Ryan Gander. The whisper perspective

Ryan Gander’s body of work fully reflects theories about the reality of the virtual. Professor, amateur philosopher – as he likes to define himself – and TV presenter, the artist from Chester (UK, born 1976) masters the ability to open new fields of discussion on important themes through the lens of the details of everyday life. Gander swims upstream, avoiding by-now-common reproductions of human experience of reality in artificial digital media: his focus is the real effects generated by something that does not yet fully exist – the next yet-to-come.

Considered the standard-bearer of new conceptual art, his artwork has been shown at dOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and at the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. Among Gander’s projects is his solo exhibition at the National Museum of Art of Osaka in 2017, where he not only presented approximately sixty of his works, but also curated an exhibition pairing works from the museum collection.

“Clack, clack, thud”, 2013.
Image credit: © Ryan Gander. Courtesy the artist. Image Ryan Gander’s Studio.

Interview with Ryan Gander

MARCO ANTELMI: In your work, the themes of attention, money and time recur constantly and wink to each other in a triangular loop. How do you relate to these three fields?

RYAN GANDER: I consider them under the aspect of artifacts: when we’ll be dead, there will be a lot of artifacts that will stay, that will remain after us. So I consider art as a physical thing, but one that leads to an experience or to a story or a situation that is not physical, and, moreover, that can only be articulated through an object, or by an object. As in Shintoism, for instance – art in its physical form doesn’t matter, art objects are only “recipients” of experiences. Ultimately, art can be considered as the value of time, on time. In other words, if you’re sitting on a bus, thinking about a work from the exhibition you just visited, it means that that specific work is a successful one, whether you liked it, enjoyed it or loathed it, it captured your imagination. For this reason, I consider artworks as proof of quality experiences.

“I… I… I…”, 2019.
Image credit: © Ryan Gander. Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin. Image Andrea Rossetti.

MA: Your art is in the details, I think about We never had a lot of € around here (a single 25 euro coin from 2036), about I… I… I… (a mouse animatronic that holds philosophical discourses). Why, in a time characterized by enormity, did you decide to focus on the details?

RG: I like big subjects, such as mortality, but I don’t like to demand attention. I believe that the public should invest attention on what it wants. If they invest attention on a particular work, it’s their choice. A lot of art now is like clickbait, it demands attention, I don’t like to feel manipulated so I prefer artworks to seduce me subtly. You shout and often people don’t remember what you say, however a whisper is a different thing.

“Some Other Life” exhibition view, 2019.
Image credit: © Ryan Gander. Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin. Image Andrea Rossetti.

MA: So, you wanted to express this atmosphere of subtlety when you used an 18% grey, the one that photographers use to set their camera, to color everything in your exhibition Some Other Life at Esther Schipper Gallery in Berlin?

RG: In this installation I wanted to induce empathy. This grey is also the one used in virtual spaces, when you use it in the real space, it produces a feeling that what’s around you doesn’t feel like reality. This specific grey, and more precisely this 18% one, it’s midway between black and white and this is exactly what I want to express with my production: neither black, nor white, but something in between. It’s about perspectives, because this color communicates a kind of virtual feeling that can open the public’s minds to the new. It’s not a statement, it’s a start.

MA: What about your watch with an obscured display, Clack, clack, thud, or your collaboration with Tony Chambers for the production of kitchens with your new venture OTOMOTO, then? Do you think your way of describing reality is closer to some kind of “alternative life” solutions, rather than actually art?

RG: If we go back to the triangle made of money, time and attention, there should be said that these fields are not only intertwined, but also overlayered. Everybody knows that time equals money, but I’m convinced even more that time equals attention: if you only had 20 days left, would you still go on Instagram? Starting from this, I believe there is no difference between design and art; all this is just cognitive activity, it’s exercising your imagination. We could consider imagination as a methodology – actually, imagination is a muscle. And the best way to exercise imagination is to make a lot of various creative acts.

“Equivalent Economies and Equivalent Means”, 2018.
Image credit: © Ryan Gander. Courtesy the artist and GB Agency. Image Aurélien Mole.

“Equivalent Economies and Equivalent Means”, 2018.
Image credit: © Ryan Gander. Courtesy the artist and GB Agency. Image Aurélien Mole.

MA: Another element that often recurs in your work is the collision between public and private, between family and philosophy, daily life and infinity, like in Equivalent Economies and Equivalent Means, a vending machine that sells stones. Could you explain more about this?

RG: A lot of art is about politics, activism, the Internet and other very important topics, but I think that all this art is actually about mortality. We, as humans, have a deficiency: we project ourselves in the future; animals, on the contrary, are lucky, because they only think about diet or reproduction. The vending machine idea came from my kids, they were collecting stones illegally on a beach, so I decided to put them in a vending machine and to let people buy them. I wanted to talk about predicament of value. We feel that time accelerates because of repetitive acts, so I try to break this repetition with different mechanisms of the way we approach art.

“2000 year collaboration (The Prophet)”, 2018.
Image credit: © Ryan Gander. Courtesy the artist and Kunsthalle Bern. Image Gunnar Meier.

MA: Is this the same reason why you chose to use your nine year old daughter’s voice for the works 2000 year collaboration (The Prophet) and I… I… I…? This work is not only cute, I remember your daughter saying very important things, imparting, in the first one, a philosophical speech based on the final scene of The Great Dictator by Charlie Chaplin, rewritten from a post-Internet perspective. This cuteness made the work very famous, especially on social media. Where did this idea come from?

RG: I chose my daughter’s voice because when politicians make their speeches they usually shout, they stand higher than you, they’re on a pedestal. Again, here comes back the perspectives topic: I wanted to bring out a positive dictation speech from the smallest character possible, this is the reason of the mouse animatronic. Furthermore, if you shout nobody listens, if you whisper everybody does, that’s why I chose my daughter’s voice.

“A toppled Breuer chair after a blizzard of snow”, 2017.
Image credit: © Ryan Gander. Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery. Image Jack Hems.

MA: It’s interesting how you talk about and face complex topics without using specific or trendy words, i.e. Anthropocene, climate change, and so on – for instance, in A toppled Breuer chair after a blizzard of snow, a chair apparently covered by snow, which is actually marble.

RG: I am of the opinion that we use the wrong strategies for changing. I have to say I don’t believe in protesting, in political demonstrations and so on. If you want change, you have to reach for it in a positive way. People should just start being good role models, and then the rest will come. This is also why snow is the material of our time: snow is a kind of equalizer, it’s always changing and changes also the environment around you, the sounds, the colors. If you think that in 2050 the UK weather will be like Barcelona, snow is really the rarest material today. Snow is the material of our time, just as time is the subject of our time: it doesn’t only transform the environment, but also the way we understand the world. The sea, for instance, never disappears, it shows us the bottom of the ocean. Snow is the material of our time because when it is gone, we’ll realize how important it was.

“A toppled Breuer chair after a blizzard of snow”, 2017.
Image credit: © Ryan Gander. Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery. Image Jack Hems.