8/19/2023 0 Comments Ephemeral art artists![]() ![]() “No,” he says, “just by never having enough resources or time.” I’ve been recording them in pictures, and I’ll probably recreate them in a gallery at some point.”ĭoes he get haunted by the ideas he hasn’t made yet? “My son is quite compulsive and he puts all his toys and cars and stuff in long lines across the floor. That’s kairos.” He pulls out a bunch of bundled photographs: “Baxter’s lines,” he says. You can’t say to him ‘wait until six o’clock to eat’. Like my son, Baxter, is three and he is autistic. “ Kairos is more like ‘readiness’, for now. “ Chronos is what I would make if I had more time and money,” Gander says, explaining his system. There are also shelves of file boxes marked: “ chronos” and “ kairos”, two ancient Greek words for different aspects of time. “You won’t know what that means,” Gander says, “but I do.” The hope is that the cards start to make connections with each other, like a mind map, or a police investigation wall. We end up in his office – “I don’t work in here that often,” he says, “because I get lonely” – which has a couple of hundred printed notes pinned to the wall, as three-word “catalyst ideas” for future projects: “cartoon, poster, wobble”, say. For the Documenta 13 show in Germany in 2012, he exhibited a cool breeze circulating in an empty gallery. Gander’s practice includes the ongoing lecture series Loose Associations, in which he riffs on ideas that interest him. My favourite piece of his is The End (2020), in which an animatronic mouse appeared through a hole at the bottom of the wall of an empty gallery room to talk about metaphysics (in the voice of Gander’s nine-year-old daughter Olive). ![]() Gander, as you’ll have gathered, is a conceptual artist, but he is also a likeable kind of philosopher, providing ad hoc theories to order. The tackiest of them is Santo Sterne and the most high-minded is Santo’s anagram Aston Ernest. The fictional artist selves, he says, allow him “to make work better than I can make work, but also work that’s more superficial and shallow than I would want to make”. For a start, he has a small team of assistants making and planning for another thing he’s got eight artistic alter egos, who have created different strands of his work for more than 15 years. Gander has always been a one-man group show. In one room are the moon paintings he is making for an exhibition in Tokyo, some using paint prints from upturned tables in a Chinese restaurant in another are some of his draped mirror series in which the reflection-obscuring fabric is cast in marble here are piles of art posters for exhibitions that never happened, there are animatronic “dying mosquitoes” twitching on gold playing cards in one corner is a vending machine trading an alphabetic list of “everything you never want to run out of” – A is After Eights, B is Beer, # is a bag of marijuana there are recreations of graffitied back alley doorways, recast in polished steel plans for the most authentic lifesize gorilla robot ever made, with “smells, sounds, everything”, which should be ready for his exhibition at Lisson Gallery later this year homages to 1970s slideshows a recreated transparent Japanese gym locker… Before we sit and talk, he gives me a tour. His studio, in a former register office and sports hall in the Suffolk village of Melton, is living proof of that determination. His solution is always to act on ideas “before they lose their energy”. The real killer of art, Ryan Gander suggests, is procrastination. ![]()
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