In this talk, artist Jill Magid introduces the term Assisted Nonfiction, coined by art historian Gilda Williams to describe her work. Magid engages in Assisted Nonfiction by selecting, researching, observing, and/or inserting herself into a real-life event, circumstance, institution, or system, in order to partially rewire its operations and purpose from within, usually with little preconception of the eventual outcome. Assisted Nonfiction, like Assisted Readymade, is a willfully oxymoronic term, in that both nonfiction and the readymade are, by definition, meant to exist in the world without artistic or literary tampering. This ambiguity is often embraced, and the artwork delights in inserting itself into the very folds of this abiding contradiction. Through a presentation of Magid’s practice— including early iterations such as The Surveillance Shoe and Auto Portrait Pending—to her current project Tender, she explores the key components of Assisted Nonfiction. These include the participation of non-artists collaborators, whose participation she negotiates and recognizes are essential, and the work’s temporal dimension, which can extend beyond the real-time duration of the project, even infinitely.

American artist Jill Magid’s work is deeply ingrained in her lived experience, exploring and blurring the boundaries between art and life. Through her performance-based practice, Magid has initiated intimate relations with a number of organizations and structures of authority. She explores the emotional, philosophical, and legal tensions between the individual and ‘protective’ institutions, such as intelligence agencies or the police. To work alongside or within large organizations, Magid makes use of institutional quirks, systemic loopholes that allow her to make contact with people ‘on the inside’. Her work tends to be characterized by the dynamics of seduction, the resulting narratives often taking the form of a love story. It is typical of Magid’s practice that she follows the rules of engagement with an institution to the letter – sometimes to the point of absurdity.

With solo exhibitions at institutions around the world including The Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City; Tate Modern, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Berkeley Museum of Art, California; Tate Liverpool; the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam; Yvon Lambert, Paris and New York; Gagosian Gallery, New York; Dia Bridgehampton; and the Security and Intelligence Agency of the Netherlands, Magid has received awards from the Fonds Voor Beeldende Kunsten, the Netherland-American Foundation Fellowship Fulbright Grant, the 2017 Calder Prize, a 2020 Creative Time Artist Commission, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2021 Via Art Fund Grant. Magid has participated in the Liverpool, Lyon, Bucharest, Singapore, Incheon, Gothenburg, and Performa Biennials, and Manifesta, among others. She is an Associate of the Art, Design and the Public Domain program at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, and a 2013-15 fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. An adjunct teacher at Cooper Union, Magid is the author of four novellas. Her first feature film, The Proposal, premiered at Tribeca Film Festival 2018, received an Honorable Mention for Best Emerging Filmmaker at Hot Docs in Toronto, the Festival Grand Prix Award at the Millennium Docs Against Gravity Festival, Poland; and the Public Prize at the Architectural Film Festival Lisbon. Opening at IFC Center New York, the film was recently released in theaters across the US with distribution by Oscilloscope Labs. Her work is included the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Whitney Museum of American Art, Fundacion Jumex, and the Walker Art Center, among others.

Image Credit 

Jill Magid, Tender, 2020
120,000 edge-engraved 2020 US pennies
Documentation image by Leandro Justen
Courtesy of the artist, Creative Time, New York, and LABOR, Mexico City