Vienna. Somewhere halfway through Ryan Gander’s show there is a crash: in the back part of the exhibition you enter a room whose floor is covered with shards lying in the semi-darkness. The picture can be reconstructed by a kind of detective work: the fragments are the remnants of a light installation of neon tubes that was previously mounted on the wall. You can just make out some writing, but not what the text says. The title of the work, »A Phantom of Appropriation«, allows the deduction that some form of borrowing has taken place here (experts will be reminded of various works of minimal or concept art using neon writing). And now? Will viewers attribute this landscape of debris to an accident or rather to a performative act in which destructive rage has manifested against the work-as-object? Or will people see here a denial of functional and causal logic of representation in this presentation of mute signs as a mere effect without a cause? The »case« stays open.
The young Briton Ryan Gander has set up his exhibition »Short cut through the trees«, which brings together works of the last four years, as a game with meanings, times and identities. A method can soon be seen in the way he pounces on formal languages and narratives with high memorability, smashes them up and reassembles them so that their original meanings are alternately twisted, shortened, extended or concealed. MUMOK shows four works from the series »Association Photographs (2004), for which Gander has arranged and photographed textual and visual material – newspaper clippings, photocopies, snapshots, illegible handwriting etc. – on a wall of his studio. The arrangements do not follow any compelling logic; the connections between the heterogeneous elements does not seem to be legitimated by anything more than the connecting principle of the montage itself. At each left-hand bottom corner of the large photographs there are inserts that give information on the type, material and source of the different image components. They are just descriptions, not stories. The peculiarity of Ryan Gander’s working method can perhaps be described using Jacques Rancière’s concept of »anti-representation«. Rancière mounted together with Gander would look something like this: by the way that Gander melds widely different meanings, like a building material, and trims different significances to the common scale of our everyday needs, he gives them »a presence and a familiarity« »that can make more of them than just tools that we have at our disposal or text that we can decipher. They make them inhabitants of our world, personalities that create us a world.«1 This »world« has something childish and magical about it: anything can do anything, everything can be connected with everything else, »wonders« are possible (without causality). Here, producer and viewer can meet each other at the same eye level. Gander himself calls his »Association Photographs« a »collection of possible starting points for new work«: They provide the material for the film noir – or a parody of it – in our head.
Ryan Gander’s arrangements do not just shrink spatial distances; they also make possible jumps in time. »To walk to the distant tower turn back to page 17« is written in one place in the work »Happenstance« (2006). The installation consists of 168 torn-out book pages which Gander presents as framed double pages on the wall and of which only four are printed with text and illustrations. All the other pages are blank and thus have the effect of a magnifying glass on the fragmentary story, in which the sentence quoted refers as a footnote to an early passage that is, however, missing. Thus liberated from any context, the footnote can be read as a trace leading to another work in the exhibition: on a plaque mounted on the wall at eye level, several copies of Gander’s own science fiction novel, »The Boy Who Always Looked Up«, are piled up into a tower. From the MUMOK leaflet, we learn that the story is about modernistic architecture and social (future) utopias - superfluous information in the context of the installation, which reduces the book to its mere presence and, by forcing the viewers to look up to read the title of the novel, throws them back on themselves. The book that is transformed into a sculpture is one more proof that Ryan Gander does not think much of (genre) definitions. »A short cut through the trees« is perhaps less an exhibition than the appropriation of its form that has been worked using rough tools. The short cut through the woods may be uneven, or perhaps not completely safe, but it emanates an irresistible attraction.
Translated by Timothy Jones