Sad Sack James Stanfield

Ian Kiaer should be one of my favorite artists on Earth. A certain curator gave me a poster of his a few years back. It has hung on my wall in four different apartments in three different cities. It’s just an image of an upside down trashcan. I think it is fantastic!

But Christ, this guy sure knows how to dampen my admiration. Why does his work have to be so pinned down? Why does he build work around narratives? Why is his work about stuff? Here’s an excerpt from the press release for his current Tanya Bonakdar Gallery show:

"‘The Grey Cloth’ presents five new works inspired by a novel from 1914 of the same name written by the German architectural critic and writer Paul Scheerbart. Setting his novel in the mid-20th century, Scheerbart lays out a visionary work about glass architecture, but within the context of a human and irony-filled narrative that includes the personal suffering and megalomania of the story’s main characters. Within the year the novel was complete, Scheerbart had died of an infection in his legs, and the show touches on his illness, his looking into the future which is also symmetrically our past, a kind of fictionalized Modernism, and somehow, the difficulty of writing and thinking about visionary work."

And here is an example of what the show looks like:



Do the text and images here have anything to do with one another? Seriously, how does it help to have read the above paragraph and then be confronted with work that is so full of arbitrary choice? It doesn’t. It’s just tiring. He makes wonderful, dematerialized combinations of objects. They mean so much on their own. They don’t need a text as an excuse to exist. Well…OK, maybe they did in the 90’s, but not any longer. Ian, it worked! You’ve got the attention that you deserve. But it's a new decade, and you don’t need to pretend anymore.