Ralph Rugoff on "Psycho Buildings"

Photo by Morley Von Sternberg

Ralph Rugoff

Rachel Whiteread Do-Ho Suh Martin Kippenberger Los Carpinteros Ernesto Neto Tobias Putrih First Annual Art Awards Winners Announced Modern Masters Give FIAC a Boost

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

A lot of people worry about art getting too close to entertainment, but I think the [Höller] slides worked on many different levels. First, it was great as a sculptural work. I also think the experience of sliding down it was great — the fact that the experience links with the kind you might have at a fun fair does not invalidate it. Serious painting has a lot to do with cartoons and comics.

I wasn’t too worried about this with "Psycho Buildings." A lot of the works are quiet, and some of them are very difficult. Mike Nelson’s piece [a seemingly war-torn room] will be a real challenge to a lot of the audience. Someone has destroyed a room: How is that a piece of art? It has a narrative, but it’s not one that’s immediately apparent.

Were there any works you wanted but couldn’t get?

There was one artist, whose name I won’t say, who wasn’t available. In retrospect I’m glad, because I think the work proposed wasn’t quite as strong as what we do have. Having said that, I can think of another four artists who would have been good if we had another floor to the gallery.

Architecture has obviously influenced the artists on display here. What can artists teach architects?

That’s a good question. I think that architecture is trying more and more to appeal to us as something we experience only with our eyes, as visual spectacle. The artist-architect relationship is a funny one. In the mid-’90s you had a lot of big flashy museum architecture. A lot of the buildings were sculptural in themselves but not very good at actually showing work.

I think that space, as a concept, has become a crucial issue, partly because the majority of people now live in cities, but also due to the proliferation of virtual space. The fact that so much time, and so much human experience, is being spent in a purely graphic space affects our perceptual capabilities. If you leave out the thinking that comes from other types of sensory spatial experience, you risk shutting down human potential. How we deal with space is a really important issue that shouldn’t be left in the hands of land developers.