Ian Kiaer at the Neubauer Collegium

(link)

The romance of battle against architecture, as some have written it. In which the overt drama of rooms is rivaled by dumpy objects attended to. Kaier is seductive. The gesture of the artist's deliberation, hand, heightened to anxiety, makes unresponsive objects gain weight. 

see too: Ian Kiaer at Lulu, “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet, Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center

Ian Kiaer at Lulu

(link)

Kiaer's fetishism - in which objects gain authority through compositional attention, finickyness as gospel (think Fried's theater and the "arrangements" of minimalism's staging of viewership doubled w/ awareness of this expectation), the vestigial dust detritus and bits, remnants totemized by a self-aware anticipation of the viewer, and arranged for them - is probably the best argument against speculatory theories. The arrangements anticipate the viewer, appear as though inhabited, sentient by the specificity of their arrangement, a logic which cannot be seen but inferred, winking, and attributed to the Wizard of Oz, an intelligent design from some immanent spectre, but really just a smokeless mirror and us believing again in ghosts. The mirror reveals something way more interesting than that. A paraphilia in which the actual objects are substituted by an administration of attention.


Michael E Smith at Lulu, Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry, Zak Kitnick at Clearing, Renaud Jerez at William Arnold