Lowland Lullaby is an interactive visual and sound installation in the form of a stage onto which gallery visitors can walk. The piece was first exhibited at the Swiss Institute in New York, as part of a collaborative installation between Rondinone, Swiss artist Urs Fischer, and spoken-word poet John Giorno. Forty speakers embedded throughout the floor played Giorno’s reading of his poem “There Was a Bad Tree.” This provided a platform for Fischer’s drawings and sculpture, which dangle from the wall and lean onto the platform, contributing to an environment of flux and unrest.
Rondinone’s stage, created in collaboration with FWM, is made of 100 individual wood sections, hand-printed using black and white car paint in a repeat design. Through a grid of curving lines, the two-dimensional pattern perceptually suggests a three-dimensional undulating space. To protect the pattern, the entire surface was coated with the highest-grade polyurethane, designed for use on buses and airplanes. Using relatively simple means (plywood, speakers, hand-printed paint), Rondinone’s installation investigates the construction and interaction of physical, visual, aural, and social spaces.
In this as well as his other works, Rondinone has used vibrant patterns and bold imagery—in the form of targets, clowns and neon signs—to translate conflicted psychological states into environments that provoke corresponding moods in the viewer. Elizabeth Janus, writing in Artforum, describes the “parallel realities” he creates as “filled with fantasy, angst, monotony, and despair . . . closer to the truth than we’d care to admit” (Artforum, No. 3, November, 1998).