This Place is Everything: Pablo Bronstein and Ryan Gander in London

Gander's Labyrinthine corridors. Photo by: Julia Abrams

If you were ever sceptical about the power of the placebo effect you need only spend half an hour in Ryan Gander’s new creation the Locked Room Scenario, a meticulous case study to the power of suggestion.

The whole exhibition is shrouded in a carefully cultivated veil of mystery; much like cracking the cover of a Holmesian thriller you expect certain components before you ever enter the space. It all begins with a text message anywhere from three days before your intended visit to the morning of. From other accounts I expected an enigmatic invitation to a nearby pub to meet one Spencer A (an artist of Gander’s creation), but instead received the grammatically rooted riddle: “This place is everything… This place’s everything… Rose”. Frankly, I was hooked.

Walking through Old Street to the derelict warehouse space Gander has commandeered, I passed a strange and possibly drunken man asking odd and unintelligible questions, pacing up and down the same stretch of road, and was glad I had chosen a pre-dusk viewing time. Arriving at the site, there was a palpable apprehension; no one likes to play the misled fool and I felt myself preparing to overcome Gander’s curated mind game. Immediately I saw a skip with a furry blue piece of material nestled amongst the odd collection of rubbish and a white spray painted scrawl proclaiming: “Mary Aurory sorry” on the warehouse wall, both of which I’d expected, and eased a bit into art-viewing mode. Perhaps it’s not so revolutionary after all.

Behind the scenes. Photo by: Julia Abrams

Entering the dark building you are momentarily unable to make out much other than the two young figures sprawled out at the top of the litter-strewn stairs, the boy speaking into his phone with a sort of heightened attempt at authority: “Good evening Natalie, you’ve been entered into a prize draw for an art competition…” followed by an unsettling cackling from his companion as I ease further into the exhibition. Actors I conclude, walking quickly away from the foreboding pair, most definitely actors.

The would-be office area feels more decidedly staged; the small teller window showing the interior to an office that is reminiscent of a museum reproduction, everything from the rumpled paper to the magazines posed for the viewer’s eyes. On the wall is Gander’s timeline of the ‘Blue Conceptualist’ movement, supposedly spanning decades and highlighting the birth and death dates of its key proponents (including the ever elusive Spencer A and Mary Aurory, as well as my invisible correspondent Rose Duvall).

It isn’t until you wander away from this staging area and begin a scavenger hunt to uncover the art from the coincidental (although I am hesitant to say anything was truly in the latter category) that Gander’s magic begins to reap its reward. The polite art viewing façade in which everyone has an instinctual sense that one mustn’t go too close to a piece or touch anything without some sort of express invitation is quickly eroded.

You find yourself picking up rubbish to see if it’s a component to Gander’s fantasy (in my case the crumpled note was another of his enigmatic seating charts), and pulling on every door handle that comes into your sightline. My friend felt he was being absorbed into the piece when two rather insistent tourists circling the exhibition at roughly our pace tried to open the door to the men’s room he was using assuming it was yet another mysterious element of the puzzle.

The pivot point of the piece is the exhibition at its center, a selection of sculptures and paintings presented as any exhibition in a white walled gallery but inaccessible to the general public. Time and again you come across a window that affords an obstructed glimpse of the treasures beyond; the glass covered in hand prints and grease patches from the numerous faces of those before you who pressed themselves up against it to try and take in just a bit more of this semi-hidden treasure trove.

Leaving Gander’s world you cannot help but be pensive. The lines between reality and fiction seem inexplicably blurred. Your mind wanders over your experience, reimagining what had seemed commonplace and asking for some deeper meaning. Perhaps that drunken man who is still on the same path is in fact the mysterious encounter other reviewers had eluded to and not a symptom of the area we were wandering through?

Gander is known as a narrative artist who is a masterful storyteller, and there was a strange juxtaposition in his newest creation. He has created something that feels both clandestinely unconventional and standardly artistic. The smell of fresh paint and the new blue carpets allude to his omnipotent presence and your place within his world, while the dereliction implies a haphazard and spontaneous accumulation. The viewer is both put at ease by the exhibition conventions and pushed into discomfort by the new behavioral requirements.

The Locked Room Scenario fits perfectly within the catalogue of Artangel projects that have included such immersive works as Roger Hiorns’ Seizure in which the interior of a council house was filled with blue copper sulphate crystals; and Rachel Whiteread’s House, the concrete cast of a condemned terrace house. Locked Room Scenario is an affirmation and a mockery of the modern art world, taking a tongue-in-cheek approach to the history of artistic movements and the expectations of art in today’s world.

One of Bronstein's magnificent dancers. Photo by: Tom Medwell

It is particularly interesting to look at Gander’s work in relation to the current ICA exhibition by Pablo Bronstein entitled Sketches for Regency Living. Bronstein’s works look at the role of architecture in personal identity, following the ICA’s home, Nash House, back to its Regency roots. As we entered the exhibit, the decadently adorned dancer sat reading as though a room attendant, his lavish golden clothing stark against the pure monochrome backdrop. While the area is cordoned off to visitors there is no need for the pointed exclusion Gander cultivated, we are afforded un-obscured views from the raised corridor that places the entire scene into a singular image more akin to a painting than a performance.

The Gander hangover truly took effect when circling the Regency Box, a striking white construction whose black surroundings and long sides give it a similarly labyrinthine feel. The large arched doorways at either side are open but there is a weighing sense that you aren’t meant to go inside, decorum on overdrive after the titillating sense of transgression the day before.

The stairwell to the upper floor was one of the most humorous and aesthetic moments of the show, the length of the corridor lined by Designs for the Ornamentation of Middle Class Houses (2001). This piece was a collection of sketches of exteriors that differ in subtle and then increasing increments, the buildings gaining width and floors the higher up the staircase you climb. To me, this part encapsulated Bronstein’s intentions and tone, lifting the viewer and interacting very acutely and conspicuously with the surroundings.

There was a comfort to Bronstein’s show that was purposefully lacking in Gander’s but also an interesting thematic contrast in their focus on, and use of, architecture. In both instances we are drawn to examine the structure, the buildings, the details that alter social interactions and impact on us as individuals, but where Gander attempts to alienate and intrigue, Bronstein welcomes the viewer warmly into his lightly humorous world where we are encouraged to laugh at ourselves and society without feeling at the butt end of the joke.

That two such connected and opposing creations are coinciding in London is wonderfully fortuitous. Individually the two are dynamic masterpieces of their respective creators, combined they are a fascinating thesis of art and the individual.

Locked Room Scenario, Until October 23. Nearest tube: Old St.

Sketches for Regency, ICA, Until September 25, Nearest tube: Charing Cross.

There Exists Only One Definition For Everything, Everywhere at Any One Time

Travis Riley, Arts Editor

I had the absolute privilege of listening to Ryan Gander talk about his practice at the ICA as part of their series of Culture Now lunchtime talks. I have written up a short addition to the above article, guided by Gander’s choice both of words and subject, for those who are interested.

In the talk Gander described Locked Room Scenario as “a choose your own adventure book”. It begins with booking a ticket, “one starting point” that can lead to “thousands of different endings” depending on the individual spectator’s perspective and experience with the work.

Gander went on to explain that there are 150 different devices active in the work, all of which can act as ways into the piece. These include the text message all viewers receive before arriving and the aggressive actors on the stairs of the building that most will come across, but also several more obscure and individual interventions including: prank phone calls, a taxi that can take you home, a deaf person who runs after you only to hand you a piece of paper, obituaries in newspapers, and 600 pages on the internet created and back-dated so that all the fictitious artists suddenly seem very real. In short, Gander’s explanation of the piece affirmed that it is truly a very complex and in-depth work that has started long before you arrive at the exhibition site and will continue long after you’ve left.

Gander noted that the piece “only functions if the spectator is interested enough”. This is to say that to a certain extent you will only get out of the work what you put in. There is an element of investigation involved in understanding just what’s going on in the first place and Gander has clearly put so much thought into the connections, characters, objects, and art movements created for the exhibition, it will take you more than just a ten minute trawl through a building to begin to understand the narrative outline of the project. This begins to explain the 100 requests for refunds that the piece received in its first two weeks on show. To put this into context, Artangel have never previously been asked to give a refund for any work of art they have commissioned.

There is also a link here with Gander’s professed enjoyment of detective stories (he is apparently particularly fond of Inspectors Morse and Holmes). In the talk he was eager to compare the visual arts to “Super-sleuthing”, and certainly, in his own work, the more eager detective will reap greater benefits. In this case however, there is another resource for the detective to tap into. Gander talked of reading articles about Locked Room Scenario that recall elements of the piece that he did not himself install. Indeed each newspaper reviewer who has spoken about the work has found something different and unique to recount, and there are countless bloggers besides each with their own views on the secrets to be discovered. In this sense the collective experience of the work has generated more clues, and made the piece increasingly complex. The truth of the statement is almost completely irrelevant, if the statement builds the experience of the piece, then it has added something to the unfolding narrative of Gander’s work.

On a final note, Gander’s topical overview of the piece is that it is one “about frustration”. The work does of course well fit this brief, being an exhibition you can’t enter about an art movement that may or may not exist. The impenetrable clues, and carefully exposed, ambiguous portions of narrative make a great deal more sense when you consider them in this context.