Assisted Nonfiction

Assisted Nonfiction definition
by Art Historian Gilda Williams

Assisted Nonfiction is a term coined by Art Historian Gilda Williams to describe Jill Magid's work.

An artist engaging in Assisted Nonfiction selects, researches, observes, and/or inserts themselves in the first person 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 outcome. Artifacts from and documentation of the process (which can be ongoing, i.e., “definitively unfinished”) are presented in a new context—that of the art exhibition—and potentially take form across a variety of formats, including written or found text, sculpture, video, photographs, installation, and more. 

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. For example, Man Ray’s Assisted Readymade from precisely a century ago, Gift (1921), which presents an iron with fourteen super-sharp tacks attached to its flat underside, contradicts the tool’s original purpose to care for clothes, threatening to shred a garment to pieces. Artist Jill Magid’s Assisted Nonfiction Spy Project (2005–11) compromises the very premise of the highly secretive Dutch intelligence agency through the artist’s semipublic inquiry into its employees.

Assisted Readymades necessarily enlist nonart objects to perform as art; correspondingly, Assisted Nonfiction involves nonartists as collaborators. Negotiated into participation by the artist, they contribute unscripted but essential elements to the work. Whereas Readymades exist principally in space rather than time—which is reduced to a flash, the instant the artist chooses the object, Assisted Nonfiction extends temporally, beyond the realtime duration of the project, even infinitely. The 120,000 coins in Magid’s Tender Pennies (2020) were released into the US monetary system as valid currency and thereby left to circulate indefinitely.