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