Any attempt to boil life down to one gesture risks being seen as gimmicky – a contrivance Sianne Ngai calls “the capitalist form par excellence,” inherently “overperforming and underperforming” at once. To call something a gimmick is to register an uneasy sense that it is working “too hard” yet “too little” simultaneously, promising efficient simplicity while giving off an air of cheapness or fraud.

A conceptual project limited to one recurring symbol (itself) deliberately flirts with this gimmick problem. It can look like a labor-saving shortcut (2 paragraphs of monospace text) – one idea standing in for a complex self (the idea of a gimmick) – even as it feels like an over-investment in a single gesture (actual time from my day). Indeed, conceptual art often suffers an intense “gimmick problem,” an anxiety about whether value really resides where the concept claims.

A Gimmick (2025), Static web code (HTML/CSS)

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