Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Ian Kiaer
Ian Kiaer
Directors Foreword
Long has there waged a dialogue surrounding what is art?
Like many criticisms the idea is posed as a question. There is
additionally some implication that there is a standard by which
to make this evaluation. Traditionally I have come down on the
side of artist intention: that is, if the person who made the object
claims it as art, then so be it.
The application of this methodology inherently provides for a
subsequent ascription of a value judgmentit is art, but is it
good art? It begs the question, What art is worthy of our time,
attention, concern, and investment (psychological, spiritual,
financial, or otherwise)?
For me the best art teaches us (the viewer) something about
lifeculture, ourselves, and societywithout knowing that the
teaching is happening or has happened. The best art allows us
to look, learn, and be in a seamless fashion.
Ian Kiaers work was put to this test for me in Venice this
summer as I took a few friends who happen to be contemporary
art collectors to see his installation at Fondazione Querini
Stampalia. Kiaers work is decidedly obtuse, at least upon an
initial encounter, and not surprisingly they all looked to me for
an explanation of what we were seeing.
Kiaer often works from a very specific topical (usually historic)
subject mater and filters narratives, circumstances, and facts
into personal physical expressions. While I was not aware of
this source for his Venice project, I led my friends through what
I saw installed, verbalizing my visual impressions and making
observations and connections along the way. My willingness
to do so seemed to empower them to do the same. When we
left we noticed a text panel hanging outside the room that we
had missed upon our entry. The text confirmed what we had
collectively learned. The experience reinforced one of the things
I value most about artit not only allows us but encourages us
to trust ourselves and what we see and know.
The truism that life is what we make of it may be clich, but it
also applies to art. We all know what we know, but it is through
art that we may come to know it a bit differently.
Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson
CEO and Director, Chief Curator
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Black Square (1915) placed itself within the legacy of the icon, as
is apparent from the way that it was hung high in a corner, just as
icons traditionally were, in the First Suprematist Exhibition in St.
Petersburg, thus evoking some notion of the absolute in its new
beginning. The chair in Kiaers Melnikov Project, placed against
the wall with pieces of fabric that become abstract paintings
found monochromesechoes the famous documentary
photograph of that exhibition. On the other hand, Aleksandr
Rodchenko in his three monochromes made from red, yellow,
and blue pure pigment roughly applied (1921) asserted the
sheer materiality of paint and the labor of painting without any
notion of transcendence. Even this was too retrograde for the
critic Nikolai Tarabukin, for whom monochrome painting was a
blind wall.2 As Tarabukin and his fellow revolutionaries argued,
artists must abandon the making of objects of contemplation
for the practical transformation of the social environment as a
place for collective life.
Melnikov is exemplary according to Kiaer in part because, in his
private studio constructed like a fortress tower, he returned from
architecture to painting after the announced end of painting.
What would it be to make a painting after painting that would
not be a return to what painting was before its purported end?
Around the time Malevich was making paintings that effaced the
past in the name of a radical new beginning, Marcel Duchamp was
taking existing objects and designating them as readymade
artworks. For Kiaer, to make a painting after painting is to make
a painting as a readymadeto take an already existing piece of
fabric and pin it to a stretcher, for example, or to hang a piece
of card.3 Just as Duchamp altered his readymades, so Kiaer will
sometimes add paint or some faint drawing to those surfaces that
already constitute paintings before he begins to work on them.
The things that Kiaer brings into the studio often bear a record
through marks, stains, crinkles, and cracks of the times and
places through which they have passed. One piece of fabric
used for Melnikov Project is one half of a tablecloth, the other
half of which had been burned, its embroidered flowers joined
by the stains left from a meal. Kiaers activity is not to make it
new but to allow the object to manifest itself as it is, sometimes
contributing a further trace or track of paint to the marks that
commemorate what it has undergone. As an artist, Kiaer acts as
an enabler (though his interventions, discreet as they may be,
are crucial) but he is also a producer, in the sense of bringing
the thing into presence in a particular way. In our discussion
at the studio, he mentioned the classical Greek distinction
between praxis and poiesis. Praxis involves a willed making or
doing that produces a determinate result. It depends on a linear
idea of time where effect follows cause. Poiesis, or production as
bringing into presence, involves a disclosure in which the human
participates but does not necessarily will.4
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NOTES
See Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner, eds., The Studio Reader: On
the Space of Artists (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
2010).
1
See Thierry de Duve, The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas, in Kant
After Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 199279.
3
For the account of poiesis and praxis that Kiaer referred to in conversation
with the author, see Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans.
Georgia Albert (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 5993.
4
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Craufurd, quoted in Simone
Weil: An Anthology, ed. Sin Miles (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 212.
5
See Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1989).
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NOTES
This essay first appeared in the Autumn 2010 issue (no. 4) of the quarterly journal
Picpus and is reprinted here with the kind permission of its editors.
A. A. Strigalev, The Cylindrical House-Studio of 1927, in Konstantin Melnikov, and the
Construction of Moscow, eds. Mario Fosso and Maurizio Meriggi (Milan: Skira editore,
2000), 90.
1
In 1929 Melnikov designed a Laboratory of Sleep for workers in the Green City. See
S. Frederick Starr, Melnikov: Solo Architect in a Mass Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1978), 179.
2
Ibid., 177.
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Biography
Born 1971, London, England
Lives and works in London
Education
2008 Royal College of Art, London, PhD Painting Research
2000 Royal College of Art, London, MA Painting
1995 Slade School of Art, University College London, BA Fine Art
Selected Solo Exhibitions
* with catalogue
2012
Alison Jacques Gallery, London
2011
Il Baciamano (A Nobleman Kissing a Ladys Hand), Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice
2010
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Endnote, pink, Kunstverein Mnchen, Munich
2009
COMMA 15: Ian Kiaer, Bloomberg Space, London
Three Proposals, SE8, London
Project Room: Ian Kiaer, Alison Jacques Gallery, London
What Where, Galleria Civica dArte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, Italy*
2007
Bruegel Project, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Ian Kiaer, Alison Jacques Gallery, London
2006
Erdrindenbau, Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan
2005
The Grey Cloth, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Art Statements, Alison Jacques Gallery, Art 36 Basel, Switzerland
British School at Rome, Rome
2004
Galleria Massimo de Carlo, Milan
Endless House Project, Alison Jacques Gallery, London*
2003
Art Now: Ian Kiaer, Tate Britain, London
Art Statements, Art Basel Miami Beach
Endless Theatre Project, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Interstice/Double Impact, W139, Amsterdam
2001
Asprey Jacques Gallery, London
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2000
UBS Painting Prize, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London*
EverydayImagesEvery Day, Rogaland Kunstnersenter, Stavanger, Norway*
Manifesta 3: Borderline SyndromeEnergies of Defence, International Biennial of
Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, Slovenia*
Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (with Athanasios Argianas and Nick Laessing)
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2003
Ian Kiaer & Jeff Ono, Asprey Jacques Gallery, London
Harmony, at Happiness: A Survival Guide for Art & Life, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo*
Atto Primo, Galleria Massimo de Carlo, Milan
Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer, 50th Venice Biennale*
The Straight or Crooked Way, Royal College of Art, London
2002
Building Structures, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York
Artists Imagine Architecture, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston*
The Bold and the Beautiful, The Pavilions, London; RMIT Project Space, Melbourne, Australia
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List of Illustrations
All works by Ian Kiaer unless otherwise noted.
Cover: Melnikov project, screen, 2011 (detail). Installation view, Ian Kiaers studio, London, 2011.
Photo: Louise O Kelly.
pp. 315: Installation views, Aspen Art Museum, 2012. Photos: Jason Dewey.
p. 3: Melnikov project, small screen, 2012.
pp. 45: Melnikov project, chair (yellow), 2012.
p. 6: Melnikov project, chair (yellow), 2012, and Melnikov project, lab a (silver), 2011.
p. 7: Melnikov project, lab a (silver), 2011 (detail).
p. 8: Melnikov project, chair (yellow) 2012; Melnikov project, lab a (silver), 2011;
and Melnikov project, lab b (silver), 2011.
p. 9: Melnikov project, lab b (silver), 2011 (detail).
pp. 1011: Melnikov project, lab b (silver), 2011; Melnikov project, screen, 2011;
and Melnikov project, sleep, 2011.
pp. 1213: Melnikov project, screen, 2011 (details).
p. 14: Melnikov project, sleep, 2011, and Melnikov project, cloth, 2011.
p. 15: Melnikov project, cloth, 2011.
pp. 1729: Installation views, Ian Kiaers studio, London, 2011. Photos: Louise O Kelly.
Images courtesy of the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; and Alison Jacques Gallery, London.
p. 17: Melnikov project, lab b (silver), 2011.
p. 18: Melnikov project, chair (yellow), 2012.
p. 21: Melnikov project, cloth, 2011 (detail).
p. 22: Melnikov project, screen, 2011.
p. 25: Melnikov project, sleep, 2011 (detail).
p. 26: Melnikov project, lab a (silver), 2011 (detail).
p. 29: Konstantin Melnikov, Melnikov House, 19279. Photo: Robert Oerlemans.
p. 31 above: Konstantin Melnikov, bed chamber of the architects home. Melnikov Family Archive, Moscow.
p. 31 below: Konstantin Melnikov, preliminary variants of sarcophagus for V.I. Lenin, 1924.
Melnikov Family Archive, Moscow.
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