Ian Kiaer and Sara MacKillop

Preview Wednesday 12 March 6.00 pm to 8.00 pm Artists’ talk: 5.00pm, Wednesday 12 March Lecture Room, Maple Road, Bournville Centre for Visual Arts

Twenty Questions: Ian Kiaer and Sara MacKillop A Project by Matthew Higgs

The typical one-to-one format of an interview invariably reveals as much about the subjectivity of the interviewer as it does about its subject. In an attempt to both democratize the role of the interrogator and to hopefully broaden the scope of the interview’s remit, twenty individuals, all of whom have had a professional or personal relationship with either Ian Kiaer or Sara MacKillop, were invited to pose a single question to one of them. What follows are Ian and Sara’s responses to their respective ten questions.

Ian Kiaer

Andrea Büttner ‘If this is not too private, what are you afraid of when you make your work?’

Ian Kiaer I have different kinds of fears. When making decisions I try to think about the tone, whether something is either too emotional or perhaps too dry, whether there’s a criticality or whether I’m falling into a way of doing something that is just about language rather than a directness or honesty. And then I start to worry about the relevance, and then I think it’s ok to be irrelevant, that in a state of irrelevance something interesting can occur. Sometimes I fear because I have become over tired and then it is good to take a rest.

Ben Carter ‘What kind of art – yours or others’ – would you want to install in a space station?’

Ian Kiaer I suppose a space station represents a place removed from the world, a condition that allows a certain distance to think about things. For reasons such as gravity and storage, the work should probably be a painting or at least something flat that can be attached to a surface. I imagine that the air conditioning and synthetic static might become oppressive, so it may be good to have something that suggests a certain earthiness as well as maybe fresh air. At the moment I would want a Gainsborough watercolour or perhaps a Raoul De Keyser painting.

Paola Clerico ‘Dear Ian, West or East...?’

Ian Kiaer West and East are difficult terms that become more complicated when thinking about whose West and East. I like those maps of China that represent themselves as the centre of the world. I’m not so keen on the idea of artists attempting to incorporate and practice traditions that have been entirely separate from their formative roots, though when I think of James Lee Byers or John Cage it’s clear I shouldn’t be so prescriptive. I found it necessary when making a project on Yang Paeng Son that I did not try to assume a Confucian approach to painting but used motifs that originate from an understanding of simple model making. In a way, making a model of something sidesteps the problem of authenticity.

Roger Cook ‘How do you understand the relationship between aesthetics and politics in relation to your work?’

Ian Kiaer Recently I learned about a manifesto written by Nikolai Tarabukin in 1922 where he singled out Rodchenko’s Red Square as the precise moment of painting’s death. He regarded it as opaque, stupid and revealing how painting would always be representational. He saw in this example an aesthetic and social crisis where art was trapped as a product and instead called for artists to enter factories and work collectively as only one component in a process. I was thinking how early the avant-garde were in questioning the autonomy of art and seeking new methods of intervention. It confirmed in me a sense that in making anything, there is a kind of hopeless redundancy. Yet in acknowledging this there is a freedom, which still allows for some kind of hermetic studio practice. I found in the model a way of working through ideas, not in a nostalgic way but rather confirming and even enjoying their redundancy. Maybe there is still such a thing as a radical autonomy.

Robert Harbison ‘How do you see the relation between art and criticism? Maybe thinking more of your own writing than criticism in general, but including the wider field if you prefer.’

Ian Kiaer Apart from a few articles or papers I see most of what I’ve written as being quite private and not something I feel so confident about. I’m not sure if it’s even criticism, in the sense of having a view that is laid out within a critical framework. Yet writing has been important to me as an alternative to making work, in allowing me to spend time thinking about certain works or connecting ideas that I feel close to. I suspect it’s probably quite important to remain irresponsible or at least inconsistent in the conclusions I might draw. I certainly wouldn’t want to use writing or criticism to ‘work things out.’ I feel it is also necessary to resist the temptation of allowing criticism to be too directly translated into studio practice. The relationship should be kept at a respectful distance.

Andrew Hunt ‘In terms of the relationship of your studio practice to an expansive, collaborative and social activity, I’m interested in your concern for the contemporary potential of the fragment. You’ve said that not only can it ‘be used to question received canons’ but also that ‘the notion of the fragment and the material nature of the model are relevant to the issue of control’: they undermine and frustrate history and authority in an anti-nostalgic and unsentimental way through a delicacy inherent to certain crude and makeshift forms, thereby opening up an imaginative space for the viewer because they are partial. In view of this, can you tell me about your latest work, and in particular, if you have considered the ‘utopian’ plan of Bournville in the making of your project for IPS?’

Ian Kiaer I was really in awe of Bournville and felt it’s difficult to respond in any way that does justice to the place. It is very strange, this overwhelming factory building, which physically seems to keep people on the outside. It’s the coming together of chocolate with Arts and Crafts and private patronage. I think Roald Dahl captured the unnerving quality with Willy Wonker. I want to somehow attend to this aspect of industrial modernism and fantasy, but I’m still not sure what form it will take. I’m not sure it’s a good idea that the factory now does guided tours. For Dahl I think it was the element of secrecy that allowed him room for story telling.

Alexandra Lockett ‘If you could ask one question to anyone (alive or dead, real or fictional) to whom would you ask it and what would you ask them?’

Ian Kiaer I’d ask my mum what it’s like in heaven.

Francesco Manacorda ‘You mentioned once in a talk your fascination for the sequence in Solaris when the camera enters Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow, and the painting is rendered real in front of the camera. Could you conceive of a film in which one of your works is zoomed into in the same way and turned into a real architectural situation?’

Ian Kiaer What’s interesting with this particular sequence was the way the film focused in on details of a painting that, for me, represents a constructed universal whole, which seems no longer attainable in painting. What the camera did was to fragment the picture, while retaining its sense of continuity through time and animated sound. It made me think about the relationship of the fragment to the whole, which I suppose is a romantic concern. A part of the concern in using fragments is to acknowledge this loss in painting. I’m not sure in that sense I would want to film the work.

Paul McDevitt ‘Ordinarily I associate looking at your work with being crouched down, but in the most recent show of yours that I saw (Alison Jacques, November to December 2007) you had some elements that were actually bigger than me. These filled the room rather than drawing the viewer into a diminutive world. Do you have ambitions to dwarf the viewer with actual architectural interventions?’

Ian Kiaer Though the scale of that work was larger, I still saw it very much as retaining its provisional model status. I’m not so much interested in monumentality for the sake of it, although I am interested in what monumentality might imply. I hope there was still an impression of instability.

Matthew Higgs ‘What question would you like to ask yourself?’

Ian Kiaer Why choose a Gainsborough watercolour?

Sara MacKillop

Anna Barriball ‘Do you go out to look for the objects you work with or do they find you?’

Sara MacKillop I just happen across some of the objects in my everyday life and I engage with them because of an aspect of their design or function that I find appealing. But also I think the objects I find are innately interesting and to a certain extent I’m just highlighting that innate quality, so in this way they find me. However once you notice a quality in a particular object you inevitably look for further examples. I use both methods of discovery.

Jessica Bradley ‘If a pad of paper = conceptualism and a stack of tape cassettes = modernism, what does a bunch of scattered CDs equal?’

Sara MacKillop CDs are one of the last physical formats for the distribution of recorded music, if you think of them as part of some kind of timeline of recording devices. I haven’t used CDs in a piece, I tend to use analogue, but according to this formula they may suggest some kind of last incarnation of the object. I’m not sure how that would fit in. With the objects in my work, although there are references and resemblances, I like the attributes of the object and its purpose to remain, for example with Ringbinder, it still continues to be a ring binder but it is just temporarily leant against the wall. In this way the pad of paper would continue to be a pad of paper etc.

Declan Clarke and Paul McDevitt ‘Is too little ever too much?’

Sara MacKillop I’m understanding this to be an extension of the phrase ‘less is more’. I use a pared down approach in making my work, trying to keep my interaction with the objects to a minimum in order to be concise. If the lack of artistic interaction becomes an unintentional spectacle, then yes, it would be a case of too little being too much.

Andrew Hunt ‘Can you tell me about your use of ‘obsolete’ mass-produced material such as vinyl records, flexi-discs, puzzles, frames and old stationery, and do you think that your twisting of this ephemera – which you somehow render neither ‘current’ or ‘retro’ – points to a less standardised view of the world?’

Sara MacKillop I’m not sure I see these objects as obsolete, or just involved in a cycle of redundancy having slipped from functional use. With the records and the flexi-discs I often obscure the information about what is on them and the actual sound contained. I am interested in slightly disrupting the everyday codes that are attached to these objects. The puzzle pieces have been selected from a larger puzzle turned over and displayed in a way that is not in keeping with the original rules of the game; I imagine this is a less standardised use of puzzles.

Ian Kiaer ‘Does showing your work in Bournville alter the way you understand it, in regards to a particular social ideal and perhaps to a kind of English formalism?’

Sara MacKillop I think certain aspects of my work may be highlighted by the exhibition in Bournville. I think where I’m using blank pages from books or blank inner sleeves from records to partially block the found frames, the muteness of the objects is emphasised, and this links them to formalism. The wall pieces I have made for the exhibition have a particular visual resemblance to English formalism e.g. those linked to the Circle publication. They are of a domestic scale. The work I’ve made is more pared down than usual using none of the optical effects that I have sometimes employed, which also seems fitting for the context of Bournville and the abstemious nature of its founding principles.

Lynda Morris ‘What inspires you so much about charity shops?’

Sara MacKillop I’ve always gone to charity shops and second hand shops. At first I think it was quite a purposeless activity, something to do in lunch hours or Saturday mornings. They are a good place for browsing, and quite a lot of the time I become interested in something because of a detail such as the curved corners of a record sleeve, which seem to stand out when flicking through a stack of records. I quite like the basic categories, like ‘books’, ‘records’, ‘miscellaneous’. When I go to charity shops I find objects for my artworks whilst also finding books to read etc., so in a way it’s just looking at the same set of objects but with a different set of criteria.

John Stezaker ‘How do you feel your work relates to your other work?’

Sara MacKillop I work in a university admin office a couple of days a week. There are ways in which this relates to my practice. When making the work I set up certain methods of dealing with objects to make a particular piece, for example when I make the jigsaw pieces by turning them over and stacking them, this act could equate to an administrative system in that I am just carrying out a task. The envelope window series was a way of changing the focus of the task of opening the post from the contents of the envelope to the aesthetic quality of the security patterns inside the envelope. In this way I was able to subtly subvert one of my bureaucratic duties for my own ends. At work I engage with a certain set of processes and objects, which influence my other work in as much as it’s part of my everyday existence, just as trawling through second hand shops is. But I get paid, which also influences making work.

Godfrey Worsdale ‘Can we do a show together one day?’

Sara MacKillop Yes I would like that.

Hugo Worthy ‘Sara, do you think that your work is just a little bit sentimental? (Thinking Nicholson Baker here rather than Mills and Boon.)’

Sara MacKillop I think my work is sentimental. There is a sentiment in the choice of objects I use, but not in the sense of linking to a personal nostalgia, more in just valuing the objects. I think this can coexist with a reductive approach to presenting the work.

Matthew Higgs ‘What question would you like to ask yourself?’

Sara MacKillop ‘Are you happy with what you have done for this project?’ But I’m afraid I can’t answer that yet.

Biographies

Anna Barriball is an artist based in London.

Jessica Bradley is Director of Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto.

Andrea Büttner is an artist and art historian who lives and works in London and Frankfurt.

Ben Carter is an artist, writer and translator living in Berlin.

Declan Clarke is an artist.

Paola Clerico, after being a gallerist for nine years, is now an independent curator.

Roger Cook is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London.

Robert Harbison is Professor of Architectural History at London Metropolitan University.

Matthew Higgs is the Director of White Columns, New York.

Andrew Hunt is Curator of International Project Space, Birmingham.

Ian Kiaer is an artist who lives and works in London.

Alexandra Lockett is the Programme Assistant at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham and a freelance curator.

Sara MacKillop is an artist who lives and works in London.

Francesco Manacorda is Curator at the Barbican Art Gallery, London.

Paul McDevitt is an artist based in Berlin.

Lynda Morris is Curator of EASTinternational

John Stezaker is an artist based in London.

Godfrey Worsdale is Director of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.

Hugo Worthy is Exhibitions Officer at The City Gallery, Leicester.

Ian Kiaer and Sara MacKillop