Time — the passing of, the meaning of — has always been a favourite theme of artists. Look at Ugo Rondinone, for example, a bird-like, neatly framed man from Switzerland with Swiss-Italian parents, who has taken over the Whitechapel Art Gallery with an installation involving a Perspex labyrinth, black rubber masks and a great big woven “zero” painted on black burlap. Not a new underground sex club, I hasten to add, but a project that, according to the exhibition’s curator, David Thorp, “presents us with something that escalates our awareness of the emptiness of life”.
If this is true, then Rondinone’s installation focuses our attention on what the purpose of time might actually be. Called zero built a nest in my navel, the show will take up the entire lower galleries of the Whitechapel. It centres on a large structure in reflective Perspex that, like an open-ended maze, frames a series of masks and sculptures that hint at an interior mental state.
The entire installation is dark and sinister in feel. A prerecorded dialogue between a man and a woman, heard from speakers, loops round and round but seemingly never results in a shared conversation. If you think this sounds all rather melancholic, then that’s what fascinates the artist, who reveals his European pedigree in his focus on “big” ideas.
“He’s asking us what we really want from art,” explains Thorp. “He shows us the functionlessness of both art and life — it’s not an easy picture to take away with you, but you have to look beneath this façade of disinterest, this supposed inactivity, to see that he’s trying to tackle very large questions about what we’re here for.”
Rondinone, who speaks quietly and with the kind of strangled inner laugh that suggests either the privately insane or the fervour of someone party to some divine joke, offers only partial clues to his work’s meaning.
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“There are some sculptures placed in the labyrinth, positioned on pedestals that are covered in poems. I’m not really interested in what forms the sculptures have taken but rather in the fact that they represent periods of time in which they were made.”
This, then, is his singular oddity: that aesthetics and the whole palette of concerns about form, texture and substance that interest even the most minimalist of artists just don’t matter. That the whiling away of time, the distraction of making art in the face of the meaninglessness of life, is itself the project. It’s not a philosophy that, taken at face value, might appeal to many, but I’m not sure we should take Rondinone’s word for it.
After all, this is an artist who has made a career out of continual disguises: he is simultaneously a photographer, video artist, painter, draughtsman and sculptor, with exhibitions ranging from landscapes drawn in India inks resembling high Romantic pieces from the 19th century to psychedelic “target paintings”. Rondinone’s films have shown both a Woody Allen-esque focus on the dysfunction of human relationships or the lack of them and, in his sequences of clowns shown slumped on gallery floors, a fondness for the japes of Tati, Keaton and Chaplin.
What, then, is his signature style? “I guess the independence of thought, the thinking behind the work, is the signature style. The forms and materials are just tools. But the symbols are important,” he says. He points to the presence of ravens and other birds in the Whitechapel installation in the form of drawings and small cartoon-like figures.
“Ravens are solitary birds. In a way, the installation is about my studio — that it’s a nonsocial place, somewhere for me to follow my onlyness.” That, perhaps, is where the wisdom of the work is to be found. When it comes to designing originality, we are all on our own and it is perhaps in the patterns of Nature — it is significant that there are 12 masks, one for each month of the year, in the installation — that some kind of meaning is to be found.
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“I think his genius lies in the ways he makes room for us to work through certain ideas,” says Thorp. “Despite what he says about not being interested in the forms he creates, he can’t help making them appealing.”
Ugo Rondinone is at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, E1 (020-7522 7888), until March 26; Rondinone’s my endless numbered days is at Sadie Coles HQ, W1 (020-7434 2227), from tomorrow to March 11
Builders and shakers
Janet Cardiff (b 1957, Canadian) does audio and video Walks in which visitors follow the artist’s directions through a site, and become involved in her instructions and suggestions.
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Gregor Schneider (b 1967, German) is best known for building in his home rooms within rooms, doors that led nowhere and windows that opened on to dead spaces. In 2004 he created two identical adjoining houses in the East End.
Mike Nelson (b 1967, British) creates large, sprawling installed rooms and a vast array of objects that inhabit them. They are theatrical, detailed pieces that defy easy interpretation.
Thomas Hirschhorn (b 1957, Swiss) is best known for his constructions of foil, plastic, cardboard and packing tape. gathering together references to philosophy and popular culture.
Tomoko Takahashi (b 1966, Japanese) has become well known for installations in which she transforms reclaimed rubbish into crazy, complex and beautiful arrangements.