| There are always multiple ideas that I could choose from when I am making another piece of work. As boring as it may seem, I choose it very logically and mechanically. I simply choose the idea from my notebook that is the least like the work I just made. It acts like smelling salts, wakes me up, and puts me in a position where I have to start thinking from zero again. The jump from, say, being a tailor to making a fictional feature film to architecturally designing an art school based on Bentham’s Panoptican, is massive but means that I find myself in a place that is so unfamiliar that I push myself to reassess everything. As painters may use color, I use “stuff.” |  |
Ryan Gander
There are always multiple ideas that I could choose from when I am making another piece of work. As boring as it may seem, I choose it very logically and mechanically. I simply choose the idea from my notebook that is the least like the work I just made. It acts like smelling salts, wakes me up, and puts me in a position where I have to start thinking from zero again.
The jump from, say, being a tailor to making a fictional feature film to architecturally designing an art school based on Bentham’s Panoptican, is massive but means that I find myself in a place that is so unfamiliar that I push myself to reassess everything. As painters may use color, I use “stuff.” This can be anything and end up anywhere… a conversation, a big Mac wrapper, a car, martial arts, a handshake, hotel management, ear piercing, a dance, a typeface, fog…
There’s something really nice about being light on your feet, and I enjoy seeing it in other artists’ work. It is similar to moon walking; you spend more time in the assent and dissent between steps or projects than you do actually with them. That gives you a really good position from which to look at the constantly changing position, and this perspective gives you a privilege of hindsight, as if you were a spectator yourself, musing over a work for the very first time.
I think being an artist is a really good job to have.
