“Science has become the battleground for society
to discuss its spiritual questions.”
“One of the curators at the Museum of Modern Art
said the three big no-no’s were sex, science, and
spirituality... These are the big three questions of our
existence has human beings. My work is at least as much
about science as it is about the other two...”
“The technology of the playing card is such a beautiful
thing. It’s been around for a long, long time. No
one mistakes it for some kind of art related activity—it’s
a playing card. You know you can throw it away.”
“I’m interested in reconstructing that chain
of evidence that leads you from the one thing to the
other, because there’s the real universe, then
there’s what we see which is really just a metaphor.”
I read "Nature
Magazine," this weekly journal of science. It’s
so technical, just published raw data. You can glean
enough
of it to understand that there’s a huge gap between
what people understand is going on in contemporary science
and what is really going on. Like the gap between the actual
frontier of research and how it’s then filtered back
to everybody else, it’s vast. Sadly, out of that
comes ignorance and fear because the explanations are
less informative
and persuasive than the original experiments, which are much
less conclusive and didactic.
Some people who are trying to put a popular spin on science
end up simplifying it into either the Frankenstein argument—it’s
going to be bad for you—or the utopian argument—it’s
going to be amazing and there’ll be a flying car and
a robot in your kitchen. So you get these two poles, neither
of which are remotely true.
In fact it’s just science figuring out—question
by question by question—what’s really going on.
When you go back to the original material, you get what it’s
really about—human beings just doing work, trying to
figure stuff out. There’s no point of view, there’s
no agenda. And that’s what’s amazing. You go back
into history and that’s the common thread that links
every kind of investigation—whether it’s aesthetic
or scientific or theological—everybody’s just
trying to figure it out.
You’re really not supposed
to talk about this. One of the curators at the Museum of Modern
Art said the three big no-no’s were sex, science, and
spirituality. So I really have to go off-the-record to talk
about any of them. These are the big three questions of our
existence has human beings. My work is at least as much about
science as it is about the other two, but science is an easier
handle for some people to grasp.
In the contemporary climate we’re all very wary—and
I think rightfully so—about spiritual investigations.
It’s all become this sort of corrupt miasma of claim
and counterclaim, evangelical versus neo-Buddhist. Again,
one of these absurd polarities has developed. Science has
become the battleground for society to discuss its spiritual
questions. It’s no accident that the real theological
debate is about stem cell research. It’s a scientific
discussion, it really has nothing to do with a theological
point of view. But because people can’t articulate their
theological disagreements in any meaningful way, they’ve
sort of hopped onto science.
The premise of science is that it represents order. By its
nature it therefore excludes an essentially theological interpretation
of the universe. To come up with a theological counterpart
as heavyweight as science, you would have to come up with
a science of theology that was based on an ordered understanding
of the theological relationships of the universe—which
some people have actually tried to do in the past. It’s
even more abstract, specific, and meticulous than science
itself. It reverts back to the utopian versus the Frankenstein
again. This kind of balance kind of pops up because these
are the great archetypes—will it be
good for us, will it be bad for us? That’s what we want
to know so we cook it all down to these essential arguments.
But I’m more interested in science as a way of having
a conversation that’s based on an idea of looking at
things than I am in the rhetoric around science.
My installations, they don’t like laboratories. Other
artists are interested in, in claiming the territory and the
appearance of the laboratory, but the appearance of science
has nothing really to do with what it actually is. If you
look at a physicist’s journal it’s just a bunch
of scribbled marks because they’re doing work, they’re
not particularly interested in large chrome table tops—that’s
just a byproduct.
ART:21:
How does that tie in with your
work?
RITCHIE:
I’ve been working for
a long time on this series of linked projects that deals
with
a group of properties, 49 properties or characteristics.
Each of the properties or characteristics represents a function
of the universe. "Proposition Player"
(2003) at MASS MoCA was a gathering of a large group of
those
characteristics, fusing them into one project. But it left
some of them out, and the ones that got left out were in
"The Lytic Circus" at the São Paulo Bienal.
"Proposition Player" is all about gambling and quantum
mechanics, the elements of chance and risk, and how those
things
build
into an entire continuum of meaning. "The
Lytic Circus" is about what happens to the unacceptable
elements of risk, the ones that you want to exclude to
keep
the bad out.
ART:21:
How do the two projects relate
to one another?
RITCHIE:
The slogan of "Proposition
Player" was "You may already be a winner!"
It’s about the idea that in the moment between placing
your bet and the result of the bet there is a kind of
infinite
freedom because all the possibilities are there. "You
may already be a winner!" It’s fantastic—you’re
like a god! Everything opens up. "The
Lytic Circus" is
really about the opposite—a kind of prison of life
where no risk is ever really rewarded. You’re trapped
in a set of circumstances that are biological, temporal,
physical,
mental—locked in to a point of view. It’s about
the idea that you may already be a loser—just as
true as the statement that you may already be a winner....So
the illusion of risk, of gambling, is all that you have.
But in fact it’s just a circus. So "Proposition
Player" and "The Lytic
Circus" are
like counterbalances—the utopian versus the dystopian—it’s
always sunny, or it’s always raining. In fact, you
know most likely every day’s going to have a little
bit of both.
ART:21:
Explain how the playing cards
function in "Proposition Player."
RITCHIE:
When you go into
"Proposition Player" you are given a card by one of the
guards. The idea of that is twofold. One is to make
it a tangible
gesture from me to the person visiting the show: here’s
a piece of the show for you, you get to take it home.
And
the other gesture that it’s making is: this is not
strange to you, this is not foreign, you know what a playing
card is, it’s a tool for playing a game.
The title of the show says it all. "Proposition
Player"—you’re being propositioned,
you’re
being asked to engage in this game which has a very limited
downside.
The technology of the playing card is such a beautiful
thing. It’s been around for a long, long time. No one mistakes
it for some kind of art related activity—it’s
a playing card. You know you can throw it away. You can
stick it in your pocket. Or you can go buy that whole pack
of cards at the gift shop and play. It’s perfectly
useable as a deck of cards, it has all the traditional
suits.
But it’s also a key to the characteristics that I
mentioned earlier. I’ve been working for years with
these 49 characteristics and I was thinking about this show
and how I wanted to do a pack of cards because it was a
way in. It takes the idea of a fixed set of relationships
which I’ve worked with for a long time and turns it
into something that’s completely shuffle-able. You
can mix it up. There is no story in a pack of cards, but
you can tell any story you want to tell.
The most important cards are the
four aces—they
represent the four fundamental forces in the universe:
weak force, strong force, gravity, and light. There are
only
four forces in the universe, conveniently enough for me.
They underlie everything, tie everything together. So
in
this room, everything in my show, everything in your life,
everything is held together by the four forces. And the
four aces generate the four units of measurement, which
are progressively: time, mass, length, and temperature.
To make it into a proper pack of cards, of course I had
to introduce a joker, which is time—absolute time
rather than linear time, which is the totality of time.
The kind of known time that we all live inside, that we
measure off as the hours and the minutes in the days. And
then there’s all of time. Then there are these characters
called the gamblers who start off with the four kings and
proceed into all of the face cards. And they represent the
quantum forces that devolve from the four aces. So you have
the plank limit, you have photons coming out of light. You’ve
got black holes coming out of gravity. And you’ve
got duality coming out of the weak force. So these three
sets set the route. The rest of the pack builds out from
that—moves through the forces and the structures
of thermodynamics, chemistry, the periodic table.
So you’ve got a card, you take it in, you give to
a guard, and he’ll let you play the game of chance—the
dice game—which is also called "Proposition
Player." The game builds up into all of the elements
in the paintings, which take you through this narrative
that describes the evolution of the entire universe. You’ve
started out as the smallest element, and gradually you
see
how essential that particle is to everything else. This
is literally a little way of representing you in a giant
game. You know, "Come in. Put your card on the table
and play." It’s really just taking the traditional
aspect of confronting large complex ideas about the universe—which
is one of awe—and inverting it to one of play.
You already own this—your body is already filled
and saturated with every single thing going on in the
universe...so you
may as well enjoy it. You don’t need to live in fear
and shame about your relationship to this larger structure.
It should be about joyous participation!
ART:21:
How do people participate in
art today?
RITCHIE:
I’ve never understood any
of the debates about modern art as some sort of form of alienated
practice. Modern art is a gift, take it or leave it. Nobody’s
forcing it down your throat, but once you’re there at
the museum, you may as well relax and have a good time. All
anyone is trying to do is try out some new ideas—something
different. And I think there’s something enormously
ambitious about that idea, that we are all trying to advance
or at least question what’s going on. I just think that’s
great. It’s really cool the idea of a total freedom
that it gives, like you’re not bound by any particular
loyalty or reverence, you can just move forward in any direction
you want. It seems like a gift. It’s certainly a gift
to me as a practitioner.
ART:21:
In a way, aren’t you inventing
the universe in your work?
RITCHIE:
I look at it more like, there’s
the real universe. We know through our scientific practices,
or we have estimated that we can perceive about 5% of the
real universe. So that’s 95%, gone. Dark matter, dark
energy—it’s a very strange and complicated place.
On any given day, you or I might be able to find out about
5% in our entire lifetime of all human knowledge. Now can
we use that knowledge all the time? No, it would be amazing,
but we can’t. We can probably use oh, 5% of that in
our lives. And then when it comes down to it, you probably
make a decision based on about 5% of the 5% of the 5% of the
5% of the universe. And you’re pretty confident that
that decision is a really good decision. You say, “That’s
what I’m going to do today with my life or in this relationship
or with this financial decision.” And you’re basing
that on .00625% of the universe. And you’re totally
confident that you’re somehow connected, because you
are. You are connected to that 100%.
I’m interested in reconstructing that chain of evidence
that leads you from the one thing to the other, because there’s
the real universe, then there’s what we see which is
really just a metaphor. It’s already a metaphor for
the real universe. We can’t see 100%, we see 5%. Then
we represent that as another little diminished 5% to ourselves
and then we put ourselves in that 5%. So we’re already
playing the game that I’m playing every day. This is
in a way of sort of building back out and saying, okay, I’ve
got this much, but I just kind of want to see just a little
bit more, maybe 5% more. And that’ll push me out to
the next level of possibilities and kind of open it up.
