Ryan Gander's Ruined Sculpture and Time-Traveling Debris at Guggenheim

Ryan Gander's two-part installation at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (October 1, 2010 – January 9, 2011) reimagines Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince as a collapsed statue and column, questioning the value of public art. The sculpture, a model of a ruined monument, critiques art reduced to mere decoration. In the museum's library, Gander presents shattered glass fragments from a fictional violent fight between Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg in 1924, who fell from Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin house after a dispute over diagonal versus horizontal-vertical lines in abstraction. The debris landed in the Guggenheim library via a temporal portal from the Café de l'Aubette. Outside the library door, a quarter from the future (2032) is glued to the floor, engraved with its inflated value of $25, alluding to objects traveling through time. Gander avoids a didactic reading by creating conceptual ruptures between the works, which nonetheless converge on a baroque logic of intensification of parts over subordination to the whole.