Art

A collective sigh of unconcern greeted last week’s disclosure of the design for our Olympic stadium and, on the same day, a similar shrug went round those assembled at the unveiling of Thomas Schütte’s new sculpture for Trafalgar Square’s empty fourth plinth. While 2012’s athletics venue raised few eyebrows because architecturally it’s just plain dull, Schütte’s colourful, layered-glass structure failed to surprise because it looks no better than the much smaller, Perspex version that had been widely illustrated and exhibited beforehand. The siting of a big bit of contemporary sculpture smack dab in the middle of town should be cause for applause, but Schütte’s work, a ‘Model for a Hotel’, mocks the very idea of monumental art. For a start it’s see-through and, as the title suggests, it’s merely a model for another yet-to-be realised structure. You can just imagine Schütte applying for the competition: ‘I propose… a proposal.’ So while viewers might look straight through this transparent effigy, many will miss the inherent truth it imparts about the artistic act; that all art is a form of proposition and anything’s possible.
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Artists and architects have long strained to test the boundaries of plausibility, not least in plans drawn up by French neoclassical architect Étienne-Louis Boullée for Isaac Newton’s cenotaph, whose grand design called for a domed roof so high that it would create its own microclimate of clouds and rain inside. Generally, there is something strangely underwhelming about all but the most spectacular and visionary maquettes, architectural models or artist’s impressions. They are, by definition, not the finished articles. Models exist somewhere between drafts, sketches and by-thoughts on the way to a concrete reality, which is ironic, as often the best and most ambitious plans are most likely destined never to be built.

This hypothetical way of thinking also informs the work of a quietly insistent young British sculptor Ian Kiaer, whose new work goes on show in central London this week. Like Schütte, Kiaer specialises in proposals for the built environment, except his models admit their failure much more freely. First, their scale is all wrong – most of his objects are too small even to be considered architectural models. Then there’s his material – often salvaged from skips or found on his travels – which is dishevelled, beaten-up and distinctly knackered-looking.

Kiaer’s scavenging, what he calls ‘taking stuff off the street and giving it another life’, is evident in a crumpled piece of decorated card that stands in for a teeny tower block as well as in a number of recycling bags that he has cobbled together to make an inflatable cushion, which bobs up and down cheerfully in the gallery. Kiaer is obviously not one to play grown-up, because there’s even an abbreviated doll’s house in silvery card that has all the gluey fingermarks of an enthusiastic child modelmaker (all bar the eggboxes).

Rather than train sets, Kiaer’s background is in the theatre and as a painter. He says he figured out a way to ‘sidestep the anatomy of an object’ by making or gathering things that only ever reach an ‘intermediary stage between painting and sculpture.’ His works don’t make any strong claims to be either medium and are all the more interesting as a result. He describes his modular trash works almost in the negative, calling them ‘weightless, fragile, vulnerable’ but also ‘pathetic’.

While these travesties could very well comment on the throw-away culture that greets us on every junk-filled London street corner, Kiaer’s latest series refers specifically to Ulchiro, the rapidly changing market district of Seoul. First inspired to visit South Korea after seeing architect Rem Koolhaas’ mad-house installation ‘Cities on the Move’ at the Hayward in 1999, Kiaer met his wife there and has since been fascinated by the urban struggle of a capital ‘trying to find space’ in between row after row of identical skyscrapers. His miniature model of Ulchiro market has walls and windows made of individual frames cut from a manga comic book, suggesting, not only the multiple-occupancy, but also the chaotic noise of life in an Asian city.

While Kiaer’s aluminium hoarding teetering on the brink of collapse and his sorry pile of polystyrene struggle to compete aesthetically with Schütte’s slick, scaled-down hotel of the future, at least his makeshift models display honesty. They also recall a brilliant video of ‘Incidents’ by two Russian artists, Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky, in which bits of street detritus are blown around by a stiff wind (a better-known version is the dancing plastic bag scene in Sam Mendes’ film ‘American Beauty’). Kiaer shares this vision of an unseen world at our feet, but his model village has gone to seed. Sculpture need not have the inflated sense of grandeur that it gets from being elevated to a plinth or put out to weather the elements and mass public scrutiny. Here today, but what tomorrow?

‘Model for a Hotel’ by Thomas Schütte will be on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square for the next 18 months. Ian Kiaer shows at Alison Jacques from Nov 15-Dec 22.