Ryan Christopher interview with Raimundas Malašauskas for De Ateliers Offspring 2023: Raamvertelling
RM
How long have you been coming to this building since?
RC
Since January last year. Around one and a half years now.
RM
And how has your relationship with the building been developing? What did emerge as routines?
RC
I think initially I felt a lot of pressure to be in the studio as much as possible. But then I found that it wasn't really possible for me. So I came to a more realistic routine of often being outside in the world, outside of this monastery, and then coming back to the studio to think things through and arrange materials. Many people have described it as a monastery, which is beautiful, but it can also be quite isolating. I’d say I spend more or less half of my week in the building and half outside of it. And whilst I’m there I’m usually very focused, but then other times I just need to be around people or outside walking or reading or whatever.
RM
You mentioned that in the beginning, there was a sort of pressure to be in the studio. Where was that pressure coming from?
RC
There was a lot of energy because we were in a new space, and I came straight out of university where we were required to be in the studio and to use it. Coming from there to these huge studios, you feel the pressure of having to utilize them, so of course you have to fill them with work. That's the pressure that I felt. Now if you look at my studio, it’s not exactly filled with work. Things happen at a different pace, and I think I just took a while to find that pace. It feels a lot more comfortable to make work, and it can flow more naturally, I think.
RM
Are you one of those people that accepts the sensibility and aesthetics of a monastery very eagerly?
RC
Yes, and I think the work needs it. It needs the sort of basic essentials or the sort of conditions that monasteries set up. Somewhere to think, isolation, some clarity, just without the rigid routine. I often work on the De Ateliers garden which I set up with a previous participant last year. That definitely adds to the monastic feel of the place, and I feel my work is responding to a lot of what’s around it.
RM
Now we are in your studio, which probably, of all the studios I have seen, has the smallest desk. When you speak about clarity, maybe the size of your desk is a sort of privilege, a way of privileging the air, the air in the studio. Did you always have this scale of a desk or did it, at some point, shrink?
RC
I guess it was just that I found a piece of board that I liked. It was a practical decision really - even though it's not actually that practical, it does the job. I went scrounging around in the wood workshop for a tabletop, and I was drawn to this one. It had enough width to sort of fit a book or a notepad and that's all I needed. And room for a laptop.
RM
And what do we have here? At the moment, I see Simone Weil…
RC
Yes, she's always very close to me and to the work. She’s this constant presence and filter and my thinking is very informed by her writings - I find them beautiful. Then I have my notes, and I have the parts of a barometer, an aneroid barometer, some string and tape and a script.
RM
What is happening with the barometer here?
RC
Well, I just confronted myself with the different parts of it because the idea of a barometer and its function is very interesting to me. But it was another question of how to deal with its constituent parts and then how to think through them. So my thinking was that if I place them in front of me on my desk, then I'm confronted with them every day, so I've got to do something with them.
RM
It's interesting that you use the word ‘confronting’ in this case, because I don't see that type of relationship with the world, in your case, as being confrontational. So it's interesting that you say you want to be confronted with elements of the barometer.
RC
Yes, because it's easy for me to sit with them, but I think the confrontation is what forces them to become art somehow, because then they're staring at me and waiting to be put into a form that would allow them to be thought about in an interesting way. They needed to be there staring at me.
RM
It's interesting, the metaphor of the barometer in art history and art writing, because I think there are generations of artists that identified themselves or were identified by the critics as the barometers of society.
RC
I was drawn to them because I feel that perhaps we're all quite similar to barometers. They have a central unit called the diaphragm, and it expands and contracts. It's very sensitive to air pressure, and it moves up and down very slightly according to the atmospheric pressure. This is also what I was feeling in an old chalet in Verchaix that I was staying in earlier this year - there was a beautiful aneroid barometer there - it's this feeling of being very sensitive to the air pressure. You feel it in your breathing when you're at a high altitude. You feel it in your mood when it's cloudy or when it's rainy or clear. So you have this sensitive internal mechanism that's responsive to external changes in the air pressure, and that's incredibly similar to the internal mechanism of a barometer. I find it to be a very human metaphor. But I do like the idea of the artist as a barometer of society.
RM
If you apply that metaphor to yourself - the artist's barometer - where do you find yourself within that thinking? Like, what do you measure as an artist, what do you transform, or what do you start to register? Because transforming is already very proactive and I don't know how you feel about what you do in relation to transformation, but in my simple perception, you are more of a contemplative subject.
RC
Yes, I think I'd agree. Also in a wider sense, I suppose I’m registering the experience of being human with all of its peculiarities and paradoxes. I have this ongoing interest in subjectivity but also in the areas of overlap - how we can feel and experience life in a way that’s not too dissimilar to people, say, two thousand years ago. I’m also thinking about things in relation to the past and to religious experiences in particular, and trying to place these different voices and these very fragmented narratives together in the work. And with all that I’m registering, I suppose in my practice I’m working to find some clarity or balance in the form of it whilst still holding its complexity, or to find some sort of feeling of silence in its voicing, in the same way that I'd find a silence in prayer or in the natural world. There’s usually a form of renunciation, a sort of stripping back. So I suppose there’s definitely more of a contemplative registering of things.
RM
I agree. What were the circumstances that made you go into the making of art? Like, how did you decide to become an artist, Ryan?
RC
I think it just made a lot of sense to me to become an artist. In terms of the space that I'd need to be able to think through things that I found interesting and to be able to communicate with other people who were also thinking interesting things, to be in close dialogue with them - I think it made sense. I felt very much at home in the conversations that were happening in art. I found that going to art galleries was interesting because it's very contemplative and you go through things at your own pace, but at the same time you're also stimulated intellectually and emotionally. It was rare to find a space where those things could come together with contemplation - lots of new ideas and lots of different paces of ideas coming at you and different people being curious about things that are very interesting. So I just had to be in that space and around these people. It felt very natural to be pulled into that, drawn into it somehow.
RM
When you say people, you mean?
RC
Artists, friends, acquaintances and also people in the past who were also feeling things that I felt. It was going to galleries and seeing very old paintings and seeing certain expressions and figures or moods that I could relate to. I felt I had to keep them in close proximity somehow.
RM
And who were those people in the past? Can you mention, like, one or two?
RC
Yes. I’d say Giotto and Piero della Francesca. I was and still am mostly interested in the sort of emotional and spatial economy of their compositions, and this geometrical rigor that all of their works seem to have, thinking through these very calculated measurements in a space with this beautiful sense of balance and restraint. I really liked how they could have these precise structures and also contain a lot of very raw human emotions in the figures that they were dealing with, and how they could articulate these deeply spiritual experiences within those structures. I found that to be a brilliant way to deal with our lived experience; by putting it into this framework where it could become more fixed somehow, where it could be articulated in a clearer way.
RM
Lived experience that could be articulated in a clearer way. So something that we experience in, let's say, everyday life, but with the help of art we can make it more clear?
RC
Yes exactly, and it can be used to articulate things within our experiences that are easily forgotten or perhaps not felt enough. With art, you're more, to use that word, ‘confronted’. Again, you're more confronted with feeling, and you can sit with it for longer. It gives feelings a space to be voiced, which I enjoy.
RM
It's a very nice way to put it. And it's interesting to me that you don't define or describe those feelings but you speak about them quite abstractly.
RC
Yes. Usually the art that I relate to the most is the work that deals with the most subtle or inward feelings that are difficult to articulate. So it gives me a sort of reverence for them to the point where only a quiet sort of attentiveness feels appropriate.
RM
Do you practice social contact with art? I mean, do you go to see, let's say, Giotto, with your friends and you look at it together?
RC
Yes, sometimes. Usually only with a friend or two, though. It’s very interesting to discuss things in those contexts, but sometimes I find it better to go alone, especially when there’s a lot of art to see, so I can go at my own pace without feeling hurried - there’s a bit more clarity with that. I think with anything social, it detracts from inwardness somehow.