Functional Disorder And Really Shiny Things That Don’t Mean Anything
Warsaw City Council and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw has devoted a new prime space to public art. The collective initiative of “The New Place Project” (the Tribune), is the answer to the growing interest in quality fine art commissions for public spaces as expressed by the city inhabitants.
The first of the project will be a Ryan Gander sculpture titled, ‘Really Shiny Things That Don’t Mean Anything’, chosen in an international competition. The site of the exhibit, the Honorary Tribune on Parade Square, strikes straight at the heart of the problem of the open spaces in Warsaw, that is, visual and functional disorder. Parade Square, the center of the Polish capital in a sense, currently performs the functions of a car park, a temporary building for the construction work on the underground Metro station, an advertising space and an unofficial bus station which serves hundreds people every day, all of this with no proper organisational infrastructure. The old symbols (the Palace of Culture and Science) are the imposed images of this part of the city, and the new ones have failed to change anything in the last twenty years. Of course, Gander’s sculpture will not bring an immediate end to this situation.
But a work of art always reveals the world that surrounds it in a new light. The project organizers count on the symbolic attraction of the work of the British artist to draw attention to this situation and to achieve what urban designers and architects have failed to do so far during their countless discussions – that is, draw attention to the fact that Parade Square is a void in the city center which needs a proper spatial development plan.
Ryan Gander is a British artist born in 1976. He has established an international reputation through artworks that materialise in many different forms from sculpture to film, writing, graphic design, installation, performance and more besides. His work springs from jackdaw instincts for appropriation and re-presentation, and associative thought processes that connect the everyday and the esoteric, the overlooked and the commonplace.
Where: The Honorary Tribune, Parade Square (Plac Defilad) 28 October 2011 – 30 March 2012