Ryan Gander, Why French people look out of windows, 2008 steel and resin, 3/4 x 6 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches Image � Ryan Gander, courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Frieze Magazine Issue 116 June - Aug 2008 by Dan Fox
Where to Begin? Monograph Ryan Gander�s lectures, scripts, installations, videos, sculptures, paintings, children�s books, clothing, jewellery, typography, photographs, etymology, facts, fictions, borrowings and more �
I had trouble starting this article.
My first introduction began �This is an article about the work of British artist Ryan Gander, written by Dan Fox, and published in the summer 2008 issue of frieze magazine� and went on at some length in the same fashion. Not entirely original, but I thought it might reflect the way in which Gander�s work concerns itself with context � the inseparability of an object from history, place and such like. In Gander�s art, form is not just a vehicle for content but springs forth as the direct, logical conclusion of his work�s subject matter and, in some dizzying cases, delivers a meta-critique of the work itself. (His knack for this reminds me of John Cooper Clarke�s poem about haikus: �To convey one�s mood / In seventeen syllables / Is very diffic.�)
But my meta-intro was heavy-handed, so I changed strategy and sallied forth with a more reportage-like introduction, getting down the facts about Gander�s new exhibition �Heralded as the New Black�. I dived straight in with a sentence about how it�s his first major UK museum solo show; that it opened at Birmingham�s Ikon Gallery at the start of 2008, toured to South London Gallery in late spring and will visit the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, early next year; that it is supposedly his �return� to art-making after a year-long sabbatical. I thought I could cut myself some autonomous critical slack with the bare facts approach; such is the breadth of devices Gander uses (interviews, lectures, scripts, installation, video, sculpture, painting, animation, other artists� work, advertising, children�s books, music, clothing, jewellery, typography, photography, etymology, fact, fiction) that familiarity with his art can lead to the vertiginous feeling that everything somehow exists within its remit. But that introduction proved too reductive. On the surface Gander�s work may employ the poker-faced formalism of historical Conceptual art, yet he uses it as a pane of precision-cut glass beneath which to press wildly allusive subject matter. Some may find his work almost neurotically concerned with associative thinking and the interconnectedness of ideas. I�d say his art is highly romantic � fired up by paradox, possibility and structural permutation but also in thrall to old-fashioned unfathomables such as mystery and belief. Just take some of his titles: Spencer, Forget About Good (2001), Is this guilt in you too � (The study of a car in a field) (2005), The Universe as I knew it aged 5, collapsed and expanded several times more (2008) or the enjoyably caustic More than the weight of your shadow (Rich kid I am talking to you) (2008). The title �Heralded as the New Black� plays tongue-in-cheek arrogance against the impossibility of creating new absolutes � the colour black, for instance.
In a recent catalogue essay the critic Brian Sholis quotes Gander�s father, Ian, repeating the old adage that �You should never let the truth get in the way of a good story�.1 So I used Introduction Version Three to describe the occasion I told Gander about a set of 18th-century coins belonging to my dad, which were minted during the French Revolution out of melted-down bells looted from churches. I told Gander this was the reason they chime beautifully when gently knocked together. He didn�t believe me and suggested that my dad might instead just be very good at constructing imaginatively convincing back-stories for objects. The trouble with using personal detail in criticism is that it can so often seem self-serving. But everyone has a history, and Gander involves friends and family in his work in a disarmingly open but unsentimental way � and as Sholis has observed, Gander�s art is nothing if not about storytelling. The most explicit example is perhaps his �Loose Associations� lecture (2002�ongoing). It�s a slide talk which skips freely from �desire lines� used in urban planning through �trauma lines� painted on hospital floors to the Barbican building in London, Gander�s auntie Deva, the design of institutional meeting rooms, fake Robin Day chairs, the Victoria and Albert Museum�s collection of fakes, the famous photograph of Christine Keeler astride an Arne Jacobsen chair, Homer Simpson imitating Keeler�s pose, the film made to accompany Bob Dylan�s song �Subterranean Homesick Blues� on its release in 1965, the work of Gillian Wearing, the NatWest Tower in London, aerial photos, blue heritage plaques, Sherlock Holmes, Inspector Morse, Morse code and so on. There is some art for which you need to know a whole back-story in order to understand it. Gander recognizes that some back-stories need art in order to understand them.
This made me think about the centrality of language in his work. Not just the spoken or written word, but body language, film language, design language, the languages of dress, work, travel, collaboration, making, thinking and talking about art. Gander is interested in how language conceals as much as it reveals. In an interview between the artist and Stuart Bailey, published in their collaborative book on Gander�s work Appendix (2003), Bailey observes that when Gander commissioned the designer John Morgan to create a poster for the artist�s lecture �On Camouflage� in 2001, Gander and Morgan �both independently spelt �camoflague� wrong throughout the project, so the word was camoflagued too�.2 (The misspelling of the word in the transcript and its correct usage everywhere else in the interview makes the printed quote doubly perplexing. Or should that be �camouflaged�?) Might it be interesting to begin this article by asking how, if Gander were to write it, he might use language as camouflage?
Alter egos and fictional characters populate Gander�s work � David Lange, Abb� Faria, Marie Aurory, Spencer Anthony � a family of surrogates allowing him to avoid the issue of having a stylistic signature. Maybe the writer�s name at the top of the article could be a pseudonym? Or what if the piece were delegated to a jobbing writer? Wasn�t Gander�s video Ghostwriter Subtext (Notes on Speaking and Listening) (2006), in which a professional ghostwriter interviews Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rem Koolhaas after their 24-hour interview marathon at London�s Serpentine Gallery, all about scrambling critical authority? Inasmuch as the article details objects and art works that, presumably, are not in the same room as the one in which you are reading, could Gander use the article as part of another work? After all, a monographic essay spins yarns that are not necessarily immediately verifiable. For example, it could be an inventory of works whose existence is dependent on their description in the text. And who is to say what the role of the accompanying images is? Gander�s work is littered with clues, puzzles and mysteries inviting further investigation. Are these illustrations simply straightforward documentation or full of sneaky sub-plots and visual MacGuffins?
With the exception of this sentence, does the article contain the word �mitim� � a palindromic word invented by Gander and designed to be inserted, uncommented on, into newspapers, magazines, crosswords or everyday speech, and meaning �a mythical word newly introduced into history as if it had always been there�?
