Real jump scares are rare in the white cube. But then you don’t necessarily expect to enter a gallery and find, hidden under an office-style corner desk, a life-size animatronic gorilla. Ryan Gander spent two years developing the robotic primate that forms the centerpiece of his latest solo show, “PUNTO!” The resulting work, School of Languages, 2023, is unsettlingly realistic. When I saw it, the gorilla fixed me with its amber-eyed stare, bared its teeth, and emitted a low guttural groan. A faint whiff of urine was in the air, circulated by a humming electric fan. Maybe the gorilla was frightened, too. After a moment, the animal quieted down and began to sway its head gently while wiggling the digits on one hand and one foot. In an interview for the show, Gander explained that the gorilla, whom he affectionately named Brenda, is learning how to count: a quintessentially human skill on which, for better or worse, the accumulative system of capitalism (as symbolized by the office desk) relies.
What is it, though, that truly makes us human? And what might the world look like if we had evolved differently—without knowledge of numbers, for instance, or language? Would everything be a bit less, well, fucked? These are the kinds of big questions that preoccupy Gander, who once—with characteristic wit—categorized himself as “a sort of neo-Conceptual no-style-style amateur philosopher.” His artworks do not tend to offer resolved answers, operating instead by way of surprising interventions that snag your attention and send you down a speculative train of thought. Among the strange artifacts on view alongside Brenda the gorilla was a double-sided clock consisting of two overlapping four-digit seven-segment LED displays bearing the digits 88.88. One juts out at a normal angle; the other has a slight downward tilt. The effect is like you’re experiencing a bout of double vision. Or perhaps, more ominously, the clash of two distinct temporal systems. Chronos Kairos, 88.88, 2023, is part of an ongoing project in which Gander ponders the relationship between two Greek terms for time: the linear, quantitively measurable time of chronos and the more qualitatively assessed, decisive moments of kairos. What would happen if we shifted focus from the former conception of time to the latter?
Screening in the basement of the gallery was Only a Matter of Time, 2020, a reworked version of an hour-long television documentary that Gander made for the BBC the previous year. Here, the artist himself appears as presenter—although his face, in the made-for-gallery version, is obscured by a series of black-and-white drawings of a Cubist-style visage. The film takes the contemporary phenomenon of the selfie as the starting point for a wide-ranging exploration of how new technologies are transforming human selfhood. Like much of Gander’s work, it is simultaneously entertaining and disquieting, though occasionally verging on the didactic. He brings the viewer with him on a “digital pilgrimage,” meeting people who have taken aspects of modern existence to some form of extreme. There’s Dan, a famous YouTube gamer; Zoltan, a transhumanist politician; Kristie, a single woman who delegates her dating-app interactions to ghostwriters; and Max More, a CEO of a cryogenics company that preserves corpses in the hopes of one day reanimating them. Along the way Gander also meets Emma, who has decided to totally unplug, living off-grid in a mud hut in the Welsh woodlands. He can’t help but express admiration for her back-to-basics approach. Maybe that’s a solution.
