Ryan Gander: Make every show like it’s your last
At the Contemporary Art Gallery until November 1

“Parapossibility” is a word British artist Ryan Gander uses while discussing the nature of his art-making. In a recent public conversation with Contemporary Art Gallery director Nigel Prince, Gander said that “parapossibility” was a kind of creative proposition, an imaginary condition of being able to do anything and be anywhere. To us, the word suggests that his art could be a wormhole into an alternative universe—a universe of boundless imagining where, again, anything is possible. Or if not anything, then very many things.

Gander’s internationally acclaimed, concept-driven practice is so wide-ranging and various that it’s difficult to nail down. (In the BBC video that accompanies the show, he is described as “a cultural magpie”.) Based in London, he queries and investigates contemporary life, social trends, material culture, and, of course, the making and displaying of art, past and present. He creates visual fictions, often with elaborate narratives attached to them. And he engages the idea of play.

In addition to forays into photography, video, drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation art, Gander has designed running shoes, paperweights, coins, maps, a crossword puzzle, and a chess set—and is working on a kitchen sink. He has cobbled together a series of IKEA-style lamps from everyday items such as a car jack, a fishing rod, bricks, belts, batons, firewood, and stacked rolls of tape. And he has also created a little book of artists’ cocktails, whose contributors include a number of his creative alter egos—fictional artists, two of whom bear the anagram names of Santo Sterne and Aston Ernest.

The show includes marble sculpture, acrylic painting, digital video, a wall calendar, a fibreglass party balloon, a TV ad, a crumpled piece of paper bearing a seating plan for a make-believe art-world dinner, a dozen lamps (on display in the CAG’s outdoor windows), and animatronic eyes. The computer-operated, cartoon-style eyes, titled Magnus Opus, are set into the wall near the entrance to the CAG’s Alvin Balkind Gallery. The work is activated by a motion sensor: when the viewer walks into and around the room, the plastic brows rise, lower, and tilt downward in interest, surprise, or perplexity; the eyelids open widely, squint thoughtfully, and shut with a resounding clap; and the blue irises peer up, down, sideways, and straight ahead. Magnus Opus reverses the expected dynamic: instead of our looking at what’s on the gallery walls, the gallery walls look at us, prompting us to think about how active or passive, critical or accepting our customary art-viewing experience might be. It’s an appealing and amusing work, although in his talk Gander declaimed it as being too simple and said, “I’m always suspicious of work that people like.”

What interests him is work that that stays with viewers because it is not immediately forthcoming or comprehensible. The best art, he said, speaks to us through a condition of incompleteness, through what’s invisible or absent. A prime example of this condition is his acrylic painting on glass, Please be patient—Penny Eve Gander smiling at Olive May Gander in the darkness, The Midland Hotel, Manchester, Tuesday, 22nd of July, 2014. It consists of a few abstract smudges of grey and black paint on a circular piece of glass—that is, the work on view is the palette that Gander used while painting a portrait of his daughters (just one in a large series of portraits of friends and family). He then destroyed the portrait and kept the palette, which he sees as far more interesting. Painting, he told the BBC, “seems quite a futile, illogical, unintelligent act to me”.

Unintelligent or not, the work’s title and the colours on the palette stimulate the viewer to consider the tradition of the painted portrait and imagine what this particular portrait might have looked like.

Imagineering, Gander’s fake TV ad for a fictional British government initiative, extols the adult embrace of childlike imagination. Produced by a German advertising firm to Gander’s specifications, it registers the artist’s alarm over funding cuts to cultural programs and institutions in the U.K. At the same time, and perversely, it is an utterly cheesy and unimaginative production, with clouds of shiny soap bubbles drifting by as adorable children play hopscotch or daydream or slurp spaghetti. It’s as if Gander’s parapossibility had been turned inside out by a dimbulb bureaucrat, creating a wormhole into a very dull universe, indeed.