Tim Hawkinson: Impressive, but I’m not satisfied.
Abraham Lubelski
Museum curators and artists should know better. The Tim Hawkinson show, currently at the Whitney Museum of American Art, entertains?but that’s not enough. Yes,the exhibit is playful, even a behind the Disneyfied venier. It provides a clever lens through which we view ourselves and the world around us. It is a beautiful installation full of cotton candy and puff and magic. At least while the mystery remains.
The Tim Hawkinson?s mid-career show and the accompanying catalog are a display of whimsical thought, burlesque and macabre. They are a meditation on meandering through the universe. Yet, something is missing. A show that would seem to perfectly illustrate a cosmic view of who or what we are, Hawkinson?s search fails to make us more aware of the exploration of the self because it simply overcrowds. I can’t help feeling disappointed. The show feels more like a twilight zone or, for a more recent reference, a journey on the Enterprise in Star Treck.
Don?t get me wrong. It’s clever. But first and foremost it’s clever entertainment. Everyone is trying hard to find a way to fill the comic void (one that is sometimes bigger than a football field?which Hawkison takes on literally). There is the lonely planet syndrome that we are all too eager to embrace. Hawkinson does play between the macrocosm and the microcosm as a wonderful and entertaining circus promoter/producer. Some of the works even remind me of a contemporary, electronically and technologically enhanced version of Calder’s circus. Others are reminiscent of the feeling of walking like a giant among the alleys of Red Grooms’ Models of New York.
Indeed, it is hard to speak "badly" of anything that is so full of fun-loving, of the sense of detail, of humor and irony, of the mysterious and the profoundly personal. And yet, that’s precisely the point. Something is missing. In the end, the artist still serves as the creator and guide, the museum as collaborator. And neither are at all helpful. I leave the show restless, disturbed and bewildered by the magic of it all and can only think of Hawkinson as a byproduct of cultural spectacle, a player of games in which I am neither implicated nor engaged.
