Jill Magid (born 1973) is an American conceptual artist, writer, and filmmaker. Magid’s performance-based practice "interrogates structures of power on an intimate level, exploring the emotional, philosophical, and legal tensions that exist between institutions and individual agency.”Dia Art Foundation, Exhibitions: Jill Magid. Retrieved 16 February 2020
Magid has frequently worked by forming personal relationships with governmental systems of power, including police and intelligence agencies, questioning these structures of authority on a human level by embedding herself within them.Aoife Rosenmeyer, Jill Magid, ArtReview, Summer 2016 Other projects intervene at contested sites of corporate control, bureaucratic process, and the law.Jovana Stokić, Jill Magid, Bomb Magazine, May 13, 2014
Life Magid was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1973. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and received an MS in Visual Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She currently lives and works in New York with her husband Jonny Bauer and their two sons. She serves as an adjunct professor at The Cooper Union.The Cooper Union, Jill Magid Faculty Page. Accessed 18 February 2020
Exhibitions Magid's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at numerous institutions, including Tate Modern, London (2009); Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2017);Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City. “A Letter Always Arrives At Its Destination” The Barragán Archives April 27, 2017 – October 8, 2017. Retrieved 18 February 2020 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010); San Francisco Art Institute (2016);San Francisco Art Institute. Jill Magid: The Proposal 9 September 2016 – 10 December 2016. Retrieved 18 February 2020 Berkeley Museum of Art, California (2011);Berkeley Art Museum, California. “Jill Magid: Closet Drama” 20 March 2011 – 12 June 2011. Retrieved 18 February 2020 Tate Liverpool (2009);Tate Liverpool. “Authority to Remove” 10 September 2009 – 3 January 2010 Retrieved 18 February 2020 the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (2005);Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. “Jill Magid: Libration Point” 13 November 2005 – 30 December 2005. Retrieved 18 February 2020 Yvon Lambert, Paris and New York (2009);Yvon Lambert, New York. “Objects to be Handed Over or Destroyed 27 September 2009 – 24 October 2009. Retrieved 18 February 2020 Gagosian Gallery, New York (2007); the Centre D'arte Santa Monica, Barcelona (2007); , The Netherlands (2008); the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2022), and the M-Museum, Leuven, Belgium (2023).
Magid is represented by LABOR, Mexico City.LABOR, Mexico City. Jill Magid Artist Page . Retrieved 18 February 2020
Awards and residencies
Magid is an Associate of the Art, Design and the Public Domain program at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University,Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Master in Design Studies Homepage. Retrieved 18 February 2020 and was a 2013–15 fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.Vera List Center for Art and Politics. Jill Magid: Fellowship Page. Retrieved 18 February 2020 Previously, Magid was an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam from 2000–2.Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten. Alumni Archive. Retrieved 18 February 2020 She has received various awards, including the Calder Prize 2017,“Jill Magid Awarded $50,000 Calder Prize”, Artforum. 22 January 2018. Retrieved 18 February 2020. the Basis Stipendium from Fonds Voor Beeldende Kunsten in the Netherlands in 2006 and a Netherland-American Foundation Fellowship Fulbright Grant from 2001–2002.Fathomers. Artist Bio Page: Jill Magid. Retrieved 18 February 2020
She is also the author of four books, and her project The Barragán Archives is the subject of the book The Proposal, published by Sternberg Press.Jill Magid, The Proposal. Ed Nikolaus Hirsch and others, Critical Spatial Practice, Sternberg Press, 2016.
Selected works Evidence Locker Evidence Locker was a 2004 collaboration with Liverpool's City Watch (Merseyside Police and Liverpool City Council) – then England's largest citywide video surveillance system. Wearing a red trench coat for thirty-one days, Magid periodically contacted on-duty police to train their public cameras on her. Sometimes, the surveillants located her on their own.
City Watch stores CCTV footage for only thirty-one days "unless requested as evidence"; requested footage, in turn, is kept for seven years in a digital "Evidence Locker" on the organization's main computer. Despite her collaboration with the organization, Magid could only obtain access to her footage by formally submitting thirty-one Subject Access Request Forms, detailing the time and nature of the evidentiary incidents. Building upon her implicit intimacy with the CCTV observers, Magid filled out these legal documents as if writing letters to a lover. The collected letters form her 2004 book, One Cycle of Memory in the City of L.
After filing the forms, Magid received over eleven hours of CCTV recordings, constituting her own personal evidence locker. The artist edited this footage into a number of videos, including Final Tour (2004), which comprises a series of time-lapse sequences of the artist motorcycling through the city at sunset, backed by Georges Delerue's score from Le Mépris. In Trust (2004), a CCTV operator communicates with Magid via mobile phone, guiding the artist – eyes closed – through the city's public spaces.
As a whole, Evidence Locker contributes to contemporary debates around public surveillance by giving a nuanced, focused take on the "emotional and philosophical relationship between ‘protective' institutions […] and individual identity."
The Spy Project In 2005, Magid was commissioned by the Dutch secret service (AIVD) to make a work for its new headquarters, as per the law's stipulation that "a portion of the budget for the new building be spent on an art commission." The organization solicited the artist to help improve its public persona by providing "‘the AIVD with a human face.'"
Magid spent the following three years meeting with eighteen willing employees in non-descript public places, from restaurants and bars to airport meeting points. AIVD restricted the artist from using recording equipment, so she collected her contacts' personal data in handwritten notes, which informed her later series of neons, sculptures and paper works. Magid also drafted a report of her meetings, amassing the details of individual contacts into a collective persona that she referred to as "The Organization."
The first exhibition of the project, Article 12, opened at "Stroom" Den Haag, The Netherlands in April 2008 – the same month AIVD took residence in its new headquarters. The show also marked the official end of the artist's commission. Named after the article that protects personal data, Article 12 never entirely disclosed the identities of Magid's contacts, but nonetheless inverted "the surveillance duties of the agency" by publicly displaying materials associated with its employees.
Magid invited AIVD personnel to review the exhibition a day before the opening; the agents returned, during its run, to confiscate several works. A draft of Magid's report, in turn, was delivered to the artist with redactions of "any information that might compromise her sources' identities," as well as "some of the artist's descriptions of her own thoughts and feelings."
The artist "protested against the censorship of her own memories," prompting AIVD to suggest that she "‘present the manuscript as a visual work of art in a one-time-only exhibition, after which it would become the property of the Dutch government and not be published.'" Magid's 2009/10 exhibition at Tate Modern, Authority to Remove, marked the fulfillment of this request: the uncensored report sat securely behind glass. In its penultimate state, the project thus expressed "what it means to have a secret but not the autonomy to share it."
AIVD entered Tate Modern, in 2010, to permanently confiscate Magid's uncensored manuscript. A paperback of the redacted version, Becoming Tarden, was published in 2010.
Failed States On January 21, 2010, a man attempted to enter the Texas State Capitol to speak with a Senator's aide. Immediately upon exiting the building, he fired six shots into the sky. Magid, coincidentally, was on a trip to research the history of snipers in Austin; her eyewitness account of the shooting aired on several media outlets.
The motivations of the young shooter, Fausto Cardenas, remain unknown. He was charged with perpetrating a terrorist threat to the government, but the trial date for his case was continuously delayed. Fausto accepted a plea bargain, in August 2011, "ultimately silencing himself."
Magid responded strongly to "the symbolic gesture of six shots into the sky, the fateful setting, the silence that refuses to ground [Fausto] in political rhetoric or personal instability." For Closet Drama, her 2011 exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum, and the subsequent Failed States, the artist drew thematic and formal connections between Fausto's act and Goethe's nineteenth-century poem, Faust. Acting "as eyewitness and dramaturge," Magid linked themes of tragedy and futility between Fausto and his nominal relative, even bringing texts of Faust's monologues into the gallery space as implicit stand-ins for the shooter's silence. Goethe's epic was originally written as a "closet drama," "a play to be read rather than performed". In Magid's hands, the gallery transformed into a "stage to be read," with language, sculpture, video and image creating an intertextual weave between stories and events, individuals and publics, actions and aftermaths.
The day of the shooting, Magid met with a reporter, "CT," who had previously embedded with the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over a series of meetings, the artist decided to train to embed with CT on his next trip to Afghanistan. CT informed her that they would navigate the country in a "hard car" – usually a Mercedes – armored to withstand gunfire while blending into traffic. Magid promptly decided to armor her 1993 Mercedes station wagon and, as part of her 2012 exhibition at AMOA-Arthouse, Austin, parked the car in the spot where Fausto had parked on the day he fired his six shots.
Auto Portrait Pending In 2005, Magid signed a contract with Lifegem, a company that specializes in turning cremated bodies into diamonds. The artist specified that, upon her death, 8 ounces of carbon from her remains will be transformed into a one-carat, round-cut diamond estimated to cost about $20,000, to be set in a gold ring.
Auto Portrait Pending is exhibited as an incomplete form of Magid's self-portrait. A contract containing three sections (a corporate contract, artist's preamble and a private beneficiary contract), a ring box and the unset gold ring make up its existing parts. The beneficiary contract allows for ownership of "the artist (in symbolic terms) until her death, after which her ashes will be transformed into a jewel to be put in the ring on permanent display." At the beginning of the beneficiary contract it is stated that the funeral and artwork are to be completely separate. The beneficiary who is unknown at this time must be a collector or institution with a substantial collection where the piece will remain in permanent display. In her own words, "The beneficiary is usually the loved one. The husbands gets the wife, the wife the husband, etcetera. I specify the beneficiary as a collector."