He thinks painting is futile, the YBAs were an embarrassment, and most artists today might as well be working in carpet shops. So why is his new show full of, er, paintings? We meet the confounding British artist
‘This is so bad isn’t it?” says Ryan Gander, grinning like a naughty schoolboy. “People are going to hate me when you write this up.” The 50-year-old conceptual artist has just finished telling me why, not only does he dislike drawing or painting, he finds the very act “futile and dumb”. He explains: “Copying reality with a pencil and paper just seems completely mad to me. It’s such a weird act. Why would I draw you when I could just take a photograph?”
Gander has many such opinions, from how we measure the value of work to why 90s Brit art was a load of nonsense (more on that later). He also has a superb way of communicating that makes whatever he says seem like the most obvious thing in the world. After an entertaining couple of hours in his company, I leave thinking: “It’s not Gander who’s mad – it’s everyone else.”
Adding confusion to his anti-painting stance is the fact that his new show, Maybe: Ryan Gander, at Eastbourne’s Towner gallery, features new works that are – wait for it – paintings. What’s that all about, I wonder, although whenever I ask about them he freewheels off on fascinating tangents.
These include shinto philosophy, the difference between the two competing ancient Greek concepts of time (kronos v kairos), and how we might save the planet from the self-destructive consumption trajectory it’s on. “My mum has this saying, ‘There are no pockets on a shroud.’ And it’s true. I can’t take my smoothie-maker and wheelchair with me when I’m gone.”
Fascinating, but seemingly little to do with the paintings I asked about. Yet as with most things Gander talks about, his viewpoints ultimately relate to his wider concept of what art should be, which is not about stuff – sculptures, paintings, vases etc – but rather the stories they inspire, the feelings they produce. Perhaps that’s why he once exhibited a breeze blowing through an empty white room. “Art’s not meant to be measurable,” he says. “It’s meant to be ephemeral. It’s meant to be like a gas.”
If Gander has an identity as an artist, then it’s as one who ruthlessly avoids having an identity. He was born in Chester with a severe brittle bone condition which meant he spent a lot of time in hospital beds where his imagination learned to roam free. Past projects have included cocktail recipes, treasure hunts, vending machines, carved wooden condoms, and chess sets made with car components (his dad used to work as a Vauxhall engineer). Art, he maintains, can and should be anything – a joke, a new word, a concrete car. Or even, as he once claimed, a “piece of dogshit on a stick”.
Why then, he asks in bemusement, is so much of it designed to hang on a wall? “As an artist you’re in a place where anything is possible and you have permission to act outside the norms of society. Yet 99% of art is flat and square with four corners.”
The obvious answer may be that people are more likely to buy a pretty picture than – and this is just my guess, here – dogshit on a stick. “Yeah. And the problem with that for me is then we’re no longer making art.”
Galleries used to tell Gander that dancing around so many different styles would be the death knell for his career. “I completely ignored that and actually aggressively did the opposite,” he shrugs. “And in 30 years, I’ve never not sold work.”
He has long been mystified as to why artists throughout history have made variations on the same kind of work. “You can do anything in the world, and you do the same thing again and again and again?” he says. “For me, being creative is about jumping around, not repetition. Mastering something is not creativity – it’s practice. Creativity is finding interesting solutions to difficult problems. Joseph Beuys said that art is the science of freedom, and doing the same thing every day is not freedom. It’s like working in a carpet shop. I wanted to do art because I can do anything. I can wake up and I can be a choreographer even though I can’t walk.”
Of course, Gander could easily be open to accusations that he’s merely a dilettante. “I think that as well sometimes,” he says with a smile. “That I’m not seriously invested in anything. But that’s all right.” Does he have fun doing what he does? “Fuck yeah! It’s amazing.”
He certainly makes being an artist look like a blast. Gander’s work happens in two studios. A little one in London’s Barbican where he conceives his ideas (“Only I have the key to that”) and a big one in Suffolk where the execution happens. He says he has around 100 pieces in the works at any one time, including some that have been years in the making. But he is slowing down. He got divorced recently and, after making a fresh start with a new girlfriend, realised: “I can’t do everything.”
I ask where his ideas come from and he pulls out a deck of white cards from his bag, each bearing a few cryptic words: “Glassed off areas”; “Suspended light box”. He says he might see a man walk behind a phone box at the same time that a woman appears out the other side, as if they’ve transformed like a superhero; he takes a photograph to remind himself, then prints the idea on a card.
“I have, like, 22,000 of them,” he says. In the studio they’re in files and pinned on boards; the ones he has today are just a stack he grabbed before leaving for Eastbourne. “They’re starting points, catalysts.” They remind me of Oblique Strategies – Brian Eno’s deck of cards for helping musicians choose randomised creative actions, although he says they’re less instructive than those.
He pulls one. “Snow machine creating drift within floor,” it says. “That’s pretty didactic, but if you add this one – ‘Glow-in-the-dark props’ – and this one – ‘Money is a luxury’ – then there’s something about the noise they make when they collide.”
This is all very well but I’ve noticed that we have still, somehow, not discussed his paintings. So we try again and somehow end up talking about how he’s never been popular in his home country. Not compared to his success in Japan or the US. “Why am I so un-British?” he asks. “I mean, I’ve never even been nominated for the Turner prize.” Should you have been? “Yeah, of course. Obviously!”
Why hasn’t he? “You’d have to talk to the director of Tate Britain if you want an answer to that. But I’ve done bigger things in bigger museums and I’ve won bigger prizes than the Turner. I guess people often show things just so that they can win the prize, whereas I think if you’re going to do a show you need to do it like you’re going to die next week. There’s no point doing it for another reason.”
Gander also thinks he’s from a bit of a lost generation in British art – the one that came after the seismic shock of the YBAs. “It was very hard to be a British artist after such an egocentric, attention-seeking, shallow kind of art,” he says. “It was loved by people in Britain but you’d go across to Benelux or to France and everyone would be like, ‘Zis eez stupid!’ They thought we were total idiots because it was just debauchery and narcissism and egocentric shouting.”
He did, however, visit the recent Tate show covering the 90s and thought that the art was a whole lot better than what’s being made now. “At least everything looked different and people weren’t all painting the same thing like they do now.” Which is? “Frog paintings. Paintings of frogs on bikes. Just nonsense that doesn’t mean anything. But I’m not very interested in art anyway.”
Most artists, says Gander, just like the fame and the parties. “I’m not doing it for money or attention or to keep me out of jail or because I use art as therapy to help me with my psychological trauma – which I do have,” he says, laughing. “I’m trying to make art that makes an original contribution to human knowledge and history.”
I’m thoroughly enjoying such a wide-ranging and bolshie chat but feel like I really should get something on this new show. So I try again: tell us about these paintings!
“Oh yeah,” he says. “Well I’m not into painting. That’s not interesting to me. For me, art is about ideas. It’s about cognition, not about the retina …”
I stage an intervention before we’re off again. And finally he explains how the painted works are actually a collaboration between him and his seven-year-old son Baxter. (Gander also has two daughters, aged 12 and 17; sculptures of them make up part of the show.) Baxter is autistic and non-verbal. He is also, if Gander is to be believed, telepathic.
“I know that sounds a bit hocus-pocus, but he’s hypersensitive in ways that we would never be. I just have this feeling he can read through me, a bit like how dogs sniff people and don’t like them and then you find out the person’s a murderer. He has this whole aura around him that’s very mystical.”
One day Gander and Baxter were playing around with Picture Exchange Communication System cards, which are used to help non-verbal children communicate. “He’s not normally interested in them, but on this day he got really into the one with a beachball. I decided to paint a huge beachball just to see what he thought.”
It wasn’t supposed to be an artwork for the show but something struck Gander about the painting: “It was almost taking the piss out of the way humans try to rationalise everything that’s different. They way they try to bend people who they think have problems to the way our world works. There’s nothing wrong with Baxter. The only thing that’s wrong with Baxter is society because he doesn’t function in it. It’s the same with me being in a wheelchair. There’s nothing wrong with me. The problem is the fucking nightclub’s down a flight of steps.”
There are other works in the show that Baxter has collaborated on, including music composed visually by placing stickers on a musical stave. “He’s very into pattern recognition, so there is a pattern, but to us it looks random,” says Gander. “Or maybe it is random. Who knows!”
The compositions exist in a wind-up musical box attached to the gallery wall: turn the little handle on the right and Baxter’s charming pieces play. “People think they’re amazing,” says Gander. “I don’t think he’s a savant or anything. The reason people think they’re amazing is because there’s a voice of authority associated with them that tells you they’re meant to be exactly this way. The same way as if I walked over there and knocked a bucket of paint on the rug and we put it in MoMA. Why would anyone question that it’s not perfect abstraction?”
The Baxter collaborations sum up how Gander feels about abstract art in general. “There’s no such thing as a good or bad abstract painting,” he says. “The angels don’t sing and there’s no divine intervention. There’s no Jackson Pollock’s genius. It’s just the way the world is. Go outside and the chewing gum on the pavement is a beautiful abstract composition – as long as you’re told it’s meant to be like that.”
It’s time for Gander to get back to work. They are halfway through the show’s installation when we meet – so I take the time to have a quick look around what’s gone up so far. Gander and Baxter’s paintings take pride of place – a giant painting of balloons sits on one wall, with the beachball opposite. True to form, Gander sees me out with one final confounding opinion. “I’ve never shown these paintings before. I don’t even know if I like them as art.”
Really? The naughty schoolboy grin returns. “Well, you can’t just show bangers all the time, can you?”
