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Kate Meng Brassel: What was the immediate context of your creation of 3 Men in 2007? |
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Ian Warren, 3 Men, 2007. Installation performance with table, latex, and air, 50 x 80 ft. Courtesy of the artist.
IDOL: An Interview with Ian Warren
Kate Meng Brassel: What was the immediate context of your creation of 3 Men in 2007?
Ian Warren: After finishing undergrad in Massachusetts, I spent a year moving all over the country: from NYC to Utah, California, and Mexico. Somehow I ended up settling in the unlikely state of Ohio. During that period, I made exclusively site-specific work. By “site,” I mean an individual landscape or space, including the people and culture that shape it—a notion of site fused with a sense of regionalism.
3 Men was a response to a retired chapel in Northeast Ohio that had been “secularized” and turned into a music venue. It was such a beautiful space. I originally thought the piece would hang from the ceiling. While having technical trouble, I stumbled upon the solution you see here, which ended up being so much stronger. I loved the idea of the two bodies supporting each other. And that’s what the performance was ultimately about: endurance and support. The characters stood there in silence, in a damp old stone church, straining, focused, and still.
Like many works I made in that period, it had almost no audience. The stakes were extremely low, as there was nobody to impress. I was thus able to run with an idea without fear that it might fail, so it became especially personal, intuitive, and cathartic. I also think the chapel and some of the other sites I used simply worked better when empty. The chapel was more uncanny and ominous— even frightening—when devoid of people. Like telling a story in the dark, it created more a sense of possibility, which was crucial.
Ian Warren, Hands, 2009. Number two pine, glue, and nails, 1 x 60 ft. Courtesy of the artist.
KMB: Do you feel that there is a kinship between 3 Men and your 2009 piece Hands?
IW: Definitely. I think both pieces examine a manifestation of the unknown, and each depicts a moment that is full of potential action. 3 Men and Hands each reveal an indeterminate narrative, an unfinished story that provides a space for the viewer’s own notions and ideas to complete it. Both pieces are physically precarious; each seems ready to topple over. Scale functions to this end, as does the visible struggle of the performers.
KMB: You have written that your work does not put “objects on pedestals.” This is striking, given your patent interests in patriarchy and theology. Would you tell us more?
IW: I actually meant that literally. It’s not enough for me to replicate the traditional viewing experience that has been around since the beginning of modernism. I’m interested in challenging the notions of viewership and spectatorship, in creating work that bounces between disciplines without settling into any individual one, and that doesn’t necessarily exist or get experienced in an “art” context. I like that there are moments in which the work is theatrical or filmic, or simply out of place, floating in environments in which they don’t belong.
But I think you are really asking about pedestals and power, ideas that I’m interested in and that I’m exploring even more explicitly in my new work.
KMB: What are you working on now?
IW: I just finished a series of videos, an accompanying sculpture, and live performance for Columbia’s First Year MFA show. The sculpture was a large, heavy wooden column, embedded with four video monitors, each depicting a bearded woodsman posing in the odalisque and uncomfortably returning the gaze of the viewer. The column would intermittently creep around the room, bumping into viewers. I was hidden inside the sculpture, pushing it blindly across the room, and one of the monitors was a closed circuit camera. It took time and investigation for the viewer to figure out that it was a live performance. Ultimately, cracks in the wood allowed viewers to see in and revealed the secret.
Through this work, I am investigating a rugged American individualism and a certain brand of masculinity. Not unlike in Hands and 3 Men, I’m interested in creating my own discontinuous mythology. I’m examining the roots that cultural tales have in our shared history, the role they play in determining our sense of self, and the power dynamics that they inform and that we so often take for granted.
