Artist Matthew Ritchie's "project"—his paintings, sculptures and website—fuses myth, science and a host of funny-headed characters into a brave, new interactive world. He has a show up at Andrea Rosen thru 12/2.
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Jenifer Berman
p(q). %Jenifer Berman% So what's the historic background
of this project? Let's start with the character Mulciber, the builder.
p(a). %Matthew Ritchie% Mulciber began as the matrix of
information for the whole system, an index. It is
covered in plates of armor—a hermaphrodite with
49 chromosomes, two sets of both sex chromosomes and then one extra, the mystery chromosome. Mulciber is the only character who
doesn't come out of the Bible or have an historical
precedent. It was invented by Milton, for whom I
think it's a surrogate in ??Paradise Lost??. In Milton,
Mulciber is the builder of heaven and subsequently
of hell. In my project, it's also the architect, but of
the mind. As the cycle progressed it's role receded
and it became one of the seven characters called
the Watchers who are an ancient legend, a pre-Christian version of the Prometheus myth. The Watchers are mentioned in the very beginning of
Genesis as those "giants" who were thrown out of heaven for having sex with the children of Adam and Eve.
p(q). %JB% So the original base for your own mythology is grounded in Biblical myth?
p(a). %MR% What I was looking for was a team of characters—originally I was trying to make a visual symbology that could be used to describe the idea that painting is a language which fills 16 of the 17 criteria for an operating language. French and Mathematics have 17; painting has 16, so it's like a language missing one gene.
p(q). %JB% What's missing?
p(a). %MR% The idea that you can translate from one
painting to another, a Goya to a Picasso, or even
one Picasso to another Picasso; whereas you can go
from French to Greek and get pretty close. Artists
typically don't work with an integrated symbolic
language. But in the late Renaissance they
invented a pictorial hieroglyphic language which
they used to describe science and proto-science and
alchemy, and the characters representing the
metals were also celestial characters, like angels.
So you had a situation where you had an "artistic"
activity that was thoroughly translatable and had
an internal integrity. This angelic hierarchy was
hugely elaborated between the 11th and 16th centuries to include thousands of names, by the end there was one for everything: one for
ink and color, for abortion, for the lottery... Every
single aspect of human experience had a character
looking after it. What I was looking for were parallels in this hierarchy of names to all the functions that were occurring inside a painting, and the
visual language remained impenetrable until I started attaching characters to it. So the necessity for the characters came out of the functions of the painting rather than myth. Mulciber, the builder,
is obviously the character for assembly. It wasn't
like I wanted to make a classical myth, but rather
give people another language through which they
can understand the interactions of a painting.
p(q). %JB% Have you retained that idea as you've continued
working, because each of the characters, the seven
Watchers, seem to embody a particular place on
the path of a heroic myth.
p(a). %MR% That's interesting. Because in my "working
model" chart there's a line of characteristics at the
top that are the seven types of activity you can find
in an equation—the principles of addition, subtraction, division, multiplication, the result, the beginning, and the medium through which these activities occur. An equation of activity will contain no more than these seven actions, though it might repeat. The first characters, who come before the Watchers, are the basic building blocks
of the universe, and collectively they embody all
the physical principles behind the universe. The
first ones occur as a result of a negative contraction of space that Barnett Newman called the zim zum and is what we know as the Big Bang theory. Because we don't have a conception of how things
really began, we have an invention which can only
be construed as a sort of absence. In my story, a
family of characters evolve who all embody uncertainty, and behind them come many others. Collectively they go through a series of power
struggles, unhappy relationships and incest and
produce as their offspring the Watchers who represent the seven lobes of the human brain.
p(aa). So really, in terms of a heroic myth, this is anti-heroic. No one's the hero, everyone is just a participant. You are offered the choice of whom to root for, like the NBA with lots of teams, and you can choose your home team, but there's no guarantee they'll win; in fact, since all the characters have a really bad time, it's more likely that they'll lose.
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p(q). %JB% In your first show, you had the abacus-like
sculptures dispersed throughout the room. They
were a way for the viewers to participate in the
story and individually determine the projection of
the narrative. A friend told me about this interactive film where everyone in the audience had a joystick, and at varying points in the film they
could decide, Do you want the bicycle messenger
to turn right? And everyone would vote, and the
consensus said, Yes, turn right, and then again,
maybe ten minutes later, there'd be another
choice. You told me how excited people were about
being able to participate in your art in that way.
p(a). %MR% People love that, and rightly so because it's
much closer to life. This is about constructing
something that occupies a parallel mental space
that's similar to the space in your real brain where
you make decisions based on inadequate information and belief. You operate with the possibility that every corner is a blind corner, you're always wondering whether you should turn right or left,
and time is an engine propelling you forward.
With the game construct of the paintings and
sculptures and the website, what I'm hoping to
create is an environment that reflects life, but
without the temporal elements, so you can
reconfigure these events endlessly. That's why that
first piece with the abacus was called ??The God Game?? — you can play with the laws of the universe to your heart's content.
p(q). %JB% Are you writing the narrative through the process of painting, or do you work it out beforehand, and then represent it formally?
p(a). %MR% It cross-pollinates all the time. It's intended to
have a sufficient number of elements so that it
would be impossible for me to predict how they
would come together. The multiplication of 7x7x7, the magic square, is basically infinity. And so the interrelationship of all the parts is constantly surprising me, because the rules, although they're
loose, are fairly specific. When the builder shows
up it has to build something, and when the character who embodies temperature shows up it has to effect or record the temperatures of what's around him.
p(q). %JB% Do these variables occur while you're painting?
p(a). %MR% The paintings write the myth. So if I want to
put some blue in, and blue is a character, you can't
just put blue next to red. If you could do that
you've added another chapter. There was a point
where everything was very simple, but as the story
goes back in time, the paintings get more complicated. This newest painting, ??Time Novel??, is getting incredibly complicated, because it has to explain all the new events that have occurred since the last
time I thought about this.
p(q). %JB% The work seems to be fragmenting: it moves off
the wall and onto the floor; there are these color fields, sculptural cross-sections of the universe. And ??Lamentation??, a painting, is an explosion. It seems you focus at that moment of apocalypse, when the characters fall.
p(a). %MR% Well the central question of cognitive theory is
the binding problem, which is the title of one of
my new paintings. Only in human beings does
every part of the brain cohere to make a conscious
matrix, and a secondary consciousness overlaps all
of this, but there's no specific location for that,
and it's incredibly dubious whether it really tangibly exists. The missing ingredient is what these characters lack. Because they exist from the beginning of the story as fragments, puppets in the story, they don't ever have a central god.
p(q). %JB% That's you.
p(a). %MR% I've abandoned them, though. (_laughter_)
p(q). %JB% So you're malevolent.
p(a). %MR% I'm indifferent. And that's the question of consciousness generally, how do you know something
is real? That's David Hume's question, and the
answer is you don't, you invent reality based on
your sensory impressions, but your sensory impressions are being interpreted by something that is based on previous events. So when you meet somebody you decide all kinds of things about them based on what kind of shoes they wear.
p(q). %JB% Do you have an affinity for Gerhard Richter's
work? You use these cross-sections, snapshots
as you call them, to convey the whole narrative picture.
p(a). %MR% Richter is truly indifferent, or proposes that he
is, and he takes the photograph as a coincidence.
In other words, he selects from this collection of
snapshots all kinds of things and collates and
edits, that's where his subjectiveness comes in, but
he posits himself almost as a non-creator, almost
like this tape recorder. He's showing you glimpses
of the abyss. Richter's work is not fathomable,
because he's showing you the real world just as
he's showing you a different place, temporally and
emotionally, than the one you are in right now.
But in my case, what I'm trying to do is give you
something that's more like a toy where you can
legitimately assume that it will be fathomable, to a
certain extent. What I'm doing is a continuum
that's alien and invented. It maps the real world,
but is designed to be much simpler, childlike, in
that it's seven basic colors and they come together.
There're more limitations on it. But I would like to
think we share a perverse faith in the possibilities
of painting.
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p(q). %JB% It's interesting you say there are limitations.
You have the basic elements, but in the combination of the elements—blue with yellow, Azazel together with Shemjaza—you have an infinite number of possibilities.
p(a). %MR% Well, this is like a collapsing order, explicitly
ordered at the beginning and since then it has
been deteriorating immensely fast. It's much more
like a laboratory experiment constructed to see if
you could artificially simulate mystery. To which
the answer is a guarded, yes. As soon as you push
the first domino the whole thing begins to collapse. Even if you reduce all the parameters to seven basic colors and these very simple character
constructs, it still immediately spirals completely
out of control.
p(q). %JB% The permutations of these characters and the
descendants of those permutations could continue
indefinitely. Your imagination has moved far
beyond the original myth of angels having sex with early humans.
p(a). %MR% The reason I chose the Watchers was that there
was basically no myth surrounding them. In a
sense, it's the perfect palimpsest, a shaded
memory of a myth that may or may not have even happened.
p(q). %JB% For me, the character Tamaii is the most mythically emblematic character, because in very
simplistic terms, he is drawn in black and white:
Apollo/Dionysus, good/evil, trying to slay the
dragon but instead is slaying himself. He keeps
dividing and falling into himself. He's the hero in
perpetual conflict, the snake who is biting his tail.
p(a). %MR% Well, he's the angel of painting. (_laughter_) So,
there you have it. No surprise that he would be the
one most permanently conflicted. He's the thief
who steals light to make it into paintings.
p(q). %JB% Light archetypically being creation.
p(a). %MR% Yeah, and it's inevitable that the characters
come back, because they're basically indestructible. They are archetypes. Some of them have died several times already, so it's a relative construct.
p(q). %JB% As death is a completely relative construct—in
mythology...
p(a). %MR% And indeed in life. To the millions of practicing Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, etc. in America, it's very problematic to believe in it as an absolute.
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p(q). %JB% A year ago, we talked about the work capturing
that sense of energy and chaos, what with so many
narratives going on at once. At the time, you were
working more within the frame of the canvas. And
now, with ??The Hard Way??, the work breaks that edge
and crawls out onto the floor.
p(a). %MR% For the first show, the working model was a
map. It was explicitly set up with charts and diagrams, lists of all the characters. It was organized to show you a schematic of the universe, because what I didn't want to do was plunge people into
yet another arbitrary mythological construct and
then subsequently claim that their interpretations
were planned by me all along. I wanted to first
establish the game. For the second show it was
like, you have the map, now let's go on the
journey. So everything that was static in the first
show gets pushed into motion, and all the characters that were iconic and static are now active and have personalities and are arguing with each other, and it's all falling apart, the whole thing is
collapsing. But you can't do that unless you have a map to begin with.
p(q). %JB% How necessary is it that your audience understand the narrative? Can the paintings and sculptures exist independently of that?
p(a). %MR% You have to be able to trust the maker. The
writer or the creator doesn't have to spell it all out
to you. My work was partly presented as a reaction
to a climate where a great deal of arbitrarily narrative work had been proposed—this was during the 1980s—and subsequently a number of these pseudo-narratives had instantaneously collapsed,
leaving an audience extremely pissed off with the
possibilities of narrative painting. Because what
they were watching was just people in the treasury, ransacking the storeroom, and having a good time putting on the crowns and the swords. It's not like you need to be culturally specific, but you
have to be very rigorous about your own internal
mythology or it collapses and people lose faith in
it. So this was an attempt to be very explicit, probably as much for me as for any audience, to go, here are the rules up front, there are no secrets, so if I make a mistake or backtrack or start to manipulate this, you'll be able to call me on it. And that goes back to this idea of inter-translatability. If you saw my first show and you recognized a character and then saw them later, you would be able to be
assured that it was indeed the same character. It
wasn't just that I like doing funny-headed people
made out of bricks, although I do.
p(q). %JB% That's incredibly structured, proving to yourself
that you must always work within the formula.
p(a). %MR% It's like chaos theory. The weather is a closed
system, but it's a chaotic closed system. No one can
predict what the weather's going to do because it's
composed of a sufficient number of parts that are
collectively indeterminate, even though individually they are very determinable.
p(q). %JB% But if I live in New York, I can bargain that it
probably won't snow in June. I'll bundle up in
March and take my fan out in May. And then
there's always the ??Farmer's Almanac?? that has been
predicting the weather for hundreds of years.
p(a). %MR% But you can't guarantee it won't flood in June.
There's always a random factor. This is the nature
of any information system which is sufficiently
complex. I was trying to make something that
existed in a pseudo-state where you can say, yes,
it's so simple, it must be determinable, and then as
soon as you push that first domino, it's instantly
obviously completely indeterminate. And that was
supposed to be a metaphor for thought and for art
making. The patterns are fixed, but the choices
within it are yours. And because the characters
have free will, the indeterminacy level is exaggerated massively.
p(q). %JB% But ultimately they don't have free will, you're
making the decisions for them.
p(a). %MR% If we give credence to the idea that I follow the
determinate part of the project, and then allow the accidents of the inter-relations to occur...I don't really know what most of the characters are like. Or indeed any of them.
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p(q). %JB% But aren't they loosely based on parallels to the functions of painting? For instance, Tamaii is the painter, or Azazel is...
p(a). %MR% The party animal.
p(q). %JB% Id. Unknowing, unselfconscious...
p(a). %MR% Although you'd be surprised at the number of people who choose Azazel as their character, grown adults, which is kind of scary.
p(q). %JB% He's the guy with no humility, probably the
high school superstar who flacks all the girls...but eventually everyone else moves on and he's working at the gas station.
p(a). %MR% Or he could be President of the United States. He's a creature of unbridled appetite.
p(q). %JB% Is he savvy?
p(a). %MR% Savvy in his way, just indiscriminate. As all the
characters are very indiscriminate because they've
been reduced to these hyper-active single activities.
So in that sense, every time these characters do
something, they become much more clearly
defined, much more fanatic. And every time they
are betrayed by another character or things don't
go their way, they become more entrenched in
their position, or more disillusioned. Like Mulciber
is incredibly disillusioned. It builds all these beautiful earths, and then these other wacky characters come in and trash them. So right now it's completely jaded, pissed off at the whole thing.
p(q). %JB% Is there one character you feel more affection for than another?
p(a). %MR% No, obviously Mulciber was the first, it was
intended to be the creative surrogate, but now I
just play favorites. Whoever is the most fun at a
given time becomes my particular avatar, and I'll
tend to allow them more latitude. And that drives
the story because I might say, I'm going to investigate what Tamaii is doing at this point in the story—well Tamaii can only do certain things because he's Tamaii: he's two-faced, he prevaricates. So no
matter how much I might want the story to go one
way, if Tamaii has to hustle and he's entered the
story, it will in fact end up going a different way.
And then there's the third factor, which is that
every part of the story has to correlate to physical
events in what we call the scientific universe.
p(q). %JB% Right, the characters are all based on chemical,
physical properties, in addition to their metaphorical properties. Do you ever feel that the work, the characters, are instructional? That by throwing in solitude and violence...
p(a). %MR% They are instructional to me. Yeah, it's structured as a seven part scalar relationship, which goes from very big to very small, and that part of it was designed to show that everything is basically
similar, this idea of fractal entities. A tiny bit of a
landscape, a tiny rock, is usually an echo of the
larger coastline from which you've extracted that
rock, and in the same way, chemical interactions
on a tiny scale become the hole in the ozone layer.
p(q). %JB% Are you ever accused of being pedantic?
p(a). %MR% We'll strike this from the record.
p(q). %JB% You've not been asked that before?
p(a). %MR% With the first show, everyone was like, God, I
can't believe you're making me learn all this crap.
And with the second show it became obvious that
what I was intending to do was give you enough
information so that you could let go. This is supposed to be fun. This is not designed as a test. There are no questions later, this is art.
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p(q). %JB% The raw information you've compiled is enormous, dense. I'm sure you're asked this a lot, but were you into Dungeons and Dragons as a kid?
p(a). %MR% I wasn't, but I've been asked this question
enough times I've actually done some research, so
there you have my whole universe in miniature:
ask me a question and I'll go find out what the
answer is. Dungeons and Dragons is based on ??Lord of the Rings?? , which was an explicit attempt by Tolkien to incorporate all the mythic structures. And like Joseph Campbell or the ??Odyssey?? or
Grimm's fairy tales, they were all an attempt to
produce an archetype to embody aspects of reality.
They are a series of object lessons. You don't fuck
the woman who is going to turn everyone you
know into pigs. You don't talk to strangers, you
keep your nose clean, come home to your wife... And if you don't, look at the ??Iliad?? and you can see what happens to all those guys who dick around with slave girls. They all get killed. So it becomes a
lesson. And like most of the ideological structures
we have now, they've become a collating exercise,
which I think has to do with approaching the millennium. There's this effort to gather everything and reduce it to the same level, and this project definitely reflects that activity. We're in a holding
pattern, this vortex where we're constantly gathering more and more stuff. The Internet is the most obvious example: Let's get everything
together in one place for maximum incoherence.
Information at a sufficient level of complexity
becomes invisible. The sky is like information if
you look at it, all these atomic reactions, but you can't see it.
p(q). %JB% As things are supposedly moving closer in the
world, what now with the "information highway,"
there's no denying that we'll never be able to raze
that diversity. They scream that we're entering this
homogenous zone, but that's ludicrous.
p(a). %MR% And absurd. You have the Freemen in Montana
basically trying to establish a new culture, and
thousands of these little enclaves or microphyles
growing up all over the world. It's the inevitable
process. At the end of the 19th century
people were saying, we're losing touch with our
cultural roots. And I'm sure in the Homeric era
they were talking about this damn Persian
influence spoiling everything. I don't think that
we've...stayed on the track. (_laughter_)
p(q). %JB% You have seven adventures/excavations planned,
the first of which you just recently completed—to the black glaciers on the island of Svalbard in the Arctic Circle.
p(a). %MR% About 1,300 kilometers from the North Pole.
p(q). %JB% And that ties in to the narrative where the
Watchers fall to Earth.
p(a). %MR% Yes, the Watchers flee heaven via The Hard
Way, which causes their internal collapse, and
when they hit the earth, they scatter across continents leaving concentrations of their body parts at various points. So the expeditions are research, relating to this idea that every part of the project
has to be correlated with something real.
p(q). %JB% You feel very strongly about the project needing
to correlate to something real.
p(a). %MR% Yes, very strongly. That's another of the rules
that was set up in the beginning. It has to work.
Again, it's all about this idea of trust. Trust for the
viewer and trust for the artist that this thing has
an internal integrity. It's also about being responsible. Painting is this incredible technology that is so underused—like people using a Maserati as a wheelbarrow. And it's just absurd to waste this
thing that has been designed and worked on for
30,000 years to fulfill all kinds of spiritual and
social needs. You can do whatever you want in a
painting. And if all you want to do with your
Maserati is inflate the tires every now and then in
your shop then that's fine, but it seems crazy to
me. So one of the reasons for making a working
activity is to see how complicated I can make it
and how many platforms I can build in to make it
even more complex, more ambitious. And one way
to do that is to step outside the studio and see if
these parts of the world remotely resemble this
fictional narrative. And if they don't, then the narrative has to shift to incorporate the reality of that place.
p(q). %JB% It's Tamaii who falls to the black glacier, the Norwegian finds his residue in the form of a mineral deposit that covers the glacier's walls.
p(a). %MR% Yes, in that case it's coal. Svalbard is the most northerly coal mine.
p(q). %JB% And how did being in the glacier effect the
work, or change the story? Could you rewrite the
text now that you've been there? Will the rules let
you backtrack in that way?
p(a). %MR% Uh, I haven't had to yet.
p(q). %JB% But you still have six of these journeys to go.
p(a). %MR% That's true. Fingers crossed, right.
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p(q). %JB% So this leads back to the question of what
comes first, because in a sense you've already determined what you're going to perceive, or what you're looking to ingest from an experience, as opposed to letting the experience inform you, and
then writing that back into the project. Did you
see what you wanted to see when you were there?
p(a). %MR% I saw something so much better than what I'd
imagined being 300 meters underground, at the winter solstice where there are 24 hours of darkness. Because Tamaii's the black character, he had to go to the definition of darkness, and being underground in a cave with absolutely no potential for natural light, with walls made out of black rock, there was no possibility for blackness as a physical experience to get more profound.
p(q). %JB% And psychically?
p(a). %MR% It was just incredible. It's very different to go,
this is a good idea, and then go, I'm in a glacier
and it's minus 30 degrees. There's no substitute for
subjecting yourself to an invented information system and finding out if it has a physical correlate. It's like writing a movie of your life and then hoping your life actually turns out like the movie.
p(q). %JB% So the fact that you'd already written the story...
p(a). %MR% We've all written our stories, but we have no
idea what will happen next. Everyone has some
lame-brained notion of what they think the future
is, and they're all wrong. Everyone thinks it's
going to be a happy ending, or they think it's
going to be a terrible, sad ending, but they've all
got some story cooking away and are taking what
they think are the steps to make that story come
true. But in fact, you go on the blind date or you
go to the country or leave the town or have the
argument or the affair, and it's not quite exactly
what you thought, but your brain swiftly adjusts
to that and reflects a new reality and it can't really
remember how it was different. When I came to
the States, I had no idea what would happen to
me, but I was pretty sure it was going to be a
happy ending, but in fact it wasn't okay for a long
time. But that didn't stop me being convinced it
was actually all working out according to plan,
even when I was living on biscuits in a welfare
hotel. You can only interpret reality in terms of
your own experience, so you claim to understand
the events that are happening to you even as they
are stripping away all of the things you thought
you understood. The tragedy of life is that you
think you're anticipating things, but your
response is probably because those things have
already happened to you. Your anticipation is usually too little too late. And so the point of going on these trips is to accelerate that process.
p(q). %JB% What's up on the website?
p(a). %MR% There are a series of texts and images, games
and puzzles that reveal various attributes or
secrets about the characters' natures. The next
phase we're working on is an interactive quiz,
where based on your answer, you get to become
one of the characters, and the form of the characters will determine the evolution of the story.
p(q). %JB% What are you working on for the Whitney?
p(a). %MR% A part of the story called ??Autogenesis??, which is a
family tree showing how the first five or six sets of characters relate to each other.
p(q). %JB% Assuming that the Biennial represents the current trends in the art world, do you see yourself working within a community or school of thought? You came to New York from Britain
almost ten years ago, and you've said that at that
time you didn't see yourself working in kind with the British scene.
p(a). %MR% I'm not a conceptual artist. I feel very much
that the work right now in Britain is about creating a kind of theater—like Rachel Whiteread and Damian Hirst and Georgina Starr. Theater is
where English culture is very strong, and has
always been. They traditionally don't like art that's
purely visual, so this recent work hit a real core
culturally. It deserves its success. But to answer
your question, yes, there are a lot of artists here
who are doing work that I feel close to, and it
evolves around ideas of treating art as a language,
and consequently inventing narratives that come
out of that, and not in the 1960s sense of the
Gombrich great narrative of art, but something
that is a construct. There are all kinds of artists
working within traditions, like Katy Schimert or
Kara Walker, or Matthew Barney choosing to be
the goat. The goat is the most loaded psycho-sexual
symbol—it's Pan, the devil...but he's chosen to
reinvent it as a contemporary, mutogenic form.
p(q). %JB% If you think of Barney or Laurie Simmons, they've chosen a particular image or symbol, often including themselves in the work. You've detached yourself, through such a complex narrative, divorced yourself of an affiliation.
p(a). %MR% Hum. Well, the argument of the work is that
personality is constructed of competing impulses.
This is what Gerald Edelman called neural-Darwinism: your brain is basically a democracy. And this project is built as a model for me to find
out what's going on. All you have to do is look at a map of the world to know that it's full of competing interest groups. Look at the history of
evolution, it's filled with millions upon millions of
bizarre competing species. Your brain is only
another example of this, and the cells of your body
are powered by mitochondria, which are individually independent life forms. They're like slave labor. Your whole body runs off slave labor. It's got this other species trapped inside it.
p(q). %JB% Go to the jungle. It's the ultimate confrontation
with an obvious, apparent symbiotic environment.
Everything feeding off of everything else. And you
won't survive if you don't embrace that collectivity.
p(a). %MR% And New York is the cultural equivalent of the
jungle. You're competing with everything else for
space and time and energy, and that's what's happening inside your body, and also what's happening inside your consciousness. So in a
sense, this isn't an attempt to distance myself, but an attempt to properly engage all of the disparate impulses instead of going for this Apollo/Dionysus split like, I get horny but I like to read. That's Paglia's basic dichotomy of life.
p(q). %JB% Or Neitzche's or Conrad's or any slew of others.
p(a). %MR% It's much more that you've got hundreds of
competing impulses—your skin is itching, you're
responding to pressures and thoughts of age, your
body is deteriorating, you're going to the gym. It's
a mess. This temple of activity. This hive. The
heart's beating, you can hear it ticking in the back
of your mind. And your brain, god knows what's
going on there. No one's even close to figuring that
out. And so this is an attempt to try and map what
it's really like to be a person, in this simple,
childish way. It has to be simple, because it keeps
getting so complicated, which is what Time Novel is
about. Different parts of the story, with the same
characters—it's like your body. You've got the
same hand that you had when you were twelve,
the same scar, and you can remember how you
filled up a cupful of blood, and now it's just this
laminated, fossilized fiction on your skin. Rather
than show one aspect of myself, like I'm Mr. Cool
or Mr. Upset, I'm trying to show you everything.
p(q). %JB% And collating all this information, you think that is a result of the end of the millennium?
p(a). %MR% Information has become sufficiently complex
as to become a cultural sublime. Nature is no
longer sublime because we control it, it's polluted,
tainted. But the place we do have, where you can
disappear, is into the information nexus, because
it's too immense. It only offers corruption, and corruption to such an extent that you cannot step back and critique it because it's such a tangled morass of conflicting positions that it doesn't
matter if you're a student of Habermas or a student of Adam Smith. You're going to be confronted with so many paradoxes of your own position, that you cannot make a definitive statement. It
becomes sublime, you have to just sit here.
p(q). %JB% Sublime in that it is awe-inspiring, but overwhelming so that the tendency is to funnel, or compartmentalize one's world?
p(a). %MR% Yeah, people compartmentalize. They don't
like to think of it as a continuum, because the continuum has become so vast. But at the same time, I've found people tremendously responsive to this idea of a synthetic structure, because they all
know this weird symbolic language that litters the
activities of everyday life. And this is arcane,
there's no point in pretending it isn't, but if you
become simplistic, you're just underestimating your audience.
p(q). %JB% There's just the tendency to be curious, to
define, to know—who the characters are, where
they've been, what's their trajectory. For better or
worse, that's the tendency of the Western intellectual mind, to have that control. So it's exciting to piece the puzzle together, and daunting at the
same time to consider what happens when, say,
chance and fever interact. Everyone has their own
subjective interpretation, their own cultural
cairns. So in giving us the map, and then letting
us explore, it is a lot of fun. As long as there's that
openness. Because you can't rewrite history, but
you can reinterpret it based on what you know in the present.
p(a). %MR% I want people to feel that they are walking into
a story. The temporal nature of art means that it
has an infinite charge. You can go back to the
beginning of the story as many times as you like,
very unlike life where the movie progresses
whether you have figured it out or not. Painting is
timeless, giving the same charge again and again.
It's an infinite battery, it violates the laws of
thermo-dynamics, it's not entropic. A painter can
laminate thousands of hours into one artifact, and
it stays there and for hundreds of years radiates to
every viewer. It's an anti-time activity. Which is
why you'll often see the same character appearing
several times in a painting as he or she or it
evolves its way through a series of cycles and
maybe returns back to the beginning. All those
options are possible inside the same micro-second
of absorption. I don't think any other cultural
activity has quite that bizarre potential.
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2007-07-07T21:38:01-04:00
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Berman, Jenifer
Ritchie, Matthew
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As we spiral, or skulk, toward the millennium, the sublime, that supreme mass before us, has become information. Confronted by this awe-inspiring nexus, Matthew Ritchie shatters the hyperspace, splicing the world—and even more so ourselves—into all its conflicting elements.
Like squashed cubes of to-be-recycled car parts, Matthew's "project"—his paintings, sculptures, drawings and website—celebrates
how complex it really is: myth, science, philosophy, history... all appear in Matthew's work. A "thing" with six fingers, a self-aborted child, scientific formulae, fields of red and blue, arms, legs reaching out... It's impossible to catalogue Matthew's work, other than to say it is a story, and a game. On the gallery wall of his most recent show read the title: ??Seven earths. Seven characters. Forty-nine ways to die. There's only one way out. The Hard Way??. I could imagine sitting on the floor, one of his Sintra sculptures glowing like a campfire, listening to Matthew spin his yarn. But the lesson—if there is one—is to decide the outcome for yourself. I'm continually amazed—every time we talk, by how much data he collects; every time I look at his work, by how much fun it is to figure out.
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Artist Matthew Ritchie's "project"—his paintings, sculptures and website—fuses myth, science and a host of funny-headed characters into a brave, new interactive world.
Matthew Ritchie
2009-11-16T10:45:48-05:00
Editor