Ryan Gander or the pleasurable frustration
This review was originally published on the online art magazine A*DESK in September 2011
An abandoned industrial warehouse in the east of London is the scenario chosen by the British artist Ryan Gander to represent his latest and until now most ambitious project, commissioned by the prestigious producer, Artangel. The choice of the verb “represent” is not incidental: “Locked Room Scenario” is a hybrid, somewhere between an art exhibition, a theatrical play, a mystery novel and a paranoid mental trip.
It’s quite likely that many of those who began to read in the eighties will remember the “Choose your own adventure” collection, those children’s books where the choice of different options/pages resulted in different outcomes, offering the intrepid reader several books in one. Its motto included suggestive phrases like, “the possibilities are endless: remember that you choose the adventure, that you are the adventure”, which fits perfectly to describe this project by Ryan Gander, where the visitor has to banish the cobwebs from the limits of his imagination to be able to navigate this disturbing installation.
To visit “Locked Room Scenario” one has to sign up for an appointment, given that only eight people can be in the space at one time. The day of my visit, early in the morning, I received a text message, in which a certain Spencer A. urged me to meet him in a nearby pub, ten minutes before my appointment. Of course, I realised this afterwards because initially, having not seen the pub on the way, I put the message down to a strange mix up. The information available beforehand about the project is at best limited: one knows the address and that one has to adopt a sort of detective mentality, when studying the objects and the people present, in order to unravel the mystery.
Arriving at the door of the warehouse I see a group of people waiting to enter. Furtive glances and direct stares are exchanged unashamedly. I suspect that some of them could be actors under Gander’s orders and I believe they suspect the same of me. Suddenly, one hears screams that seem to come from some wild animals or human beings. The barrier opens and little by little, they let us go in. Having entered the building I go down an unlit passage. Everything is black and I have to slide my hand along the carpeted wall to be able to proceed. I go slowly, blindly, frightened of bumping into the other visitors who have gone in before me. All of a sudden I hear the sound of a slide projector, that materialises in a hole in the wall on my right, at floor height, projecting backwards, as if designed to be seen from a central room to which – I soon discover – there is no access. I think of the labyrinthine installations of the artist Mike Nelson and for a moment, in the darkness, I worry about not being able to find the exit.
After stumbling and bumping several times into closed doors, I arrive at what I presume to be the main entrance. I see a double door, with a poster that informs me that we are in a gallery called Kimberling, to see the group exhibition “Field of Meaning”, with a list of artists as unknown (and fictitious) as the gallery itself; amongst whom one finds Spencer Anthony, who I now recognise as the author of that morning’s text message. The entrance to the exhibition is, of course, shut.
I manage to squeeze into another dimly lit passage, where I hear lounge music that makes me think of the ghosts congregated in the hotel bar in The Shining. While I advance, increasingly frustrated, I can’t stop thinking that someone is observing us, me and all the others, live through the installed security cameras. Are we lab rats in a sociological-artistic experiment? Is Ryan Gander laughing at my lack of astuteness, at my inability to access the closed room of the title? At the end of the passage, a window with half-open blinds allows me to see the back part of the room and a few pieces of the elusive exhibition: a giant furry toy in Klein blue signed by Santo Sterne, a sort of wooden altar with a collection of images, in which photographs by Lee Miller and other works in the Modern style abound, a pair of figurative paintings on wood… Next to it, a room, also closed, where neon lights flicker incessantly, makes me think of Martin Creed and his piece “The Lights Going On and Off”.
The clues or signs come rapidly, one after another. A chronology on a wall explains details about the lives of the artists and their participation in key 20th Century movements, such as Situationism, Conceptualism and Fluxus. At the exit, two adolescents sitting on the stairs smoking cigarettes vilify another visitor, who, indignant, returns the insult. “Actors”, I think, while my eyes light upon some Klein blue fake fur thrown in a skip, just like the stuff in the work I had spotted a few moments before. Hours later, consumed by the fever of coming to terms with what I had seen, I discover that Santo Sterne is a fictitious artist created by Gander, and that he has included his phantasmagorical presence in various previous projects. On the Internet, I discover dubious references to some of the artists in the list. I even visit the website of the gallery, to find myself in front of a mirage-page, empty.
“Locked Room Scenario” is the astute culmination of many of the concerns that recur in Gander’s work. The artist, obsessed with enigmas and story telling, has here created a scenario, frustrating at times, that forces the spectator to fill in the gaps that he refuses to cover. “Locked Room Scenario” is a piece where the susceptibility of the visitor is everything, where only those who use their imagination will fully enjoy (or suffer) the experience. It is a mystery, which will be resolved or not, depending on the desire to carry on investigating having left the area. Gander, fascinated by tangential associations, has managed in this project to materialise, on a grand scale, questions that he had already raised in previous pieces, such as his performance talks titled “Loose Associations” or his exhibitions “You walk into a space, any space” (Lisson Gallery, Londres, 2010) or “It’s a right Heath Robinson affair” (Gb Agency and Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, 2009), where large quantities of referents and signs insinuate themselves upon the spectator, who is charged with unravelling, not without effort, the proposed suggestive narratives.
Many could accuse Ryan Gander of being an opaque artist, difficult to read. And elitist, given that this reading can only be carried out with sufficient knowledge of the history (histories) of art and contemporary cultural production. It is not a democratic art nor is it accessible, and doesn’t for a moment aspire to be. As Gander himself explained in a recent interview: “Spectators need to invest their time and their energy in my work, in order to receive something in exchange. It is my way of filtering and encountering people who aren’t just looking for a dinner party conversation. The true value of the work of art resides in the experience that one has of the work once one has physically left it”. “Locked Room Scenario” goes way beyond achieving this aim. Ryan Gander, opaque, irritating yet brilliant, has done it again.
Locked Room Scenario runs thorough the 23rd of October 2011. More information here.
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All installation images courtesy of Artangel.
Photographer Julian Abrams
Locked Room Scenario – Ryan Gander
Commissioned and produced by Artangel with the support of Londonewcastle and the Lisson Gallery.
This text was originally written in Spanish. You can read the Spanish version here.
Time travels and the (de)construction of contemporary myths
(In September 2011, the Spanish media & video art distribution platform HAMACA invited me to curate a text-based itinerary through their extensive moving image catalogue. This is the result.)
Throughout this itinerary, I would like to navigate through the HAMACA catalogue in search of traces or residues from other times and voices. I am looking to identify the little or great homages that artists make to other “artists-legends” or to the “landmark moments” in their history (understood both on a collective and an individual level). What I will engage with here is the unravelling of nostalgic impulses in art, led by a (perhaps unhealthy?) curiosity to get to the bottom of the archetypes that have come into play in the creative process of these artists.
In his “Mythologies”, Barthes said that a myth is nothing other than a distortion of history; a new ‘discourse’, born through the appropriation of a previously existing image. This re-writing of a sign is in itself a creative act. It isn’t just a cultural appropriation, but a translation or update of meaning through time. This temporal dislocation, intrinsic to the act of incorporating elements from other socio-historical contexts, is also fundamental in this stroll through the catalogue, where the evocations of the past, explorations of the present, and fantasies of the future merge unevenly, provoking a sense of vertigo towards a continuous and never-ending present.
Love the myth. Kill the myth
Our first stop is Little Star (1994) by Clemente Calvo, a popular legend transformed into a small visual tale. Calvo, who lived in New York at the time the piece was made, incorporates a legend that amongst the Indians who lived in Manhattan before the arrival of European colonisers was a small group of shamans whose souls turned into white, seven-pointed starfish when they died. Those lucky enough to find one of the starfish would enjoy the protection of the shamans forever. The plot’s temporal dimension takes us to a particular historical moment of the 17th century, yet the piece formally looks like a homage to silent film and, in particular, to the films of Jean Cocteau. With a piano piece by Liszt as its sole soundtrack, its use of black and white and poetic images with surrealist overtones, the piece inevitably takes us back to the universe of the French genius.
'Little Star' (1994) by Clemente Calvo
Following along the surrealist trail, Espejismo (1993), by Maite Cajaraville, offers a trip “through the looking glass”, in an obvious reference to the author of Alice in Wonderland, the British writer Lewis Carroll. Yet the aesthetics of this dream, set in primary colours and geometries, are clearly those of a digital landscape. Espejismo is more a memory of the future than one of the past, and is tremendously contemporary in its hybrid mix of 3D and psychedelia with New Age overtones, all of which awaken a strong devotion in many contemporary artists who, like Cory Arcangel, are obsessed with 90s digital aesthetics.
'Espejismo' (1993) by Maite Cajaraville
SIS. E3 (Servidumbre de la vida y el carácter de las sombras) (2000-2001), by the Basque artist Txomín Badiola, holds the accumulation of references and symbols as one of its fundamental ingredients. In only 4 minutes, we witness the invocation of various cultural myths, placed in that temporal grey zone that lies between modernism and post-modernism, and which includes the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Jean-Luc Godard, the art of Jorge Oteiza and the industrial design of Charles & Ray Eames. The piece freely recreates the final scene from Der Amerikanische Soldat (1970), by Fassbinder. Godard said that his death had been caused by “an overdose of creative obligations”, a sentence we can read on one of the stage walls in the piece. Whilst one of the actors wears a t-shirt with a fragment of La Ley de los Cambios, by Jorge Oteiza, another dons one with S.O.S. written on it. Both messages are on view while both men roll on the ground, between the Eames’ chairs. Shot 30 years after the original film was made, and using contemporary looking actors -who are however trapped in a melange of times and ideologies between the homage and the critique-, SOS. E3 appears to represent the footprint of our most recent cultural past, like a heavy embrace from which we cannot (and perhaps should not) escape.
'SOS. E3 ( Servidumbre de la vida y el carácter de las sombras)' (2000-2001) by Txomín Badiola
Seeing as Jean-Luc Godard rears his head, it seems relevant to speak about El Enemigo (2010), by WeareQQ. El Enemigo is a reworking of that Godardian myth called La Chinoise (1967). The young protagonists’ endearing and pedagogic verbal diarrhoea, the film credits, the domestic interiors, and the dry humour it oozes, are inherited from the original, which is however nothing more than a shell, or an excuse, to speak about certain subjects. A stage set within which the characters -cultural agents orchestrated by WeareQQ- offer a series of porous monologues where political, economic, cultural, and even emotional critiques are intertwined.
Speaking of the critique and deconstruction of myths, we may find no example more powerful within the history of the moving image in Spain than Rocío (1980), by Fernando Ruiz de Vergara. This is a documentary where a Catholic rite -the procession of the Virgen del Rocío-, is taken apart with precision, through the use of facts, and, by extension, so are the rest of the rites of Marian devotion. This was a touchy subject for a democracy still in its infancy, leading to several fragments of the film being censored, and to its author being condemned to two years in prison plus a fine of 10 million pesetas. Rocío is still, even today, a work that is little known, and terribly underrated. A good number of brilliant shots and a wise use of archive footage hold up a brave and controversial thesis for which its author paid an unmistakably draconian and absurd price.
'Rocío' (1980) by Fernando Ruiz Vergara
I also find Duchamp (retard en vídeo) (1986/87), by Eugeni Bonet, to be an essential work for a number of reasons. Not only is it a comprehensive documentary about Marcel Duchamp, it is also, in my opinion, a clear precursor of the “performative documentary” that has gained such visibility and followers since the 90s, both in the field of film and video in general, and in contemporary art in particular, with examples that go from media celebrities like Michael Moore to artists such as Mario García Torres or Duncan Campbell. In this case, a casual, humorous conversation between a couple is used to structure a narrative about Duchamp’s life, work, and impact, from his early stages as a painter -culminating with The Large Glass-, to his subsequent development of conceptual art through the readymade. Finally, it is worth mentioning that this documentary was broadcast on TV3 in 1987 as part of the TV show “Arsenal”. Without a doubt, the porosity between mass media, conceptual art and history is an exciting phenomenon, researched by the curator Chus Martínez in her recent exhibition at the MACBA, titled “Are you Ready for TV?”.
'Duchamp (retard en vídeo)' (1986-1987) by Eugeni Bonet
Time Distortions: Here come the ghosts
There is something exquisitely unsettling about Medio Tiempo (1964), by Manel Muntaner. Tension grows, due to an unsettling soundtrack by Schaeffer and Stockhausen, among others, as we are guided through spaces that are suspended in time. These are different rooms within a school, ‘paused’ during the summer, waiting to be reactivated by the students’ return. Medio Tiempo is a pioneer in the history of Spanish experimental film, a sophisticated metaphor of childhood within which Muntaner shows an extraordinary sensibility for composition and framing. The result is a nostalgic reminiscence of the first years of school, a time when freedom and play intermingle with fear and a castrating authority that is often only imagined, but equally sinister.
One of the qualities present in Nummulitis (2002-2004), by Isaki Lacuesta, that I find most interesting, is the fact that he renders visible the overwhelming capacity that black and white images have for creating meaning. As if sharing the same texture resulted in an alchemy that turns disparate images into analogous ones. Different scenes from a procession, a televised film, and a group of friends in a bar appear to blend into the same, strange, temporal space, in a simulacrum of continuity.
With similar ends, but completely different means, Mabel Palacín’s in Una noche sin fin (2006-2008) makes use of the two-channel installation to explore the absolute relativity of the perception of time. On one screen actions appear to be slowed down; dense, whilst on the other screen, everything seems somewhat speeded up; frantic. As a viewer, the experience is disquieting, and this is intensified by the theatricality of the installation, where the two screens are facing one another and separated by a bench where the viewer, seated, is forced to look one way or the other. The situations and speeds change from one screen to the other, so that any intention of continuity is constantly frustrated, but somehow encouraged by the repetition of characters and backdrops. The viewer’s capacity for attention, patience, and curiosity are put to the test during the 23 minutes of this work. When it ends, he may not know what he’s seen, but he can be sure he has learned to look at things differently.
'Una noche sin fin' (2006-2008) by Mabel Palacin
In El Año en que el Futuro Acabó (Comenzó) (2007), Marcelo Expósito plays at undoing history. Looking through a viewfinder, we witness a chronologically inverted itinerary through archive footage that begins during Spain’s first democratic elections after Franco’s death, and end with the beginning of the Civil War in 1936. The inversion of the temporal axis generates questions about the (in) evitability of the events. Is there any escape from history’s repetitive and ruthless cycle? Couldn’t these skulls, found in the excavation of the final scene (remains from the republican soldiers, in fact) belong to the ghosts of a past civilisation, or the dead from the future? The key, in keeping with the inverted structure of the piece, lies at the beginning: the primary audience of this phantasmagoria is a group of children. The only possible salvation for the future therefore lies in knowing how to learn from past mistakes. As Heiner Müller says in the quote that opens this journey through time: memory is not mere contemplation, it is work.
'El Año en que el Futuro Acabó (Comenzó)' (2007) by Marcelo Expósito
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This text was originally written and published in Spanish. You can read the original here.
English translation by Alex Reynolds, whom I would like to thank for her meticulous and considerate work.
HAMACA is a Barcelona-based distribution platform of Spanish media & video art. Explore their catalogue here.
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