Artist Books / Artist’s Novels (Vol. 7): Jill Magid

Artist Books / Artist’s Novels is an ongoing inquiry by Stephanie La Cava that looks at the intersection between visual art and literature. Each entry is a conversation with an artist or writer whose books defy genre expectations and exist outside of the traditional form.

With shows at the Whitney and Tate Modern, Magid has become known for multimedia conceptual art addressing systems of institutional power and law. Magid’s latest work, The Barragán Archives, began in 2013, and is an extended, multimedia project that examines of the legacy of Mexican architect and Pritzker Prize-winner Luis Barragán (1902–1988). When Barragán died, his archive was split in two; his personal archive, home, and library, were converted into a museum, and the professional half (which includes thousands of drawings and negatives and copyrights) wound up belonging to Federica Zanco, wife of the CEO of the Swiss-furniture company Vitra. The story goes that Zanco’s husband gave her Barragán’s archive in lieu of a wedding ring, and since 1996, it’s been housed below Vitra corporate headquarters in Birsfelden, Switzerland, where it is inaccessible to the public. 

Throughout The Barragán Archives, Magid explores what it means for a corporation to control an artist’s legacy, and to use copyright and intellectual property rights to do so legally. The climactic work of the multi-year project, The Proposal (2014-16), involved Magid turning Barragán’s ashes into a two-carat diamond ring that she offered to Zanco in an attempt to return Barragán’s archive to Mexico and open it for public view. What continues to unfold is a complicated narrative, an evolving story that is being turned into a documentary. 

Magid’s assorted work has an undeniable literary quality to it, and many of her installations includes nonfiction novellas which can be read without any knowledge of the accompanying exhibition. The four titles are Once Cycle of Memory in the City of L (2004); Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy (2007); Becoming Tarden (2010); and Failed States (2012). These books not only chronicle the larger conceptual projects, but evidence the nuance of different systems of legal language and thought. 

Magid and I met several times at her studio in New York to talk about her expansive body of work. 

—Stephanie LaCava

I. SYSTEMS (OF WHICH THERE ARE MANY)

STEPHANIE LA CAVA: Last year, when this series began, I spoke to David Maroto, an editor of Artist’s Novels: The Book Lovers Publication (who is also at work on his PhD on artist’s novels, the first of its kind). He said, “On the one hand, visual artists have been writing novels since at least the times of William Morris, on the other,...