A failure to know

by Anthony Uhlmann
13 October 2011

Through the window Ryan Gander, Locked Room Scenario

‘The art of combining is not my fault. It’s a curse from above.’
(Samuel Beckett, Enough)

Google ‘The Blue Conceptualists’. Some hits bear Gander’s imprint: the references to works by fake artists on real websites; the YouTube clip ‘In Search of Mary’; the homepage of the Kimberling gallery. Other links seem distinct from the work, but are drawn into it: the lyrics to the hit ‘To Build a Home’, which includes the title of a work by Mary Aurory, ‘There is a tree as old as me’, alongside heartfelt interpretations of the song’s meaning; the equally authentically awkward website by a mathematician called Kimberling. Then a blog that urges you to see Gander’s show because it mixes conceptualism (an art of ideas) with Picasso’s blue period (an art of emotion). While at first seeming inadequate the link is precise. Locked Room Scenario makes you feel an idea: one written in bold type before the second locked door: ‘Field of Meaning’.

You connect jumbled elements that generate a sensation of meaningfulness. The first stairway is barred by two demonstrative teens: you feel you can’t approach. The second is pitch black: your eyes adjust to reveal a door with a keyhole (you look through with trepidation). The corridor (marked, like many elements, by blue roped partitions) leads to the second locked door. At first you fail to notice the woman in a blue dress dancing behind the heavily opaque glass, but when you return the occluded spectacle assumes the very structure of desire. A large room carries a press release and timeline for the Blue Conceptualists. Postcard reproductions of their works are dispersed nearby. Through an internal office window these images recur: on a magazine cover, a poster, a CCTV screen. The space becomes charged with combinations. The colour blue repeats and gathers significance. You enter a blue corridor, remember a line from the press release that links it to the keyhole motifs on one postcard, and recognise the corridor on the CCTV screen. The main works, only partially visible through blinds, stand in a locked room. Under a large image of a naked woman a message states that what is important now is to make the life one has left meaningful. An iPhone chimes behind another locked door: surrounded by older phones, worn out by the failure to connect, its blue world throbs out an unanswered call. Past them trees, perhaps Mary Aurory’s, stare back, and voices are dimly heard.

Outside, the graffiti ‘Mary Aurory Sorry’ leads you behind the building; a blue hose draws you to a mail chute full of unopened letters to Spencer Anthony. Through the glass are two coffin-sized boxes on their ends marked ‘Mary Aurory’ and a blue neon sculpture. Meaning, felt through accumulation, generates a widening field. On the street, some distance away, a stranger points to something you have ‘dropped’. Two pages from a memoire explain how it was not Spencer, but another who took to forlornly scrawling ‘Mary Aurory Sorry’ after her departure.

There is a feeling of distance and loss, of working one’s whole life and failing to be understood. The idea of meaning Gander makes you feel aches of a failure to know or be known, a soul shaped stain you recognise, and somehow here seem to approach.

Anthony Uhlmann is editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies and the Director of the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. His most recent book is 'Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov' (Continuum, 2011).