DAVID RICKARD: ART AT THE THRESHOLDS
Many of London-based New Zealander David Rickard’s projects reflect his interest in both current science and the history of how we have evolved our scientific understanding. In work that moves between sculpture and performance, art and physics, chance and necessity, he’s particularly fascinated by the slippages between our everyday perceptions and what, through science, we understand to be the underlying reality. We discussed several projects which find ways to draw attention to such shifts – starting with the ultimate commonplace of air. As Rickard says ‘it sustains us but we forget it is a physical thing within which we are submerged, paying it little attention unless something else is carried within it.’
A Roomful of Air, 2019, is a site-specific work that Rickard has realised in three different locations. In each case the weight of air contained within a room is determined, and made physical with a solid mass of concrete or lead cubes resting on the floor: 240kg of lead at Galleria Michela Rizzo, Venice, as illustrated. That sets up a satisfying loop between the site and the work, and may remind us of two points rarely foregrounded. First, how the weight of air can vary; and second, that its weight mounts faster than you might expect. Altitude, humidity and temperature affect the weight of air, which has been around 1.255kg per cubic metre in the temperate sea level locations hosting the work to date. It gets heavier as the temperature drops - from 1.18 kg/sq m at 25°C to 1.42 kg/sq m at -25°C. Unsurprisingly, it weighs less as it thins with altitude. But it’s less intuitively obvious that humid air is lighter – as it is, because water vapour weighs less. As for total weight, ‘if you go outside and stand on one square metre of ground’, explains Rickard, ‘there is a 10 tonne column of air overhead. You would implode were the air not inside you, as well.’ We might be reminded of such classic experiments as German scientist Otto von Guericke’s demonstration in Magdeburg in 1654 that when a pair of copper hemispheres were sealed with grease and the air pumped out, the resulting contrast between air pressure and vacuum prevented the sphere being pulled apart by teams of horses.
The performance work Exhaust, 2011, externalises the air as a precious resource, capturing our active and hungry relationship with it. Rickard meticulously collects the air he exhales over a 24-hour period via a respiratory mask, transferring it into large silver foil balloons that accumulate into a mass, evincing the space we consume and the fresh air that each of us needs for daily survival. Thus Rickard makes visible a ‘day in the life’ through the process which provides our sustenance. ‘I’d never given much thought to claustrophobia before making that work’, Rickard recalls, ‘but the day after, I was on an underground train that stopped in a tunnel. I got panicky when I looked round at the people packed into that small metal box, thinking of how much air they needed, and wondered how long we had left! Perhaps claustrophobia originates in an unusual sensitivity to our need for air.’
International airspace, 2019-20, looks at air as a connecting substance. As Rickard explains: ‘The air that surrounds us today has been in circulation for centuries. In fact, within every breath we take it’s likely that we take in at least one molecule of the air exhaled by Caesar over two thousand years ago[i] – bear in mind that air is 78% Nitrogen, and that lasts for millions of years. Besides its longevity, air is also highly transient; the air we breathe in London will spread around the northern hemisphere within two weeks and across the entire globe within approximately two years. This gas we inhale, deep into our bodies with every breath, has already passed through countless bodies and borders.’ Rickard places this durable substance in the context of the human constructions which seek to regulate it: what we see is the parcels in which air has been sent to the artist from the 27 countries which signed the Paris Convention in 1919[ii]. That defined national airspaces (aligned with inland borders and set twelve nautical miles from coastlines), leaving the areas of shared in-between sky to be known as ‘international airspace’. One hundred years on, Rickard believes that increasing nationalism erodes the collaborative principles involved: so the 27 samples are combined within a single glass vessel to form a new, if fragile, international airspace. You can also read that merger as reinforcing how nations cannot really own the air above them – or, indeed, the water flowing round the oceans. And though we do have the legal frameworks for owning the less mobile earth, Rickard points out that there is some wisdom to how in many indigenous cultures, including that of his own birthplace, you can’t own the land either.
If those works are largely about ‘making visible’, Beyond sight within grasp (red, yellow and blue), 2019, is more a matter of going beyond the visible. Nanoscience deals with the ultra-small - a nanometre is one billionth of a metre – and is revolutionising various fields from health care to manufacturing. The threshold of optical vision is between 400 – 700nm. Below this scale things are smaller than the wavelength of visible light and therefore beyond the reach of any optical microscope. That largely prevented them being observed prior to the 1980’s, when the Atomic Force Microscope was developed. That works through touch, as if, says Rickard ‘a record player with a minute stylus arm were tapping the surface – so that incredibly tiny taps measured by laser build up a picture as if we are groping in the dark’.
It was the enabling instrument for a project developed in collaboration with the Nano-electronic & Nanophotonic Materials Laboratory at UCL and Beyond Sight Loss, an East London community group supporting visually impaired people[iii]. First, Rickard arranged for measurement to be made of highly polished copper in wavelengths of red, blue and yellow light (400 / 550 / 700 nm), then printed them out at scale to hold comfortably in the hand. He asked the group members to choose – through their own touch – which of them they liked the most. The forms resembled landscapes of waves, and, says Rickard: ‘I thought it might be a chaotic sprawl of individual preferences, but there was a considerable consensus. The participants spoke as if talking about sound: they liked smooth, generous forms more; and sharp, abrasive forms less. We then scaled their choices up to a million times the original scan, making them from copper so that a return was made to the original material.’ The plan (currently deferred by Covid-19) is to allow people – with or without sight – to experience the final work through touch, so completing a second return to the origin of the work.
A day at the speed of sound, 2019, takes its route into the commonly unperceived through sound, and operates at both macroscopic and microscopic levels. Again, Rickard explains, it ‘comes back to scientific understanding of the context of where we are – those thousands of years when we had no idea of the earth revolving’. At the poles the rotation is very slow - it takes a whole day to spin in place[iv], whereas at equator you are ‘traveling’ at over 1,600 Km per hour. The speed of sound – 1,235 Km per hr - is one with which we have a strong human relationship, for example through the historic lure of breaking the sound barrier in an aeroplane. Rickard went to a point on the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island at the latitude 42.47°, where the earth’s surface rotates at the speed of sound. In the morning he picked up a stone, then travelled across to the west coast, collecting any strands of string he saw, and chose a similar stone on the west coast. Thus everything in the artwork presented has been traveling - while stationary - at the speed of sound. The rocks, a paradigm of stillness in everyday thinking, were moving fast at the planetary level. And not only that: returning to nanoscience, we also know that if we go deep into physical matter, it is 99.9% vacant, and is vibrating intensely. Solid matter is a process, and the stones are just as active at the micro-level. ‘A Day at the Speed of Sound’ provokes quite another way of looking at two suspended stones.
Those five projects use art to get at the underlying nature of the world as revealed – in theory and experimentally – by science. Rickard reminds us that our everyday perception is limited. The End, 2018, examines another aspect of how we understand our place in the universe by asking – how long will it last? The book and 15 minute film version share the same underlying material: the deadpan presentation of predicted end dates for global catastrophe combining secular, scientific and fantastical predictions. In total 360 pages record endings from 635BC to the current hypothesis of the ‘Big Rip’ in 22 billion years’ time. As Rickard explains ‘it is generally accepted that it will get too hot for anything to live in 2 billion years, and in around 5 billion the sun will expand into a red giant and likely consume the earth. The Big Rip has the most traction as the ultimate end – the universe is expanding at an increasing rate, but there will come a point at which it is expanding so fast that matter will spread out too far for there to be atoms – then all will be torn apart and there’ll be no time either.’ That might be the best we can say, but such predictions don’t allow for testable hypotheses in the manner of mainstream science. That gives some logic to how the hundreds of different possible ends – many of them having come and gone, such as the fear that Halley’s Comet would be conclusive – are given the same status, whether they derive from soothsayers, cults, myth, religion or the history of science. Newton’s prediction, come to that, was for 2060 - but on the basis of his religious readings, not his scientific theories.
If The End suggests that the science which strives to find a rationale for where we are will look rather different when viewed from the future, an explicit example of that probability is provided by Star Gazer, 2014. Rickard describes it as ‘formed by a chance event within an ideal form; namely a fireworks rocket which happened to be called a ‘Star Gazer’ ricocheting off the faceted interior of an icosahedron.’ One of the construction’s triangular windows can be opened for Rickard to pop in a lighted firework: once that has ‘gone crazy’ inside, he folds back the mathematical sculpture to make a flat map of the process. In the terms of the model, that stands in for a star map – for the work refers to Johannes Kepler, a 17th Century mathematician and astronomer who believed he had discovered God’s geometrical plan for the universe by determining that the five platonic solids nested inside of each other relate proportionally to the orbits of the five planets then known. Kepler’s theory[v], which nested the 20-sided triangulated form around the planet Earth, was never all that accurate and had no hope of accommodating the discovery of Uranus and Neptune. So the work becomes an exemplar of how science shifts over time.
Rickard has recently returned to this methodology. C60, 2020, sets the firework off inside an even more complex – 36-sided – form made up of pentagons and hexagons. Which is to say: the form of a carbon molecule, which comes to carry traces of carbon given off by the rocket – another of Rickard’s characteristic loops between material and outcome. Of course, any combination of carbon emissions and atmosphere carries a charge beyond its aesthetic. And that, too, is typical of David Rickard’s way of working at the thresholds of our perception and understanding.
Please visit https://www.david-rickard.net for further works.
David Rickard is represented by Cøpperfield gallery, London and Michela Rizzo Venice.
Forthcoming exhibitions include ‘A circle called zero’ (solo) No Lugar, Quito, Ecuador (June 2021); ‘Feuilleton’, curated by Jo Melvin Spoleto and MACRO, Italy (July 2021); and ‘Brief Encounters 21’, curated by Chris Driessen & Steven Vandervelden, Lustwarande, Holland (Sept 2021)
References
[i] See San Kean’s book ‘Caesar's Last Breath’ (2017), which tells the story of air
[ii] The signing states of the 1919 Paris Convention were; USA, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, UK, China, Cuba, Ecuador, France, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, the Hedjaz, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Liberia, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, The Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Siam, Czechoslovakia, Uruguay.
[iii] Commissioned by UCL Trellis and programmed for future installation at UCL Bloomsbury.
[iv] Guido van der Werve’s film ‘Nummer negen: The day I didn’t turn with the world’, 2007, catches this neatly: it documents the artist appearing to stand still at the North Pole as he slowly shuffles clockwise. Meanwhile, as evidenced by the sun’s passage from left to right behind him, the earth spins counter-clockwise on its axis.
[v] Published as ‘Mysterium Cosmographicum’ (1595)
All images shown courtesy of Copperfield London, Michela Rizzo Venice and the artist.