Thoughts on Several Silences at the Renaissance Society
Helen Luke says: "We suffer from this noise--talk, talk, talk. In Victorian times everything was covered over thickly with whitewash and often an undercoat of hypocrisy. Now we have reacted by wanting to talk about everything in public, even the deepest, most secret things. Today, it is vitally important to know that the silence when one is alone is the only place where the final, really transforming thing may be known."*
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The work of Ryan Gander, A sheet of paper on which I was about to draw, as it slipped from my table and fell to the floor, blankets the majority of the Bergman Gallery floor with 100 glass bubbles or "moments." Within each bubble an etched sheet of paper is caught in motion--a blank page suspended. The motion of the paper is still, as are the marble-like containers that hold them. The piece captures action in stillness--or is it stillness in action?
If the viewing emphasis is on the trapped sheet of paper, you have the brief sense of the potential power and beauty of a silent moment. Perhaps an individual instant of awareness is about to be revealed from the quiet. Or as Gander's title may suggest, that the artist is keen to the futile potential of the paper, a yet un-done and undoubtedly great drawing has just slipped away, and he is mourning its loss.
But what of the crystalline spheres that lie en masse around the room? The scattered placement of the large glass marbles seem to show that the objects themselves were once in motion, and perhaps as marbles are wont, were rolling and crashing about at a frenzied pace. In a culture of talking, colliding and crashing, maybe the marbles wondered, what is the point of speech without understanding? and stopped moving altogether, bringing about a serious stillness. Despite previous false transparencies, maybe the newly muted in this space find a kind of communication that can see, perhaps for the first time, that each contains the same sheet of paper within.
Gander's objects can elicit a memorial to potential and a hopeful corporate pause, creating several--or at least a few--silences of its own.
*Helen M. Luke, The Way of Woman: Awakening the Perennial Feminine (New York: Doubleday, 1995), chap. 18.
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