The history of modern art is often told through aesthetic breakthroughs that sync well with cultural and political change. From Courbet to Picasso, from Malevich to Warhol, it is accepted that art tracks the disruptions of industrialization, fascism, revolution, and war. Yet filtering the history of modern art only through catastrophic events cannot account for the subtle developments that lead to the profound confusion at the heart of contemporary art. In Industry and Intelligence, the artist Liam Gillick writes a nuanced genealogy to help us appreciate contemporary art's engagement with history even when it seems apathetic or blind to current events. Taking a broad view of artistic creation from 1820 to today, Gillick follows the response of artists to incremental developments in science, politics, and technology. The great innovations and dislocations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have their place in this timeline, but their traces are alternately amplified and diminished as Gillick moves through artistic reactions to liberalism, mass manufacturing, psychology, nuclear physics, automobiles, and a host of other advances. He intimately ties the origins of contemporary art to the social and technological adjustments of modern life, which artists struggled to incorporate truthfully into their works.

The history of modern art is often told through aesthetic breakthroughs that sync well with cultural and political change. From Courbet to Picasso, from Malevich to Warhol, it is accepted that art tracks the disruptions of industrialization, fascism, revolution, and war. Yet filtering the history of modern art only through catastrophic events cannot account for the subtle developments that lead to the profound confusion at the heart of contemporary art. In Industry and Intelligence, the artist Liam Gillick writes a nuanced genealogy to help us appreciate contemporary art's engagement with history even when it seems apathetic or blind to current events. Taking a broad view of artistic creation from 1820 to today, Gillick follows the response of artists to incremental developments in science, politics, and technology. The great innovations and dislocations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have their place in this timeline, but their traces are alternately amplified and diminished as Gillick moves through artistic reactions to liberalism, mass manufacturing, psychology, nuclear physics, automobiles, and a host of other advances. He intimately ties the origins of contemporary art to the social and technological adjustments of modern life, which artists struggled to incorporate truthfully into their works.

This book documents a performance event in the Amphitheater in Arles, France, with artists Uri Aran, Daniel Buren, Fischli & Weiss, Jef Geys, Douglas Gordon, Oscar Murillo and Lawrence Weiner, among others. Using imported sand, the space was transformed into a beach and a moonscape.

- Anri Sala (b.1974) is a young artist whose haunting videos, photographs and installations have been applauded by critics and curators the world over
- Though his work employs straight documentary practices, it also weaves its formal concerns (light and darkness, monochrome and colour, sound and silence) into a poetic investigation of its medium
- Among other distinctions, Sala was awarded the Young Artist Prize at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001) and nominated for the Guggenheim's prestigious Hugo Boss Prize (2002)
- This is the first monograph of this scale and scope on Anri Sala's work

No less versatile in his writing than in his installations, films, architecture, and sculpture, Liam Gillick unites his critical essays in this collection, most of which were originally printed in art magazines or exhibition catalogues. Lauded for his ingenious reinterpretation of Conceptual and Minimalist art, Liam Gillick has often used language, whether in type on a wall or on a page, as a site of artistic, theoretical, and political intervention. He reveals himself here as a witness of and major actor in the largely European 1990s art scene that included Philippe Parreno, Pierre Huyghe, Carsten H ller, Angela Bulloch, Douglas Gordon, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. A key publication of discussions, references, and artistic engagements of the 1990s, the book also allows an examination of the renewed importance at this time of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, John Baldessari, and Allen Ruppersberg.