Essay published in the Exhibition Catalog (Based on a True Story) Richard Turner on occasion of Richard Turner: No Ideas but in Things, Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University; September 12 – November 19, 2022
Forever Now For Now
In the realm of the god Indra is a vast net that stretches infinitely in all directions. A single brilliant, perfect jewel in each "eye" of the net. Each jewel also reflects every other jewel, infinite in number, and each of the reflected images of the jewels bears the image of all the other jewels — infinity to infinity. Whatever affects one jewel affects them all.
The Metaphor of Indra's Jewel Net
In spring 2021, I invited Richard Turner to co-develop a retrospective of his artistic career for the Guggenheim Gallery, which he led as director for over four decades. During a first conversation, he was enthusiastic about the idea. Still, a few days later signaled that he had something different in mind and that a retrospective was not what he wanted. In conversation with others and me during the following year, Richard crystallized the silhouette for No Ideas but in Things. Looking at the exhibition now, despite all the moving parts and built-in unpredictabilities, the fragmentary nature of many of the works and the exhibition as a whole, I find that it has turned out to be a kind of meta-retrospective.
This, in part, is due to the large number of works. Over 160 individual drawings, paintings, sculptures, photos, and a video are displayed in rotation using various systems of chance applied and executed by the team of student gallery assistants to determine which works will be shown on a given day. The resulting periodic changes are posted on the Guggenheim Gallery's Instagram account. But mainly, it is because Richard, whose work always asks under what conditions the parts of an installation encounter each other, is investigating here the question of the conditions under which the conditions are determined. This subterranean undertaking initially remains hidden from the viewer, who focuses on the visible things.
Working with Richard and the team of student gallery assistants leading up to No Ideas but in Things, I noticed his fascination with the changeability of an idea and with how thought is metabolized in discussion, suggesting this or that Gestalt until it is realized in some material form, eventually becoming a thing. In the exhibition, this metabolism is sped up by the introduction of chance operations; the roll of a die or the drawing of a number becomes the deciding factor for initializing, developing, or finalizing a work.
The artist is keen on making but not particularly interested in archiving, conserving, or describing and cataloging discrete works of art. On the contrary: the reuse of the same objects in new constellations is part of the approach he has employed throughout his career. Everything, even the finished work, is raw material, and for that very reason, it is not finished at all but always remains open and in circulation.
Turner churns his material like continental drift swallows parts of the land and its history to spill it back out newly configured. His re-cycling of material surfaces as artistic sediment, fossils, or lava that hardens to become fertile, new ground. He is often inspired by existing pieces of art, architecture, films, or novels; works he admires or has a personal connection with. Original subject matter merges with the thicket of quotations and personal references contained in each element.
Throughout his career, he maintained a healthy distance from the art market's tendency to fetishize objects. His things have a more private character and hold personal meanings that are best understood through their repeated use and recontextualization in subsequent works – they are like actors taking on different characters in an ensemble that often changes the play they perform.
Exhibition catalogs and artists' books are his media of choice to commemorate or document his output, but at the same time, he remains critical of his auto-historicization and aware of it as provisional. Turner has released 15 artist books, and his works are included in about two dozen other publications. Books are collections, themselves consisting of numerous images and texts. Here we see a reflection of the peculiarity of his art, namely that his work is constituted from layers of materials and meanings. There is a kinship to the medium of film, one of the artist's lifelong passions (especially the French Auteur Cinema), where the viewer experiences a continuously changing point of view as determined by the editing, sound, and spoken or written text. Turner's books and art are pastiches, collage-works, condensing content like deposited sediment, page by page, book by book, and layer by layer, into the hills, mountain ranges, and landscapes of his narrative.
Growing up in postwar America, coming of age in the sixties during the rise of the counterculture, and living and studying in Vietnam, Taiwan and India as a young man, Richard is a rolling stone. Ironically, one of his longstanding interests is the study of the static kind of stone, which he collects, knowing well that to declare a piece of geology one's property is not without a certain comedy. Stones don't measure their existence in days, but eons and would (if they could) only smirk at the claim they were part of a collection. To attentively encounter a stone is to surrender to time, a different, non-human, and alien time, a vertiginous dimension that eludes our experience, compelling, like the view from the edge of a dizzying abyss, stretching our awareness from the now to unimaginable distances.
At the same time, the stone gazer embarks on an inward journey, becoming aware of the object's qualities as their attunement to those qualities. Turner has long been interested in the aesthetics of Chinese and Japanese stone appreciation (which mirrors another found object, namely the western idea of the ready-made). The viewing of an individual piece of found geology is seen here as both a world in and of itself and as a reflection of the onlooker's inherent condition. This polarity - reaching outwards into a temporal or physical distance and, at the same time, self-reflectively inwards forms one of the centers of Richard Turner's exhibition.
In No Ideas but in Things, the visitor encounters a plethora of non-geological objects, both found and fabricated, from Richard's artistic output as well as his personal life: pieces from installations that no longer exist in their original form are re-contextualized in new configurations which rendezvous unpredictably with a fiberglass rock that oscillates photon-like, through the exhibition space in daily increments, determined by the roll of a pair of dice. Stacks of artwork waiting to be shown are stored out of sight behind the gallery's fire door. Exhibition catalogs, artist books, and a novel, The Aziatic Hotel, are spread out on a low table in a kind of semi-private reading corner behind which is a life-sized image mounted on the gallery wall of the industrial shelving unit in his studio. The image comprises dozens of individual photographs that are collaged together in an irregular, unstable fashion. The shelf is overflowing with half-open boxes, canvases and framed works, and objects wrapped in Tyvek and bubble wrap. Mounted on top of the life-size photo is a grid of miniature paintings showing details of an Indian observatory, whose sculptural complement we find across the gallery on a table beside a modernist chair positioned on a Persian rug – items from his living room.
Facing this overwhelming display, one of the gallery assistants said to me during opening week: "I feel like I'm inside his head." I replied: "That's exactly what I said to Richard, too, but he only said: "Doesn't all art make you feel that?"". I'm not sure, but I don't think it does. What is called art often is an object standing still in time and representing a kind of culmination, perfection, or end. The emphasis is on the image, a fixed result, even in a lot of process art, where the documentation of the process creates the image, while in No Ideas but in Things, the emphasis is on the interplay of objects, the visitors, the gallery assistants, chance, and the artist. The exhibition is concerned with participation, engagement, communication, and activity rather than with presenting an unambiguous history of objects and images.
History, however, is still part of the show. The artist's recent past is represented by the experiments that he has been doing with viewing stones for more than two decades. Arrayed on four pairs of shelves and an adjacent table are stone-like forms in ceramic, wood, cardboard, and plaster, as well as mineral specimens and stones seated in form-fitting bases.
Nearby there are also some granite rocks and gravel that Turner collected on Mt Baldy Road and used in an installation of the same name, which he originally conceived for his Instagram account. In the studio he randomly distributed the material on a rough "stage" and, acting as a "force of nature" – an earthquake or a flood – rearranged the rocks and gravel on a daily basis. He then photographed the resultant landscape after each intervention, and 42 (which is coincidentally the meaning of life according to Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) of the studies, which the "director" performed with his ensemble of stones, can be found on the social media platform. What at first glance looks like a variation on the theme of the variation is not simply a frolic with the endless possibilities of composition but alludes to the human possibility of contact with the sublime.
The interventions are photographed in such a way that one can have the impression of looking at massive boulders seen from a passing car on a cloudy day. But the occasional surfacing of the supporting stage structure casually gives away its actual size. This model of a tumbled mountain landscape is the subject of the Mount Baldy Road installation. Now it is the visitor of the exhibition to whom Richard passes on the director's hat or the role of the force of nature and who rearranges the landscape of rocks. At the sight of the actual size of the stones and the stage, the actor-director realizes that the imagined artistic omnipotence of moving mountains in model size encounters the very human realization of one's own insignificance at the sight of a mountain massif; an oscillation between the mundane and the sublime, and again, the relative absurdity of manipulating these time-extended objects.
In 1972, the year Richard's twin daughters were born, he began his Coincidence Project. For two years, he collected and documented coincidences that happened to himself, his family, and his friends, illustrating these curious occurrences with photographs and imagery from newspapers and magazines. Typed on an accompanying card was a matter-of-fact description of the synchronous incident.
While Richard allows the viewer to decide for themselves whether a higher power had a hand in orchestrating these coincidences, the work is a key to understanding his approach to art. Richard regards these incidental encounters as sources of fresh perspectives and prompts for redirection. The Coincidence Project says: "Look, and you see connections everywhere." And: "Realize that you are the one who sees".
Turner's things do not reflect all other things as in Indra's Jewel Net (which he considered as a possible title and show concept in the early planning phase of No Ideas but in Things), for, in each work of art, decisions must be made as to what belongs and what does not. In our realm of reality, you cannot show everything, and all colors mixed gives you grey. But the net is the invisible, infinite, and non-existing matrix of potentiality from which things emerge. Richard is aware that these encounters are always different, an endless kaleidoscope of possibilities. Doing justice to the realized and not the hypothetical connections, indeed creating them through attention, is the moment when art and life become actual. What was an idea or ideal a moment ago becomes a thing.
Making art is playing a game. The paradox of it is to stop playing at one point and to declare the record of the play an artwork, a fixed entity. This, however, does not concern Turner. He is interested in the rules of the game and how they change, the process by which images and objects come into being and pass out of existence.
I forget where I originally encountered this quote: If you understand eternity not as infinite duration but as timelessness, then those who live in the here and now live forever.