2003

Ugo Rondinone
Our magic hour
25 June – 31 August 2003
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

Clockwork for oracle
28 January – 7 March 2004
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne

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Poets and artists have long given voice and shape to the incongruous – seeking to make sense of it, or simply to underscore its mystery. Some, like Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone, manage to do both, turning the absurd into a kind of de facto logic, and vice versa, primarily through visual means. Still, language, sound, and a penchant for the lyrical often figure prominently in Rondinone's work.

Jane Harris, ‘Strange gusts and aluminum giants from Ugo Rondinone’, Village Voice, 9 October 2007

For Ugo Rondinone, the architecture is always a framework and a stimulus. Whether it was the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in South Melbourne, known as the ‘urban Uluru’, or Sydney Harbour’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Rondinone contributed amazing works for each of the two venues. Both exhibitions were realised as Kaldor projects in a partnership with Naomi Milgrom Kaldor.

In Sydney in 2003, Our magic hour was a neon text in a gay-friendly rainbow arc on the MCA rooftop, shining across Circular Quay and heralding the kind of dysfunctional funhouse we were about to enter.

Inside, slumped in one corner of the exhibition space, a Buddha-bellied, fibreglass clown with a small bowler hat (If there were anywhere but desert. Saturday 2000) invoked the shade of one of Samuel Beckett’s clochards, having waited for Godot for too long. On one window, black plexiglas that just threw back your reflection; on the other, one of his large, out-of-focus target paintings, with a mesmerising white core. In If there were anywhere but desert. Wednesday 2000 and Dog days are over 1996, more sprawling clowns as sculpture and in video. There’s an uncanny mood, like a circus after hours. Your entry triggered a canned laughter track, and we smile but with that weird, embarrassed smile you offer when you feel left out of a joke.

Elsewhere you entered a deep blue neon-tiled room with flickering, swimming-pool blue light. The submarine effect came from six video projections of looped fragments sampled from 30 different films and scenes shot by the artist: swimming in water, moving through fog, from a dark room into light. Entropy looms.

In the series Sleep 1999, 165 framed photographs hung wall-to-wall told an unresolved narrative of two star-crossed solitary figures scouring the same bleached-out coastline but never meeting. This failure to connect was played out again in What do you want? 2002 where a funhouse mirror warped all reflections of a self, while on a sound loop a lengthy quarrel was enacted between a man and a woman: ‘What do you want?’, ‘What do I want?’, ‘Yes, what do you want?’, ‘I don’t want anything’… ad nauseam.

With painstaking artisanal craft, Rondinone carries on in a more unsettling branch of the circus of life. A funhouse is fun, while also being a place of fear and confusion: it’s fairy floss on a stick but also those spooky dark passages.

In Melbourne in 2004 for Clockwork for oracle, Rondinone presented several of the works seen in Sydney along with another video work, from which the exhibition takes its title, in which a man and a woman again walk alone, this time through a cityscape. A monumental X (six metres high, seven metres wide and a metre deep) titled Twentyfourhours subdued the exhibition space, emitting breathing sounds from tiny speakers. X is a cancellation mark and an unknown destination (according to philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Since Copernicus, man has been rolling from the centre towards X’.) On the walls to either side hung a series of sinister black rubber masks, recalling commedia del arte masks and perhaps something more primitive, with each one subtitled with a month from the lunar cycle as part of the Moonrise series.

Read more about Ugo Rondinone.

Ugo Rondinone's Our magic hour 2003 installed on the roof of Sydney’s MCA. Photo: Greg Weight. Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney