A new show at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Helga de Alvear presents all the artist’s avenues for escaping contemporary normativity
The one new work in Ryan Gander’s 60-work, two-decade survey show is less an art object than a proposition – or rather, 50 of them. All the ambition in the world (2024) is a friezelike grouping of 50 meticulously designed posters for institutional exhibitions that only ever existed in Gander’s imagination. ‘Phantom Ambition’, for a 2007 ‘show’ at Wiels, Antwerp, is characteristically playful, featuring pseudonymous artists from American Artist to Claire Fontaine, Rrose Sélavy to Reena Spaulings and Shoji Yamaguchi. Other posters point towards the future (2028, 2032); all, at their thick, layered edges, show glimpses of more posters hidden underneath, pointing to further ideas, to Gander’s mental fecundity. This notion of the art institution as an object itself, its codes, conventions and history open to simulation, as well as of proliferating possibilities – for isn’t that the most crucial part of the artwork, Gander intimates with circular irony, turning precursory advert into final product – is also literalised in There’s a work in that! (2024), which constitutes a work while seemingly just talking about making work. Dispersed around the edges of the main, second-floor gallery space are myriad white billiard balls on which are printed the artist’s various imaginings (‘Audio grill in wall’, ‘Snow falling frozen in time’, ‘Voodoo doll tiny’…).
There is, for sure, an impression of insecurity in this piece’s emphatic levity, a self-consciousness that comes through in the relentless jokiness of Gander’s wider work. His predilection for animatronics seems indicative of this quality, whatever else one may read into it. See Dominae illud opus populare (2016), a pair of blinking, shifty, joke-shop eyes embedded in a wall; the squeaky mouse delivering a philosophical speech in 2000 year collaboration (The Prophet) (2018). Meanwhile Everything is counted (2021), only referred to in the checklist, is a naturalistic representation in resin of a fly, hidden among other exhibits, without a wall label. It’s either an easter egg left for attentive visitors to discover, or a classic joke-shop surprise, depending if you are in on the prank.
It is possible, nevertheless, to think of this pervasive jokiness and refusal of gravity as conceptually purposeful. Humour, according to Henri Bergson, is always accompanied by the absence of feeling, and one might view Gander’s jocular numbness and relentless variation as a way to escape subsumption by a contemporary capitalist culture permeated by endless branding, commodification, hustle etc – as well as engaging his viewer in puzzle-solving challenges in place of routinised passive consumption. This is indeed where Gander’s postconceptual Duchampian-ness connects with his more allegorical gestures, evidenced especially in his latest works. In 2023’s School of Languages, an animatronic gorilla crouches under an office desk, frustratedly trying – and failing – to count using its fingers: bending and unbending the digits in front of its face, eventually growling in angry exhaustion. Cronos Kairós, from 2024, is a digital clock altered so that its digits overlap, inducing in the viewer an impression of perpetual double vision: a result, perhaps, of inhuman office hours or computer-induced eyestrain.
Gander’s most personal attempt at escaping contemporary normativity, meanwhile, may be Ryan Waiting (2024), a VR simulation of the artist’s likeness in a featureless void, the work programmed to run continuously on a prepaid remote server for the next 100 years. The work aggregates the show’s disparate-yet-intertwined implicit themes. It outsources any development (avatar’s position, scenery, weather) to AI, its present near-emptiness and inactivity inviting the viewer’s imagination to colour in missing details. And, relatedly, it slyly stymies the spectator’s expectation of entertainment and stimulation when confronted with a VR setup. For all of the work’s initial thinness, that’s a lot to consider.
Grunts, hoots, whimpers, barks and screams at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Helga de Alvear, Cáceres, through 20 April
From the March 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
