Looking back at the month - the snow interrupted normal progress for almost three weeks, but it had its benefits. Life slowed down, I learnt to walk everywhere, and it was good to do less better.
I am focussing on the coming year and on the kind of work I would like to make. It is not predictable, but I like to feel anyway that my work is informed by ideas and by the experience of other artists. I am looking again at the writings and drawings of Bernard Tschumi, the Swiss architect, made for his theoretical projects in the 1980s. He was exploring the idea that, rather than being a static entity, architectural space is enlivened and given meaning by human events and movements, and he includes these notations in his drawings. Later he built according to these principles.
Bernard Tschumi Drawing for Manhattan Transcripts 4 (detail)
I have spent some time reading about the art of Ian Kiaer. I have admired his work ever since I first saw it at the Venice Biennale of 2003. Amongst all the large pieces by famous contemporary artists (for example, Matthew Barney), there lurked tiny evocative installations made of waste and common materials.
Kiaer's show at the Bloomberg was in a huge white space with a few similarly fragmentary objects placed within it. These are usually everyday materials - chunks of polystyrene, tiny long life milk containers, scraps of cloth. On one wall was a battered sheet of reflective aluminium, on another Kiaer's faded and elusive canvases. The objects have a strong feeling of being unfinished and potential and of being alive.
A small (imagined) reconstruction
With apologies to Ian Kiaer
According to Melissa Gronlund, who wrote the text "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" that accompanies this exhibition, Kiaer is redefining the traditional contrast between the"creative" and haphazard process of the studio and the "closure" of the gallery. He does this by bringing the fragments and detritus of the studio (packing materials for example) into the gallery, and allowing these to represent not only themselves and the associations made by the viewer, but also a deep theoretical investiagtion, so that "the enormity and complexity of the object's references are almost inversely proportional to the modesty of their language" (Gronlund).
Kiaer's complex references are drawn from philosophy, history, film, architecture, theatre, poetry and literature and undoubtedly give power and energy to the work. But this power also comes unconsciously from the everyday nature of the fragmented pieces. Unregarded scraps can evoke memories and associations of what is absent, of moments when we are "off-duty" and unguarded in our minds and emotions.
http://se8.org.uk/exhibitions/past/past/ for article by Nicholas de Oliviera and Nichola Oxley
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