Most artists would be frustrated if their gallerist decided to vie openly for a new job during their solo exhibition. But when Jill Magid learned that her dealer, Esther Kim Varet, was running for U.S. Congress, “it was like a gift,” she says. The Brooklyn-based conceptual artist decided to turn Varet’s campaign to flip California’s affluent 40th District blue into the subject of her latest exhibition, “Heart of a Citizen,” at Varet’s gallery, Various Small Fires, in Los Angeles.

Magid, 52, has made a career out of inserting herself into seemingly impenetrable systems. The U.S. economy, the Dutch secret service, the Mexican architect Luis Barragán’s estate—no institution is too complicated, or too opaque, for her poetic yet surgical interventions. For “Tender” in 2020, Magid worked with the public art organization Creative Time to supply 120,000 specially engraved pennies to New York bodegas. From there, they circulated across the country as spare change for cigarettes and lottery tickets. In 2004, to create a body of work called “Evidence Locker,” Magid wandered through Liverpool with her eyes closed, guided only by the voices of surveillance officers as they watched her navigate the streets on CCTV cameras.

Often, Magid says, her work begins with a simple question: “What is the power structure that I’m interested in?” In this case, she didn’t have to look very far. Political campaigns have much in common with the systems Magid has explored in the past. Like government, spycraft, and the art market, they trade in access, money, and influence—not to mention promises and secrets.

As an artist, Magid relies on a mix of charm, vulnerability, and bureaucratic sleight-of-hand to get people to open doors that usually remain closed. Similarly, political candidates rise or fall based on their ability to rapidly establish a sense of intimacy with voters—and navigate obscure legal rules that exist largely to reinforce the status quo.

“Heart of a Citizen,” which is on view through June 28, began with a letter that Magid sent Varet on March 11. (The letter doubles as the show’s press release.) In it, Magid proposes installing in the gallery a replica of the platform in the White House Briefing Room, a modest wooden structure covered in star-spangled carpet. Magid’s version is both sculpture and prop. “I invite you, and anyone you choose, to use it for political addresses related to your candidacy, during the run of the show,” Magid wrote to Varet.

Even before the show opened, problems began to arise. It became clear that if Varet used the platform—and, by extension, the gallery—to give a stump speech, she might be in violation of campaign finance law. Magid was undeterred by the wrinkle—and in fact, somewhat delighted. She spoke with a lawyer and devised a solution: Varet’s campaign would rent the space from the gallery at fair market value and campaign events would be held outside normal business hours. The campaign plans to host a political debate between Varet, the district’s incumbent Republican Congressperson Young Kim, and other candidates on The Platform on July 12, Magid says.

To avoid making any kind of political contribution herself, Magid arranged for Michael Young, a longtime collector of her work, to purchase the platform from her studio and donate it to Varet’s campaign. “I love how this sculpture starts playing out our whole legal structure, and then it becomes the legal structure intertwined with the art market,” Magid says.

Magid became interested in using politics as raw material for her work in 2019, when she started hanging around the Brooklyn Federal Court Building in search of inspiration for her Creative Time project. She was intrigued by a stack of pristine white books, which turned out to be volumes of the Federal Register. “It’s essentially the diary of the U.S. Government,” Magid explains. Since 1935, the government has published a compendium of presidential documents, proposals, and meeting notes every weekday (except federal holidays). As an artist obsessed with locating the personal cracks in impersonal systems, Magid was most interested in the notes left in brackets by the president’s stenographer that placed an abrupt sneeze or ringing cell phone into the historical record.

She turned one of her favorite such lines into a 15-foot neon sign that now hangs in the courtyard of Various Small Fires. It reads: “[At this point, a gust of wind rustled the trees in the Rose Garden.]” Plucked from the transcript of a speech by President Clinton, the line took on new resonance for Magid in light of President Trump’s recent decision to pave over the grass in the Rose Garden. (The White House says the change is intended to make it easier to host events there; Trump doesn’t like it when visitors’ shoes get wet or muddy.)  “It’s vibrating with tension out there,” Magid says of the gallery courtyard.

As an expression of how heartbreaking, vulnerable, and uncertain it can feel to be a U.S. citizen right now, Magid installed a dozen cast-concrete facsimiles of her own heart on the courtyard’s gravel ground. It looks as if a crowd of people magically turned to stone and then evaporated, leaving only their hearts behind. “I feel like my heart is on the floor,” Magid says. “I feel in communion with a lot of people around me asking, ‘What agency right now does one have?’”

Inside, of course, is one answer to that question. On top of a vitrine containing the paperwork required to make the exhibition legal, including the venue loan agreement between the gallery and the campaign, sits a pile of empty candidacy forms and envelopes pre-addressed to the Federal Election Commission. Visitors are invited to take one on their way out.

But Magid isn’t interested in an exhibition that can be boiled down to a simple invitation to run for office in order to fix the broken political system. The juxtaposition of the courtyard, which is about how it feels to be a citizen, and the platform, which is about the theatricality of political campaigns, invites bigger questions. “Who really can run? Is there a space for free speech? Those things are bigger than Esther’s candidacy,” Magid says.

It is no coincidence that the list of Varet’s campaign donors—available in public records but not addressed in the show—reads like a who’s who of the art market. Among many boldface names, the artist Alex Israel and the art dealer Jessica Silverman both donated the maximum amount of $3,500. In other words, it takes a lot more than an empty form and a pre-addressed envelope to launch a campaign, let alone win.

In a final provocation, Magid stamped the back of the envelopes with a paraphrased quote from the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot. It reads in part, “Only start building platforms once you’ve fully and deeply rejected the notion and premise and promise of a platform.”

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