Matthew Ritchie in “Structures” - Season 3 | “Art in the Twenty-First Century"

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."