CABINETS #1: IAN KIAER
Three Proposals
The world around us turns back into a smooth surface, without signification, without soul, without values, on which we no longer have any purchase. Like the workman who has set down the tool he no longer needs, we find ourselves once again facing things.
Alain Robbe Grillet
Everyday Utopias
A football bladder, a sheet of polythene, a lump of styrofoam, cardboard packing, and an upturned stool: these are materials variously employed by Ian Kiaer in his installations. Moreover these might be thought of as the visible signs of a world we can physically grasp, but which remains essentially elusive.
Kiaer describes the importance of the fragment as a means of referencing something beyond the actual, in short, the thing or idea that remains absent. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze, on discussing the writings of Marcel Proust, tells of a vertiginous relationship between the present and the past mediated through what he terms as shreds, also entitled ‘virtual objects’. These are what remains as evidence of a pure past, which returns each time that we engage our recall, but as a renewed version. These memory-objects are “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.” In this way, active recall is continuously invaded by the interposing of the present, and becomes progressively more unreliable. It is argued, though, that this fluid state is desirable, as memory cannot remain static.
Moreover, the notion of the fragment, as employed by Kiaer, is essentially bathetic in nature. His endeavour to conjure up an elsewhere through paintings by Pieter Bruegel or architectonic models of BrunoTaut or Frederick Kiesler cannot, or indeed, must not, succeed; instead, his work shows clearly that these delicately displayed fragments or shreds cannot replace- or even stand in for- the whole. The resulting aura of melancholia stems from the explicit failure to complete the project, to bring a place or earlier image to life in its original state. Indeed, it is argued, the success of the work might be said to result from the planned failure of this ambitious transcription or transposition, calling to mind Jorge Luis Borges’s celebrated short story “On Rigor in Science”. In this short tale, the finest cartographers in the world progressively increased the scale of their maps, until the map of a city became the same size as the city itself, and the map of the empire covered it in its entirety thus perfection rendering it useless. In the final sentence Borges recounts that “In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars;”
Perhaps Kiaer’s works conform to this post-utopian condition; the infinitely fragile and crumbling fragments mourn the loss of perfection, a state where the world and its representation meld into one, a broken link between the past and the present that cannot be mended; and in this futile invocation of what has become lost, his shreds are magically transformed into the most complete things in the world: namely, a football bladder, a sheet of polythene, a lump of styrofoam, cardboard packing, and an upturned stool.
Nicolas de Oliveira and Nicola Oxley
Alain Robbe Grillet. An essay by Brian O’Doherty. reprinted from Art and Artists, September.1966. Minimal Art edited by Gregory Battock. A Critical Anthology. Studio Vista. 1968. [1] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Athlone Press, London, 1997. [2] Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol.1-6, Penguin, London, 2003. [3] Jorge Luis Borges, On Rigor in Science, in: Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Huxley, Penguin Books, London, 1999. [4] Jorge Luis Borges, ibid.Ian Kiaer Biography:
Previous exhibitions include the 10th International Istanbul Biennial, ‘Poor Thing’ at the Kunsthalle Basel, ‘Of Mice and Men’ at the 4th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art and ‘Brueghel Project/Studio’, solo exhibition as part of Art Now at Tate Britain. His work is currently on display at Tate Britain and he is represented by Alison Jacques Gallery in London and Tanya Bonakdar in New York.
Cabinet #1: Acetate, formica, plastic, tissue
Cabinet #2: Formica, mirrored door, foil
Cabinet #3: Plastic, Manga comic, window blind, acrylic sheet, card
