MATTHEW RITCHIE: Modern art is a gift.
Take it or leave it, you know.
It's like nobody's forcing it down your throat.
All anyone is trying to do is try out some new ideas,
something different, something, you know...
just ringing the changes a little while.
And I think there's something enormously ambitious
about that idea, that we're all trying to advance
or at least question what's going on,
and I just think that's great.
Drawing is very, very central to the way that I work
because it can be blown up, taken apart,
given to another person to execute,
put into a computer,
redrawn as if the computer had thought of your drawing
in the first place,
shrunk back down to a tiny sketch,
turned into a digital game.
You can just keep on pushing it.
It's like this infinite machine,
which is very hard to do with almost anything else.
Like even with a painting--
a painting becomes a very static, fixed thing,
but a drawing, you can make it three-dimensional,
you can make it flat, you can turn it into a sphere.
You can just keep pushing it and pushing it and pushing it,
because all it is is information.
It's just a bunch of marks.
So once you sort of understand it,
you're really just the arm at that point.
Like the drawing has already been made;
you're just transcribing it.
The idea is really taking this very small, intimate gesture
and making it into something
that retains all of the properties that it had
but allowing it to be really done on any scale.
So you're really sort of freeing it in a way
to live in the world.
It's like a three-way collaboration between me,
a computer program
that doesn't understand what it's doing at all
and then a group of strangers
who will execute it and rebuild it in a way.
And then we've all made this thing together
that has a kind of shared integrity.
The nice thing about the way I'm working is
that the program that I'm using has an infinite resolution.
So, you know, you keep getting bigger.
This is how the quality of the line remains absolutely constant
from very, very small to very large.
So it doesn't really have a lot of the conventional ideas
that, you know... of reproduction,
where you blow it up and it's like
it's going to lose its definition or its resolution.
So, this can be very, very small or very, very big,
and it's really the same thing.
It's exactly the same gesture.
It's not getting corrupted or evolved or degraded
at any point.
Each time the drawing is reproduced,
it gets bigger and bigger and bigger--
it's now 270 feet long--
and it contains more and more detail, because it always has to include
not only all of the elements that I've made since then
but the previous version of itself.
So it's like a kind of cross between a dictionary and a map,
so it becomes this separate thing,
like a living document of its own history
and the history of all the hands
that have participated in its making.
It's my work,
but at the same time, part of the work is letting people in.
It's like...
it's what keeps it alive in some ways.
I guess I'm most interested in, What can one person know?
And how much?
It's a kind of a weakness and a strength in the work
that it's interested in everything.
There's this famous ratio of signal and noise.
If you try to take too much information in,
it turns into noise; you can only process so much.
So to actually understand anything,
you have to keep tuning stuff out;
that's how we all get through the day.
[ baby cooing ]
RITCHIE: Talk about building a universe.
Eisen, my son--
it's, like, everything for him is on the same level.
Everything he sees at three months old
is just sound, noise, light.
They're all fused into this kind of panoptic sort of
synergy in his mind.
And he has to pick everything out
and start filtering it and make sense of it.
He has to do it every day from scratch.
All he's getting is this just insane, confusing information,
and that process keeps continuing all our lives.
So we filter out, you know, the knowledge
that everything in this space has a meaning and a history
and a story.
We have to sort of bank it all down,
but I'm kind of interested in then, like,
okay, we've banked it all down,
but now, like, can we bring it up a little?
Can we turn the volume up maybe just a little bit more?
Can we listen to everything just a little bit more loudly?
So, that's sort of what I'm interested in--
describing a kind of armature for that.
This piece is called "The Universal Cell,"
and it's really conceived of as a kind of a module,
like a single part of a much larger installation.
It's derived from a series of drawings
that I scan into the computer
and then I refine through various processes
and send to Jim.
Jim takes it to his computer, cleans it up a little bit,
you know, make sure there aren't any loose points on it.
And then he puts it into a machine
that's expressly designed to take the drawing or the line
and reproduce it with absolute perfection
by cutting through metals.
A process that ten years ago would have taken weeks and weeks
and weeks, can now take a couple of days.
And there's something just fantastic
about being totally in control of the whole production.
The whole thing was designed, like most of my work,
to be taken apart.
It's as much about flatness as it is about sculpture,
because I'm really interested in sustaining the drawing.
— Oh, that's nice-- the way that fits there.
RITCHIE: So I wanted to build a structure
that felt like a cell,
your cell in the whole universe.
If the universe is a prison, this is your cell.
This is where you're standing,
and you drag it with you wherever you go.
The show in Sao Paulo is really about the prison of life
where you are trapped in a set of circumstances
that are biological, temporal, physical, mental.
You're locked in to a point of view.
As a culture, we've defined evil in one particular way,
by building structures to contain it.
We build prisons.
And basically, no matter what bad thing you've done,
you go to jail and that's it.
Every crime has the same punishment.
And I was thinking about that,
and then I was thinking about, in a larger sense,
how the context of information defines everything.
So, in a way, each of us is in kind of our own prison,
like you bring it with you.
It's the prison of your biology, of your social structure,
of your life,
and how that is both a sort of challenge and an opportunity.
"Proposition Player" is about the idea of risk.
And it's about the idea of, Is it possible to always win?
The slogan of this show is "You may already be a winner,"
that takes the idea of a fixed set of relationships
and turns it into something
that's completely, you know, 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.
So, the cards themselves, you know,
the first and most important cards are the four aces.
And the four aces represent
the four fundamental forces in the universe,
which is the weak force, the strong force, gravity, and light.
There's only four forces in the universe,
conveniently enough for me,
and, uh, they underlie everything.
They tie everything together.
And the four aces generate the four units of measurement,
which are time, mass, length and temperature.
To make it into a proper pack of cards,
of course I had to introduce, um, a joker,
which is time-- absolute time rather than linear time,
which is the totality of time,
the kind of non-time that we all live inside.
Like we measure off:
there's the hours and the minutes and the days
and then there's all of time.
In the moment of gambling
between placing your bet and the result of the bet,
there's a kind of moment of infinite freedom,
because all the possibilities are there.
You may already be a winner.
So you've started out as the smallest possible element,
a particle in the gigantic universe,
and gradually you see how essential that particle is
to everything else, how everything is woven together.
We're all part of that same structure as well.
We're all part of the continuum.
So, that's the idea.
It's a very simple thing.
It's like, here you are, this is a...
literally like a little way of representing you
in a giant game.
Come in, put your card on the table and play.
It's really just sort of taking the traditional aspect
of confronting large, complex ideas about the universe,
which is one of awe, and inverting it to one of play.
This kind of boundary between abstraction and figuration
became much more interesting to think about
as a sort of more porous boundary
between us and everything.
How do we define the figure?
How do we limit the figure?
How do we think of ourselves as this bounded state?
And so these figures started appearing
who are really kind of manifestations.
It was almost like all of the universal ideas
that I talked about in the earlier work
decided that they needed to have bodies
that were much more recognizable.
They needed to turn back into people
and walk around and start seeing what that was like.
And these figures started to kind of emerge.
Before that, they had been typically more abstract
in the paintings, more present in the drawings.
They got very present in the drawings, as you can see now.
And they're still in the paintings
they're a little more abstracted,
but they're very much... they're there.
And there's this sort of ridiculous idea
that's left over from the 20th century
that abstraction and figuration are legitimate poles.
And I, from the very start,
have incorporated the two things together,
been fascinated by the idea that there is really no distinction;
it's just a question of scale.
And you can always analyze the visual art
in terms of content or appearance--
these formal qualities.
I would argue that it's a game to separate them.
They're indissolubly linked.
Everything in the material world around us has a narrative.
So to sort of classify visual art alone
as the one medium that shouldn't require
any effort on behalf of anybody to ever understand it--
you should just be able to look at it and walk away on a...
as a pure sensation--
that relegates it to the level of like a roller-coaster ride,
like "Just shut your eyes and enjoy the ride."
I'm more in mind of saying,
"Open your eyes and enjoy the ride,"
because it's much more exciting
if you are thinking and questioning
and you don't know what it is,
and it is full of questions and statements
that you can't possibly grasp,
because that is a truer reflection
of just how extraordinary reality is
than something that's sort of neatly tied up in a bow
and it's, like, "There, look at that, be at peace, go home."
I'm more interested in something
that leaves you asking all those questions,
like "What is that?
I don't know what that is."