Demons and Particles at the Moody Center for the Arts

From "The Demon in the Diagram" by Matthew Ritchie, Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University

Over the past forty-plus years, I’ve watched conceptual art become increasingly multivalent and more accomplished, in terms of bring together multiple disciplines. If Duchamp’s “Large Glass” was the initial point of departure for modern/post-modern works, then installations like Matthew Ritchie’s “The Demon in the Diagram” is an example of one of the points of arrival.

On view at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts, Ritchie’s installation is an immersive experience of the shifting sands of interpreting, describing, and diagramming existence in the world and how reality will win out over our strategies to encapsulate it in words/images. Each strategy we devise to formulate some structure of reality is altered by successive interpretations.

Ritchie begins with Hesiod and the adoption of mythology to construct a meaningful interpretation of human experience and continues through to the 21^st century and the various mappings that inform how we make sense of existence and communicate that understanding. On the one hand, each grand schema gives way to successors; on the other, there’s an underlying equivalence of experience and interpretative strategies at work.

It might be churlish to suggest that a Platonic schematic is equivalent to phenomenological hermeneutics, but Ritchie’s work tacitly invokes that questioning. He produces a kind of experiential Wittgensteinian interrogation of our approaches to interpreting the World and by doing so, invokes a destabilizing of any answers as conclusive or absolute. This is challenging and refreshing and spending a couple of hours in the midst of this edifice of various media helps contain intellectualization and contextualize various diagrams in a historical sequence (which you can ignore, of course, as well).

While the diagrams themselves are familiar to anyone who’s spent time studying philosophy, more opaque are the paintings on glass and canvas and wall-mounted light-boxes populated by abstract layers and gestures and quasi- or demi- articulated figures. The paintings on glass are mounted on metal four-wheeled frames that can be moved around as the gallery goer pleases. Some replicate the wall-work, a triple-layer of expository and pedagogic design, others echo works mounted on the wall-spaces, and others are unique. The involvement with moving the paintings evoke several lines of inquiry; since they move in relation to the diagrams on the floor and on the walls, how does the movement re-set/redefine/reclaim relationships between the mobile works and the static wall-works? 

This isn’t simply a physical relationship or series of physical relationships; it’s also about meanings contained and revealed. In some cases, it could also be about obscuration, if not erasure, as well.

As you move through the larger gallery, perspective shifts and changes and you can literally sense a shift in emphasis. For example, if you’re looking at a diagram, say, of Chaos in relation to Time, where is the corollary found? Is there one? Is it supplanted by another perspective (quite literally, as you shift your place in space)?

In the smaller, closed off gallery, there’s a felt sense of internalization. Now you find yourself in a hermetic environment where the outside, larger gallery’s themes still obtain and continue, but in a denser field of experience. The diagrams on the floor give way to vinyl replications and images, and gone are the mobile framed works, but these are supplanted by a VR headset that is by equal parts enlightening (and didactic), grounding and disorienting.

Once you get the headset navigation running, you can point to a diagram and an illuminating discussion/deconstruction of the diagram is underway. As each is located in history, the analysis may leave you wondering if the analysis is really anything more than explication; but then, it’s obvious that it’s not just the words being presented. You’re in someone else’s headspace and in an undefined physical space (it is, after all, virtual). This pulls the carpet out and replaces it with a diagram and another discussion (you could argue that this is literal since in VR, your feet disappear/do not exist in this world). Altogether, there are 25 diagrams, and in keeping that in mind, the factor of time becomes more pronounced).

This is all very heady stuff, to be sure, and there is no one conclusion to be drawn. What makes this installation work initially, is the extreme care taken to bring diverse disciplines into play. As with the best such works, this is a marriage of philosophical inquiry with visceral experience. It may begin with the head, but it doesn’t reside there. The bringing together of technology and painting and sculpture is assured and not at all gratuitous. All of the pieces fit.

The immanent feature is the concept of "demon" itself. Daemon connotes a god or agent for natural events or a deity capable of creating or altering creation. It is also term in computing for a program that runs in the background and not dependent on user input or commands.

What is as important, is what is not contained in the immediate experience; this is the transcendent feature. The work itself invites reflection on what is outside of it; literally, as in “the outside world” and figuratively, as in the internal experience each audient is going to experience and what they bring into it. In pieces like this, the viewer is more participant and part of the piece than they may at first be aware.

In another gallery is Leo Villareal’s six channel video production, “Particle Chamber, 2017”. It works as a palate cleanser to Ritchie’s installation in the sense that the viewer is presented with a dark space and six screens on which minute points of light swim, fly, multiply, condense and dissolve as a soundtrack of white noise fills out the space. Time fluctuates and ebbs and flows as these points of light configure, reconfigure, and reconfigure again, randomly, algorithmically.

Matthew Ritchie, “The Demon in the Diagram” is on view through December 22, 2018 and Leo Villareal, “Particle Chamber, 2017” is on view through December 31, 2018. Both are on view at the Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, 6100 Main Street, MS-480, Houston, Texas. For more information, call +1 713-348-ARTS. Visit moody.rice.edu or on Twitter, @theMoodyArts.

Clip of Leo Villareal's "Particle Chamber, 2917" at the Moody Center for the Arts