"The artists Ryan Gander and Jonathan Monk enjoy talking to people on the telephone. It is one of the ways in which both of them are interested—or stuck, if you prefer—in ideas, modes, methods, and moments from the past.
The immediacy, annoyance, and/or ephemerality of a phone call leaves space for all sorts of things to happen—things that cannot happen when everything is written down, etched in the marble stone of limitless-capacity email accounts. The phone creates an intimacy, and also a gap in permanence.
Of course a preference for the phone recalls the children’s game “telephone,” based on the mixing and missing of messages. Focusing on concepts and appropriating whatever medium, technique, or scale fits their purpose, both Gander and Monk often work through the sending of instructions—a mode that likewise creates space for enticing slippages, perversions, misinterpretations, reversals. The game of telephone might itself be a genre of conceptual art,...involving as it does meanings forgotten or misconstrued, instructions neglected or lost in translation.
The phone analogy also invites another allusion, to the phrase “phoning it in.” Understood to characterize an action that is done unenthusiastically, with minimal effort, half-assed, the phrase “to phone it in” sometimes describes artistic production. The colloquialism could be descriptive, ironic, or critical with respect to these artists’ practices.
The phone concept also has an interesting tie-in with art history, from the lost MCA Chicago exhibition Art by Telephone (1969), to pieces like Walter De Maria’s artwork of the same name from a few years earlier, the phone and the transmission of ideas is a hallmark of conceptual art.
The request to write this short press release arrived via email—luckily. I do not like talking on the telephone; maybe Gander and Monk know this about me. In fact, I avoid talking on the tortuous telephone at all costs; having someone’s voice close to my ear is incredibly uncomfortable for me. It’s gotten better over the years, but I still make up excuses from time to time as to why I am not available to talk on the phone.
Ryan Gander, who lives and works in London, creates language, games, correspondences, performance, sculpture, film, and other media in order to compose propositions that settle in the space between questions, solutions, and lies. Berlin-based Jonathan Monk uses family affairs and conceptual iconography in neon, metal, paint, film, slide projections, and photography to continuously ask, answer, and reimagine “what’s next?” Both artists can be reached by telephone, but please don’t call me."
Jens Hoffmann
Imágenes de la Exposición
JONATHAN MONK & RYAN GANDER
Entrada actualizada el el 31 oct de 2017
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