently decided to eliminate pennies. I learned from meetings with the US Mint that he's right: the government loses a lot of money producing pennies. Trump doesn't mention that the reason pennies are still in production is because the lobbies for the armored car companies that make so much money recycling coinage fought to keep minting pennies. With Tender, I intervened on the penny’s edge to question value, the propaganda embossed on that coin’s faces, and the status of those who get access to money. I made 120,000 Tender pennies amounting to the $1,200 stimulus checks the U.S. Treasury provided to select individuals through the CARES Act.
MA: Narrative is essential to your work.
JM: It is. Or, you could say that the work I make produces narratives.
MA: You aim to seduce.
JM: I was on fire when I read Baudrillard’s theory of seduction, ages ago, because I recognized what I was doing and thinking in someone else’s writing. Baudrillard talks about games, and that games have rules, which are not laws. There is an internal logic to a game––its participants play roles. I think of projects in those terms, playfully, and very seriously. How do you initiate the game where there wasn't a game? How do you keep it going once it starts? That’s the call and response we talked about. However, an artwork must
seduce––otherwise, why would anyone engage with it, or be moved by it? Beauty––or rigor––has a role to play. And then, there's the exhibition and how the works unfold in space, the narrative or feeling they create together.
Jill Magid, Tender, 2020, 120,000 edge-engraved 2020 US pennies, custom wrapper, image courtesy of the artist, Creative Time, New York, photograph by Paul McGeiver
MA: How important is improvisation?
JM: It's necessary. It's like chess. You can only anticipate the other person’s moves.
MA: Any favorite projects?
JM: I have messy projects, and clean projects, and I value these in different ways. A clean project is one in which the system and the form I produce from it, beautifully come together; it’s like the form of the work perfectly crystallizes the system and the question I posed to it. I think of Evidence Locker, Auto Portrait Pending, Tender, The Proposal, and Out-Game Flowers (2023), for instance, as clean. Out-Game Flowers is a series of digital bouquets featuring popular flowers that I hacked from iconic video games like Final Fantasy, Super Mario Brothers, and World of Warcraft. As NFTs, the bouquets interrogate notions of ownership and the intertwining between emotional, symbolic, and financial values on the blockchain. With other projects, my interaction with the system is messy, complicated, and extremely human. In Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy, there isn’t really a clear system. You have this cop on the subway platform, looking for
terrorists––that’s his job. It's post 9/11, New York, and he's secretly training me to be a cop, and I'm teaching him about art. The system doesn’t record us—there are only traces. He gives me a bullet from his gun and his uniform shirt. He lets me steal footage from the CCTV system. But what it amounts to are these fragments that together reveal a porous, vulnerable, highly slanted system of control, with two people, of uneven power, who are wrestling within it. I think there's a real beauty in that. Failed States was similar. These works are slower, they leak rather than crystallize.
Jill Magid, installation view, Dia Bridgehampton, Bridgehampton, New York, July 25, 2020–June 6, 2021. © Jill Magid. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York
Jill Magid, photograph by Paul McGeiver, image courtesy of the artist
Jill Magid 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.
Michaël Amy