Matthew Ritchie, an installation artist and painter, once said his work was meant to convey the message, "Life is as complicated as it seems."
Life may be complicated, but anyone who attended Ritchie's slide lecture in 185 Nassau last Tuesday knows his work is far more so.
Where are we? Who are we? How does it all work? Where did humanity come from?
According to Ritchie, these are questions that motivate all artists including himself.
Genesis and Thinking
"Adam and Eve have some kids. And then there's everybody else. And where did they come from? There's no other garden of Eden cranking out more and more kids?" Ritchie said.
The answers to these questions are at no one's fingertips, and Ritchie knows this as well as anyone.
These mysteries all but consumed his early career. After finishing art school in London, he spent 4 years on the dole in that city, produced no work and simply thought.
Still Thinking
Ritchie moved to the United States just in time for the economic collapse of the '80s, raising the grand total of the number of years he spent as a poor and unproductive artist it seems more of a brooder, really to seven.
Finally, he took a proactive approach to the questions that haunted him.
"You can think about it and think about it and think about it, which I did all the way through the 80s and into the early 90s, and then sooner or later you've got to sit down and pick up your tools and get to work and do something about it," Ritchie said.
What he did was make a chart — a "shopping list" as he describes it of all the things that piqued his interest. A three dimensional model of the chart, what he calls an abacus, accompanied the chart in his first show in New York.
What he used the chart and abacus to say is up for grabs. Ritchie spent a considerable amount of time explaining what he wanted it to convey, but what it actually means and how it makes the questions he is caught up with any clearer was as much of a mystery at the end of his lecture as at the beginning.
"The most complicated thing ever"
Indeed, the reception he received after this first installation was as confused as the impression one took away from this lecture.
Ritchie was pleased he had stopped thinking and started acting, but felt he hadn't really reached out to his audience.
"So [the show] was all very well and good, but not really because people were like, 'Wow, this is so complicated. You've just made the most complicated thing ever. And plus we did not join the art world to think about math,'" Ritchie said.
Well, here is what was clear after Ritchie's lecture.
Chimps in Thought
First, Ritchie denies the stereotype of the art world as one in which pretentious intellectuals and connoisseurs gaze upon art that may or may not mean anything.
A chimp will paint a picture if you give him the appropriate tools, so art must mean more than this stereotype implies, according to Ritchie.
"So obviously there is something going on that is quite different from what we think of as the art world. Chimps aren't thinking about white wine, maybe a beer. Certainly they're thinking about bananas. But they're not really thinking about art in America."
"They're thinking about translating this gigantic external structure into something two dimensional," Ritchie said.
Just what he is trying to say through his art may be a mystery wrapped in an enigma, but how he is trying to say it is not.
Ritchie's equation of colors and objects with meanings is a vocabulary he has created. It's an alphabet. Just as two lines tilted to meet at a point and connected in the middle by a third line represent the capital letter 'A' in the English alphabet, a tree represents life in Ritchie's alphabet. All of this is an attempt to simplify the process by which he conveys his message.
Charted Art
"The reason that I have this sort of external structure is really so I don't have to get too exercised about things like [where a painting comes from] because they end up just troubling me endlessly. Where does this painting come from? I know where it comes from the chart," Ritchie said.
It became clear that this cool, almost blase attitude also applies to other aspects of Ritchie's work after someone in the audience asked if it was hard for him to put up an installation and see it taken down again in as little as six weeks. This short life span is unique to installation art.
"It's good. Everything has its time. The way that I work, everything can be reproduced," Ritchie said.
And it may take many reproductions (i.e. reinstallations) before any one is able to figure out how Ritchie has used his visual vocabulary to answer ageless questions.
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