Notes Concerning the Spiritual in the Work of Tim Hawkinson
Erin M. Scime
Tim Hawkinson, Toothpaste Clock ? Secret Sync. 1996
From February 11 through May 29, 2005, the Whitney Museum of American Art will be showcasing the work of Los Angeles-based artist Tim Hawkinson in a mid-career retrospective. Arguably one of the most prolific working artists today, Hawkinson is best known for his whimsical sculptures made from everyday materials and found objects. The work in this retrospective includes several of these as well as many lesser-known paintings and drawings of the artist’s early career.
Although it may seem at first that the artist’s use of found objects is a direct replication of the ideas of Marcel Duchamp or even Jean Tinguely, Hawkinson’s work extends beyond this simple comparison, tackling major philosophical issues concerning measurement, time and the body’s relationship to each. Underlying Hawkinson’s curiosity in everyday materials, there lies a complex nostalgia for past modes of production. And at its core, the oeuvre questions a spirituality that is concerned with man’s relationship to his own constructed and quantified spaces of time.
Hawkinson liberates faith and spirituality from their intertwined relationship with spectacle culture. The viewer can expect to interpret the crude construction and hand-held quality of his artworks as an extension of oneself, dependent on the capabilities and limitations of a technology-based society. In other words, we are all connected within a given teleology of time. Hawkinson constructs clocks, calendars and biomorphic mechanisms that obsessively remind us of this fact. Within these objects, the artist questions the possibility of accessing a larger universal "truth" through the balance between nature, the organic body and society. It is assumed that if the truth of reality is revealed through a function of time, then perhaps one can find evidence of it within society’s objects and treasures. Secret Sync, a project carried out in two separate years (1996 and 2001), is perhaps Hawkinson’s clearest manifestation of this notion. Here, toy cars, calculators, envelopes, packing material and thermometers (among a variety of other objects) are made into obscure clocks and administered from a single power source in the ceiling.
Hawkinson has used the word ‘animism’ to describe this shared moment in time and experience in Secret Sync, hinting at a desire to bridge the collective event with a mystical nature that extends beyond the form of the commodity. Walter Benjamin’s version of this concept was "profane illumination"–for Benjamin, specifically with Surrealism, this was a phenomenon that occurs when everyday (industrially produced) objects are abnormally juxtaposed. However, unlike in the work of the Surrealists, the libidinal or erotic component is eliminated in Hawkinson’s use of everyday objects. This effect yields a mnemonic and nostalgic process of cataloguing and identification; when this process is incorporated into sculptures, the objects are no longer revered for their singularity or uniqueness, but are repeated forms–forcing the viewer to question the notion of shared experience, shared time and the relationships between parts of a larger (spiritual or historical) moment in time.
In this way, Hawkinson’s intent may be compared once more to Benjamin’s in his Theses on the Philosophy of History. Suspicious of automatic processes, Benjamin allegorized a robotic chess player to the "game" of History. This play between the mystical properties of historical progression seems a fitting comparison to Hawkinson’s view in that capital must be accounted in the scope of historical time. When asked about his thoughts on historical progression, Hawkinson insisted that the linear process of history (one that builds on itself) could be executed in "different" ways. If, he explained, human civilization originated at point A and reached point B in our understood conception of world history, then an alternate route from point A to point B-prime could have been reached if the layers of history were built on in a different manner. Wall Chart of Time From Beginning to Present (1997) most accurately and visually supports this claim with its sweeping arches, climaxes and chasms and imprinted detail.
Of course, the movements within Modernism are arguably faith-less, many having been rooted in Socialism during the late 19th century. Yet, Hawkinson’s interest in the spiritual is (with a few exceptions), something that is often ignored by Modernist aesthetics. However, I must stress that I am not suggesting that organized religion is the central reading of the spirituality in question. What I am suggesting is that Hawkinson’s work allows for us to consider his ideas as literally and metaphorically larger-than-life [read: not religious]. In his work, there is a candid interest in antique modes of quantifying time and ethereal space–from clocks to navigational or musical instruments to crude anthropomorphic speech mechanisms–and these interests converge in celebration of the "natural" movements and ebbs and flows of historical progression in order to probe the relationship between humanity, material culture and place in time.
This retrospective is organized by Whitney Adjunct Curator Lawrence Rinder and will continue onto the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from June 26-September 25, 2005. Images courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
