Gillick presents the abstract objects of the exhibition as symbolic or metaphorical signifiers in the order of his narrative project. It is a knowing reversal of the critical fortunes of Judd, who during the sixties and seventies was able to convince the art world that his works were metaphysical expressions of a phenomenological pure abstraction, until a number of postmodern critics noted that these works seemed to exude a certain industrialized machismo.

Like Judd’s objects, Gillick's works are brightly colored manufactured items. In this exhibition they tend to follow three major forms: a boxy corral-like shape of painted aluminum bars and inset with plexi-glass panes, a free-standing wall-like shape also formed of aluminum and inset with plexi-glass panes, and an aluminum wall relief. Each of these shapes has a twin in one of two gallery spaces, painted in either a conflagration of bright day-glo colors or a deep red.

If Judd’s work was criticized as a representative of a kind of Western industrialized hegemony, then in Gillick’s work that criticism becomes an elemental component of his narrative. The manufactured aesthetic of minimalism’s abstract objects came to literally represent the processes of industrialization through an aesthetic demonstration of the virtues of that production; but since the eighties Western industry has increasingly shifted overseas. Western capital has morphed into an abstract information and management economy, and the aesthetics of minimalism have become tinged with a quaint nostalgia for the age of an industrialized economy and culture. The Construcción de Uno project allows Gillick to frame that historical critique of minimalism, which is inherent in the aesthetic of his own objects, and begin a critical discussion of our post-industrial culture. He argues that the models of decision making in late capitalist society, with their endless subcommittees, actions farmed out to sub-contracted government subsidiaries, and dallying scenario planning that advocates status-quo thinking, prevent any real reform.

Gillick doesn’t intend to simply refer to those problematic issues, but offers a site within which to examine them. The screens and corrals form a spatial representation of his theoretical concepts, materialized into abstract forms whose suggestive blankness is intended to propel conversation towards new utopian models.

Liam Gillick, exhibition view, The State Itself Becomes A Super Whatnot. Via Casey Kaplan Gallery.

"Utopia" is not a word the artist uses lightly; of the collaborative 2003 Venice Biennale project by Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Utopia Station, in which Gillick participated with a host of other artists and thinkers, he wrote: " …if we are working in a post-utopian situation, how are things still agreed, planned and developed and who controls these processes? And if the situation is effectively post-utopian in terms of the absence of functional alternatives does the word ‘utopian’ only exist as an accusatory for cultural workers now?" He suggests that the proper alternative space could provide a platform within which to debate the pejorative aspects of utopian ideals, and to propose new ones. Utopia Station was a testing ground where interaction could inspire progressive dialogues, and it made active use of that collaborative invitation, with the contributions of over 160 artists.

Here it is only the forms of modernism that meet the gaze of the viewer, the failure to achieve the ideals they once represented reflected in their shiny Plexiglass surfaces, the materials alienated from the driving ideological thrust of the modernist project. As Gillick states, "We are all caught in the scenario play of late capitalism." His work is itself a deferral, a place to test for future scenarios, and a zone of endless argument. Which may be the point — to encapsulate the problematic of the current situation in the work — but then, one wonders whether his radical critique is merely window dressing or a call to action.

In traversing the exhibition site, one finds a reversal of the exhibition's title, also boldly inscribed on the wall: "The Whatnot Itself Becomes A Super State." His point, that there is a cyclical relation between the products of the state — that is, the invisible manufacture of order and material relations — and the manner of the state's production, could as well be applied to his own critique: Gillick's tastefully designed forms seesaw from the radical discourse that he carefully cradles them in and back to the shiny commercial objects that finance the intellectual’s dream.