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PROFILE: UGO RONDINONE Pádraig Timoney enters the artist’s labyrinthine world
One of the problems with formal eclecticism in an artist’s practice is the difficulty it presents in terms of identifying a unifying pattern or trajectory, if one exists at all. It’s a problem because the expectation of such a unity can be unflattering for individual works, especially if unsponsored by them. Ugo Rondinone orchestrates his many varied strands of production so that a continual oscillation between heterogeneity and unity is fully consistent with his emergent themes. One of Rondinone’s obvious abilities is to be able to temper an immense material and theatrical facility with this level of cohesion, while maintaining a key that is at times minor, at times discordant. His installations have usually featured an arrangement of some of the following types of work: videos, various series of photographs, circular concentric paintings and rectangular stripe paintings, large ink landscapes, life-size sculptures of inert clowns, broken mirrors, interferences with the access points to the gallery, coloured Perspex over windows autographing the light, rough wood stud walls, speakers emitting repetitive texts, songs, or short conversations.
None of these media, the various platforms that make up any given show, are signature ‘finds’ in themselves: well-hammered foils and fully comprehensible types of work, they announce their familiarity first. And like many a night with a bottle of wine and your favourite vinyl albums, stylus wearing the grooves down so that original quality becomes swapped for fondness and indelibility, the run through of these tropes is reproductive as opposed to evolutionary. Rondinone, in one of many guises, is a ventriloquist, lending his disembodied, disturbing vocalisation and manipulative invigoration to the limp and scrawny dummies which art history left, just yesterday, in the attic. It is hardly surprising that in one or two works (e.g. IN THE SWEET YEARS REMAINING) he references landscape-dependent northern Romanticism. The image of a single figure alone in a beautiful yet hostile landscape is traditionally encoded shorthand for a yearning for spiritual accommodation in the natural. Rondinone multiplies the image in a series of photographs of black verticals on white ground; forest trees and figure stark against snow. Mounted on a rough hewn timber wall, illuminated from behind by coloured lights, no viewpoint is exclusive: there are many surroundings and dispersals in them, the supporting planks are too present and too ‘metaphoric’ to allow the photographs to indicate much depth. The result is a flattening, a superficial dispersal of the iconographic, an exasperating choice of insufficient elements. The movement is from shorthand Romanticism to alienation: paralysis (frozen); devastating and unopposable atmospheric conditions (fatalism); emptiness (disturbing unfamiliarity). Over the last decade, Rondinone’s exhibition titles have included FAR AWAY TRAINS PASSING BY, DAYS BETWEEN STATIONS, MEANTIME, WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? BONJOUR TRISTESSE, THE EVENING PASSES LIKE ANY OTHER, IN THE SWEET YEARS REMAINING, GUIDED BY VOICES, KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE, and, most recently, NO HOW ON. It’s impossible to overlook the indication of a sentimental and existential leaning, but, as with most situations delivered by Rondinone, the ground is shifty; the indication is often a sign of warning that a tendency to look at the works as ‘expressionism’ – as self-indulgence and primarily autobiographical – is not guaranteed to suffice. No one ever meant to say that a spider’s web was expressive before functional. The difficulty extends from the fact that, in whatever way, we are usually determined to make understanding palatable. With regard to this, the work makes words of approximation appear, and these words – like alienation, isolation, dislocation, melancholy, and neurosis – are those words to which everyone has a register of personally meaningful experience. (This must be what they mean by alienation.) Rondinone’s position seems that of ‘sensitive’ personality, mixing an innocent need to source meaning with an ironical and worldly-wise knowledge that the production of objects is indulgent, pointless, ludicrous and lucrative. It’s a short step from here to attesting that this very situation of impossibility, as the true subject, needs expressing. Samuel Beckett, in his third dialogue with Georges Duthuit in 1949, deems such an attestation beyond him: ‘I know that all that is required now, in order to bring this horrible matter to an acceptable conclusion, is to make of this submission, this admission, this fidelity to failure, a new occasion, a new term of relation, and of the act, which, unable to act, obliged to act, he makes, an expressive act, even if only of itself, of its impossibility, of its obligation. I know that my inability to do so puts myself, and perhaps an innocent, in what I think is still called an unenviable situation, familiar to psychiatrists.’ Beckett is never far from Rondinone. Rondinone’s paintings spoil the opportunity of the possible. There is just the relationship of a certain number of colours screened out on an iconic zone, different colours in the simplest positioning of variations. Pure notes, but oppressed by relationship. Never escaping, slickly or fuzzily, from materiality. Tiredness, limpness, misdirection, modesty, haunting traces, emptiness in full light, fully spectacular, apparatus of appearance. A very simple way of making something that doesn’t take more than a certain allowed time, aims for and accepts all it can in the space it’s introduced to, plays with ideas of paintings as being meaningfully larger than their fabrication. The best description of an influence is often just its name; and the titles of Rondinone’s paintings are dates. Do you remember what you did on ACHTZEHNTERAUGUSTNEUNZEHNHUNDERTNEUNZIG? (1991). In this case the painting is made in the year after its title. Sometimes it is made in the same year, maybe on the same day (like the circle painted on a wall of the Vienna Kunsthalle, titled 27th June 2002, for NO HOW ON which opened the following day). If occasion and subject are distanced by a year, or if they are not, the painting is still in no situation; it either isn’t anything other than a stylistic corruption of memory, or a subject identical to its occasion: the subject is the time of making. What could be solely self-referential is rescued from self-congratulation into uncertainty; if the original referent, a day, though once universally shared, is now inexistent, then the quality of the representation is undecidable. As well as the named days, Rondinone inhabits the night with his forms of illuminated address: neon rainbows, arcing over the rooftops, spelling out instructions and phrases such as Hell, yes! (2000), or A HORSE WITH NO NAME (2002). These phrases, perhaps worn out, once ringing with communication, are now only reinvigorated by their colourful illumination, but for half-time only; the sun also rises, blanketing everything with illumination from above, squeezing the signs’ little emission into bare perceptibility. (The same feeling of existential nausea you get looking at the yellow wheeze of a flashlight switched on in daylight). Waiting for the kiss of night, a state of constant recurrence but not permanent. After-hours rainbows that don’t last long are hard to leave and hard to forget, but you don’t have much choice. Seen more coldly, the universe that Rondinone presents is like a swinging beehive of movements; geometrically literal in the pulsing tondo paintings and speedy horizontal stripes, arcs, lazily sloping walls, to the right-angled logic snakes of his most recent mirrored installations (if the logic was that each progression of the form would adopt perpendicularity to both remaining planes as the quickest means of getting far away from what is already there). Movement is echoed at the level of subject too: circlings, emergings, wanderings, repulsions, stoppages, great and little cycles, in-and-outs, back-and-forwards, dances, attractions and paralyses, erosions, maintenances. Making nothing less than a laboratory of rejections, a concentration on movements which are everywhere identified as the tensions between a recognisable, comfortable, yet unmaintainable status (identity) and its location or surroundings which can supply nothing to it but the circumstances forcing change. For MOONLIGHT AND ASPIRIN (1997) speakers hanging from two spindly trees, divided by a leaning, twisted wall, reiterate a conversation between a man and woman, to the effect that the woman doesn’t want the man to go get a cup of coffee for fear that he’ll take the chance to skedaddle. The conversation is cyclical, in that the question/answer session leads to the last line being the same as the opening, and the whole sorry story begins again. Desire and complicity in maintaining what feels good, nice, now; the demand for development (or just the wish for coffee) measured against the narrowness of a focus on what is presently evident: which is preferable? A battle between the sensibly evident and the imaginative; permanent vacillation between impermanent but solid states. Neither of which is winning in this dead, but critical, period of time. The protagonists sound first ridiculous, then horrifying, then thankfully forgettable: the repetition amplifies neurosis until it bursts into banality. We at least, choosing, may move on, the work’s format of duration provides for its content’s eventual erosion. Every work is quickly indicative of something taken from a certain surrounding: the viewer is constantly put in a situation of corrosive outside influences and their erosion of what can try only to be a sufficient and replete entity: this most obviously evident in the cast river boulders of THE EVENING PASSES LIKE ANY OTHER (1998) or in the black-and-white photographic series MOONLIGHTING, where a figure in full black bondage exoskeleton is seen, trapped at the moment of exposure, emerging from the integrity of soft black grounds. A full suit internalises and amplifies stimulation, working as an insulated battery to contain all the charge. On the other hand, it’s difficult to express when the breath is needed to just avoid suffocation. In general, the exhibitions are not so much a quiet display by Rondinone as an opened studio, an experimentation of paralysed forms, diagrammatic movement and the movement of light, the entrances and exits carefully membraned; revealing the sometimes horrible architectural remnants left exposed when the orchestra of works has been arranged. Transitory settings that are taken to be critically incidental, not totally transformative of the solidity of material underpinnings. A ‘re-evaluation’ of this underpinning, something secure, permanent, outlasting the merry-go-round of ‘shows’, is pitched against the works’ Winterreise. The resulting situation is not so horrible as to make a return to the real world welcome; neither is quite ideal. Pádraig Timoney is an artist based in Liverpool | I invented it all, in the hope it would console me, help me to go on, allow me to think of myself as somewhere on a road, moving, between a beginning and an end, gaining ground, losing ground, getting lost, but somehow in the long run making headway. All that is nothing but lies. Samuel Beckett Roundelay,1 Rondinone’s new installation at the Centre Pompidou, is a like a modernday split rendering of that same wandering. Like two sleepwalkers, a man and a woman walk within the architectonic labyrinth of the urban desert of Beaugrenelle, in Paris. As if driven by an interior force, their fragmented movements appear in sequence on six screens. The rhythm with which the images change reveal the characters to be pourvus de pieces manquantes (endowed with missing pieces – Samuel Beckett): a wide shot here, and there, followed by a close-up and then a medium shot. We see them face on, from the back, in profile, then catch a rapid glance at their shoes, from the back, from the front. We are familiar with Rondindone’s way of telling a story through isolated snapshots, but this is the first time that the images come to life. The viewer becomes the scrupulous observer of a very personal work and, simultaneously, an eyewitness of the following statement, “In the domain of art as in life, of everything that happens in time […], we can, at best, possess it bit by bit, but never as a whole at any one time.”2 That is how Samuel Beckett, being a great source of inspiration for Rondinone, summed up the aesthetic process he himself used for work he intended for cinema and television. With Rondinone, the motion of walking is shown to be psycho-aesthetic: a movement in which to find reassurance and restored strength, and also a way of escape, or an exercise in remembering or forgetting oneself. They could well be considered fortunate walking around with purpose but no goal. If that is the case, then Rondinone’s “seekers” differ to the “figures lying down”: life-size clowns and artist’s alter ego, all shown in a state of relaxation with their waiting and dreaming. These are considered today as “trade marks” of Rondinone’s work. Focused on their own spirit and their own body as unique sources of awareness, they float in a sort of limbo, somewhere between time and space. They are frequently seated or lying down beside walls that shine with fragments of mirrored glass, or beneath the magical glare of hypnotic, coloured circles. In this relaxed position they can then embark on a journey within their interior universe, where we can imagine that they work on their self-awareness. That is the main aim expressed in Rondinone’s work.” Through its repetitive form, Roundelay cuts its links with conventional, filmed narrative. But we, nevertheless, begin to sense the fragments of images, their rhythmic composition, like objets trouvés or found objects,3 rich with suggestion, which provide us with a point from which to begin inventing a story. We are actively encouraged to enter this sphere of imagination by watching the flux of images from the hexagonal space suffused with a strange orange light and whose materials are of unexpected softness (canvas, jute and felt), all of which combine to liberate our senses from the exterior world. Our normal perception is further disoriented by the ceiling, carpeted with woolly cobwebs. Finally, the impression gained is further emphasized by the enigmatic silence of the video (a silence made more profound by the minimalist and suggestive musical composition). Such are the foundations that help liberate the imagination, so that we can “hear the movement” and “see the sounds”.4 Numerous aspects of Rondinone’s work can therefore only properly be understood by actually looking at it. Ambiguous as it is, wavering between art and lyrical prose, his work as a whole undermines our ordinary expectations. The floating floors symbolize this aesthetic of uncertainty. Rondinone’s works are often permeated with an extraordinary atmosphere of uncertainty. They appear elusive and confused. Frequent changes of role, or personalities, as illustrated in the series of photographs I Don’t Live Here Anymore (1995-2000), or in I Never Sleep (1998), evoke the theme of the double obscur, or dark, vampirish activities. In Moonlight and Aspirin (1997), sculptures of skeletal trees are placed in pairs or small groups and whisper excerpts of texts that once again remind us of that notion, so cherished by the Romantics, of the migration of souls or of animated life (beseelte Natur). Rondinone’s viewers are often taken by surprise, like detectives groping for clues in a place unfamiliar to them, we trip over strange things in a strange world – over phenomena that we need to experience before even beginning to understand them. The romantic desire for that sixth sense, for a confrontation with the unknown, the intangible and changeable is one of the principal preoccupations throughout Rondinone’s work. Could this be the reason for its magical attraction? Proust’s assertion that “We love what we do not wholly possess […] [Love] only lasts if one part remains still to be conquered”5 seems a reasonable explanation of the drive that animates Rondinone’s figures in Roundelay. And maybe ours too? Gaby Hartel Translated by Diana Tamlyn Excerpt from “Devoting oneself to an illusion…” in the booklet Ugo Rondinone: Roundelay, Editions Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2003 1. Roundelay is the title of a 13-line poem written by Samuel Beckett in 1976 (while expressing the idea of circularity, the word “roundelay”, literally “rondeau”, can be understood together with the word “delay”, as the action of turning around with no end result.) 2. Samuel Beckett, Proust, translated and presented by Edith Fournier, Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1990, p.28. 3. The text is in French. 4. Sergei Eisenstein, “An Unexpected Juncture”, in Angela Moorjani, Carola Veit (ed.), Samuel Beckett Today / Samuel Beckett aujourd’hui, vol. 11 (Endlessness in the Year 2000/Fin sans fi n en l’an 2000), New York / Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2001, p. 328. 5. Samuel Beckett, Proust, op. cit., pp. 61-62.
Ugo Rondinone Elizabeth Janus In his 1960 novel, La noia (Boredom), Alberto Moravia blamed the existential ennui of postwar Europe on a reality that had grown patently absurd. For Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone, too, reality's failings are at the heart of our present-day malaise, which he wholeheartedly accepts as an aspect of the human condition. Taking this premise as his point of departure, Rondinone creates mixed-media installations that run the gamut of artistic genres and techniques - including landscape drawing, abstract painting, photographic portraiture, realist sculpture, and video - and reflect the belief that the artist's role is to reinvent reality rather than just mediate it. To this end, he often takes his own subjectivity as an artist as a starting point, in part embracing, in part resisting bourgeois notions about the artist as clown/entertainer, as marginalized visionary, or as conduit for the sublime. In his installations, he exposes the mechanisms of style, technical bravado, and presentation as aesthetic contrivances, which, like language for Samuel Beckett, may be worn-out and trite but remain the artist's only means of coming to terms with the alienating forces of our technology-driven times. For his first one-man show at the Galerie Walcheturm in Zurich, in 1991, Rondinone made a series of sketches of the Swiss countryside in an idealized style reminiscent of early nineteenth-century plein-air painting. He then enlarged the notebook-size originals to a monumental scale by projecting a photographic negative of each drawing onto a huge sheet of paper and copying, in ink, the negative image. Before hanging the enormous, framed landscapes, Rondinone covered the gallery's large picture window with whitewashed planks, which blocked out most of the natural light, exaggerating the artificiality of the environment and heightening the contrast between his highly stylized depictions of nature and their "true-to-life" scale. Rondinone's interest in provoking confrontations between the real and the artificial also informs his more complex installations, which owe much to the artist's early dabbling in performance art. (Before he began his studies at Vienna's Hochschule fur angewandte Kunst in 1986, he did a short stint working with Hermann Nitsch and his Orgies Mystery Theater.) The influence of performance was most apparent in one of Rondinone's first institutional exhibitions ("dog days are over"), in 1996, at Zurich's Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, where he created an installation that brought together live actors, sound, painting, and video and took the figure of the clown as its centerpiece. At the show's opening, several paunchy, middle-aged men made up as clowns lounged lazily on the floor of one of the museum's galleries, moving only to change position or to yawn. Fits of hysterical laughter could be heard from hidden speakers activated by sensors whenever a visitor entered. (For the rest of the exhibition's run, the clowns were replaced by their videotaped likenesses on monitors set up precisely where each clown had sat.) On the walls behind the clowns, Rondinone spray-painted huge blurry "targets," series of concentric circles that were color-coded to match the giddy combinations of blue, orange, brown, green, and yellow used in the clown's costumes and makeup. If the ensemble's initial effect was carnivalesque, with time, a creeping sense of unanswered expectations, boredom, and emptiness took over. This was due partly to the fact that the clowns never performed (they barely moved) and partly to their pathetic appearance. Rondinone's buffoon is a tragic everyman caught between the banality of his own life and his job of making us forget the banality of ours; a role, one senses, that Rondinone identifies with. In a later version of the same installation, done for a show in 1997 at Le Consortium in Dijon, Rondinone worked on a grander scale, now presenting the videos as gigantic wall projections. He also included a selection of photographs from a series he had begun in 1995, titled "I don't live here anymore." In these, Rondinone used digital imaging to superimpose his face onto photographs of the lithe, childlike bodies of female models taken from fashion magazines. Leaving traces of five o'clock shadow on his face, he called attention to the fact that the photographs had been manipulated. Seemingly unrelated, these two sets of images - of dejected, marginal men and idealized feminine beauties - are manifestations of the artist's conflicted nature, his internal anxieties and desires writ large - a public offering of an intensely subjective alternative "reality." Lately, Rondinone has turned to translating his psychological states into environments that are intended to provoke a corresponding mood in the viewer. For his contribution to the group show "An Unrestricted View of the Mediterranean" at the Kunsthaus Zurich last June, Rondinone took three stones found in a country stream as models, from which he made enlarged plaster replicas; he coated them with a shiny lacquer and embedded several audio speakers into their surfaces. The plaster "stones" were then suspended in the center of a white room with harsh yellow trim which the artist flooded with fluorescent light. An almost despondent voice endlessly droned from the speakers, "What could be better? Nothing is better." Hanging near the stones, placed in such a way that the viewer could only see one at a time, four white video monitors each played a continuous loop - of car lights approaching in a snowstorm, a man opening and closing a door, a half-naked woman pushing up a crumbling photo backdrop, or a man floating underwater with his eyes open - that had been isolated from a film (Antonioni's are a favorite source) and then slowed down and repeated. By disrupting normal filmic progression, Rondinone created a sense of suspended, cyclical time, which became the installation's dominant motif. This state of suspension, echoed by the floating rocks (symbolic of the weightiness of time), worked in combination with the installation's hot light and color, its meaningless, incantatory sound and pointless imagery, to evoke an undeniable feeling of hopelessness and alienation, and to create an unexpectedly austere and eerie beauty. If Rondinone's art seems elusive, it is perhaps because the forms he uses, culled from both high art and popular culture, meld into a composite vision that, like reality itself, is increasingly difficult to grasp as a whole. Rather than concoct a strategy to critique the complexities and contradictions of life, Rondinone offers instead a highly personal, parallel reality, which - filled with fantasy, angst, monotony, and despair - may be closer to the truth than we'd care to admit. Elizabeth Janus is a frequent contributor to Artforum. COPYRIGHT 1998 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
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