JILL MAGID
With Full Consent
Gagosian Gallery
At 34, Jill Magid is teaching the old dog of Conceptual Art some new tricks. Ms. Magid, who lives and works in Brooklyn and Amsterdam, seems motivated by an urge to infiltrate and personalize, if not sexualize, the anonymous social and technological systems that surround us. She pursues an idiosyncratic kind of body art descended from artists like Vito Acconci, Adrian Piper and Sophie Calle.
Ms. Magid's impressive New York debut includes "Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy," a video and series of photographs accompanied by a haunting novella. All record her five-month friendship with a New York City police officer. She initiated it by asking him to search her (he didn't) and then shadowing him during his night shift, usually on subway platforms in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The best part of the work is the quietly heart-rending novella, a kind of tunnel vision of two people moving along parallel tracks while the city hums around them. The relationship is never consummated, but "Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy" spells love.
The video "Trust," part of a larger work called "Evidence Locker," provides a sense of the closed-circuit action implied in "Lincoln Ocean Victory Eddy." It involved Ms. Magid's befriending some of the men running the citywide surveillance system in Liverpool, England. She persuaded them to guide her (using an ear bud) as she walked along the streets with her eyes closed, while videotaping her movements. As you watch a figure in a red coat (the artist) and listen to a man's voice quietly dictating her every move, it doesn't take long to understand what is going on or to feel like an intruder into a briefly intimate, protective form of surveillance.
In "Auto Portrait Pending," Ms. Magid contracts to have her cremated body turned into a diamond and mounted on a gold ring after she dies. (The display includes the ring, its box and the contract.) And in "The Salem Diamonds," she proposes making a memorial the same way, using the unclaimed ashes of inmates at an Oregon mental institution. These works also personalize a system —the making of artificial diamonds from cremated remains — while inventing a highly portable form of burial and remembrance. But they don't reverberate with the richness that Ms. Magid conjures up in the here and now.
ROBERTA SMITH