Ian Kiaer

Art that springs from an immersion in historical research tends to reward the viewer in inverse proportion to the depth and reliability of the findings themselves. It is as if, in championing some highly specialized or unjustly neglected cultural figure, the artist forgets his or her own responsibility to pose questions and becomes instead an amateur biographer who digs for the truth but is unable to communicate it in a form that is also art. On paper, British sculptor Ian Kiaer threatens to fall into this category, so it is a pleasant surprise when he emerges from the library with his own sensibilities not just intact but strengthened.

“Endless Theatre Project,” Kiaer’s US solo debut, is inspired by the architectural theories of Claude-Nicholas Ledoux and Frederick Kiesler, specifically their radical ideas about theater design. Both men wanted to bring the audience closer to the stage and make every aspect of a production visible to all. Kiesler’s idea of “correalism” sought as well to broaden this original intention into an approach to the interaction of art and other objects with interior space, and architectural structures with their surrounding landscape. This, then, is the subject of Kiaer’s homework, but it’s equally productive to regard his study as one starting point among many—certainly not an arbitrary choice but not a restrictive one either.

In six modest tableaux, Kiaer combines found and modified objects with small models and paintings to conjure a quiet but insistent interplay of atmosphere and potentiality. His predilection for down-at-the-heels, quotidian materials suggests the influence of arte povera, and a preference for tones of pale yellow and dusty black allows his installations to appear as at once sculptures and sketches, objects and plans. Endless Theatre Project/Ledoux: Besacon (auditorium) (all works 2003) is typical: Huddled in a corner of the main gallery, this unassuming group of objects and part objects includes a disc of umbrella material and rubber that hugs the floor like a charred lily pad, a sheet of roofing insulation partially covered with a piece of black cloth, the bladders of two soccer balls, and an ethereal ink drawing on a wall-mounted panel made from layers of taffeta, plastic, and cotton. It is a downbeat, “undramatic” arrangement that nonetheless evokes a shifting mood and establishes a “scene” of sorts. The process it implies is a perpetually interrupted one, an endless round of preparation and testing, overlap and interpolation.

Endless Theatre Project/St. John at Patmos involves a similar range of forms and materials and adds a battered black office chair. This makes the correlation of sculptural installation and stage set explicit by playing on the interchangeability of audience and performer. Kiaer asks us divide our viewpoint and imagine ourselves with our back to the wall, returning our own gaze, both detached and complicit. Two works in the main gallery, Universal Theatre/yellow and Endless Theatre Project/Ledoux: Besacon (cello) go so far as to incorporate tiny models of auditoriums. While their diminutive scale makes it harder to imagine actually taking a seat, the abandoned, melancholy atmosphere with which Kiaer manages to invest the surrounding scraps of cardboard, Styrofoam, and asphalt combines rather effectively with our instinctive efforts to forge narrative links. “Endless Theatre Project” steers well clear of a bombastic finale, and Kiaer’s backstage rummaging unearths some useful props.

—Michael Wilson