What would your primate progenitors make of you wasting your life at a desk job? It’s not a hypothetical question, but one that conceptual artist Ryan Gander has literally answered at Lisson Gallery.
The space reeks of damp and piss, there’s a desk in the corner, a pedestal fan blowing the foetid air around the room. Something is grunting under the desk. An animatronic gorilla, apparently the source of that stench, is cowering down there, purring, groaning and trying to count on its fingers. The poor ape is confused, distressed – is this how humans really live?
There’s plenty more of that sort of razor-sharp contemporary critique on display. A block of perspex lockers is filled with personal items, but each apparently unique locker is duplicated. A Costa cup and Muji bag twice over, a Cherry Coke bottle and a hair clip, all doubled. Individualism isn’t so individual after all, eh?
He takes on ideas of play too. Two bronze sculptures show his kids dressed in outfits of their choosing – clown shoes, American football pads, a life vest – instead of what they’re expected to wear by society.
It’s the art equivalent of saying ‘bloody traffic’
The best bit is the documentary downstairs, with Gander interviewing people involved in things like transhumanism and cryogenic preservation. It’s the clearest, most direct, un-preachy, least proscriptive expression of his big fears.
The central idea is that if humans couldn’t count or read, society would collapse, that we would choose play and nature over work, that what we think of as individualism in our capitalist society is anything but. The capital S Self is being lost under a tidal wave of technology and innovation that it just can’t swim against; so who are we, what are we, what is the Self now, and what will it become? They’re big questions.
But they’re approached in a pretty small way. With that monkey under the desk, with the lockers and sculptures, he’s saying that we’ve lost touch with our true primal selves, that if it was really up to us, we’d spend our days playing in nature and eating berries. And you know what? No shit. No one wants to be chained to a desk doing spreadsheets. What does this art do to address, question or undermine the system that creates those conditions of labour? What’s it even saying about those things, other than they exist? It’s the art equivalent of saying ‘bloody traffic’. We all know, we’re stuck in it, mate.
So all this monkey business is a bit of a basic, obvious, unhelpful whinge, but what truer expression of the Self is there than having a good long moan.