INSTRUCTIONS, Gio' Marconi, Milan, 1992

Softcover, offset printed, 40 pp. Gio’ Marconi, Milan, November/December 1992. Organised by Liam Gillick. Artists: Angela Bulloch, Adam Chodzko, Matthew Collings, Jeremy Deller, Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon, Gary Hume, Michael Landy, Jonathan Monk, Simon Patterson, Brendan Quick, Philip Riley, Caroline Russell, Giorgio Sadotti, Gavin Turk, Gillian Wearing.

The catalogue explains its own mechanism plainly, in its own words: “A number of artists were invited to submit a written or drawn instruction by letter or fax to the organiser indicating work to be executed at Gio’ Marconi Gallery during November/December 1992.” The artists were not required to attend. Gillick and the gallery became the production department.

That distinction is the entire exhibition. Angela Bulloch instructed the organiser to execute up to four wall drawings derived from Milanese comics, painted directly onto the gallery wall in black. Adam Chodzko’s instruction is close to a miniature theory of distributed authorship in itself: from eight submitted transparencies, six images were to be selected not by him but by Gio’ Marconi, four gallery staff and Gillick; an additional star, “no bigger than the second biggest star,” was then to be airbrushed onto each print by a photographic technician, to “improve” the constellation; the six prints mounted together and presented in a Thomas Ruff-style frame. Matthew Collings supplied a transparency of an existing press photograph and instructed the organisers to typeset text over it, manufacture a poster, paste copies on the gallery walls, and give copies away with the catalogue — the publication itself built into the artwork’s own distribution system. Jeremy Deller’s entry opens with one primary instruction and two alternative options.

The artwork, in every case, has been separated into request, specification, fabrication and distribution before it becomes an object at all.

The Gillian Wearing spread needs no interpretation to earn its place. The photograph reproduced is from the very beginning of what would become her canonical Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say — the exact “I do not think much about myself...” image, printed here while the series was still being made, not reproduced later as an established work. Facing it, a mock commercial order form: “We handprint anything... you just sit back and relax and we do all the work, while you take all the credit.” The catalogue places invention and commercial parody on facing pages and lets the resemblance do the work.

Gillick’s experiment sits in a specific, checkable position in a longer history. Instruction-based practice was already art history by 1992 — Yoko Ono, George Brecht, Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner and Fluxus had separated conception from execution decades earlier. What makes this catalogue distinct is the moment it catches: a year before Hans Ulrich Obrist conceived do it in Paris with Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier, Gillick was already running an almost identical structure in Milan — and Gillick himself later became a do it contributor, confirmed in that project’s own published contributor lists. The same artist sits on both sides of the comparison.

The roster reads very differently now than it did in 1992. Gavin Turk was barely a year past the notorious 1991 RCA degree show that saw the college refuse him a degree. Jeremy Deller was scarcely functioning as a professional artist. Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho was still a year away. Gillian Wearing’s Signs was happening in real time, not yet canonical. None of that was legible from inside the exhibition. It’s only visible now, backwards, through the accident of who these sixteen names later became.

The wall drawings were painted over. The poster came down. The gallery staff stopped executing instructions and went back to their ordinary jobs. What survives is this: forty pages recording an exhibition that was, by design, made almost entirely of correspondence, delegation and fabrication rather than objects — which means the catalogue isn’t secondary documentation in the usual sense. It’s close to the actual operating system of the show.

Condition: Good to very good. Light overall handling and surface wear to the wrappers, with scattered rubbing/scratching and minor edge and corner wear. Internally clean and well preserved; binding appears sound.