Hawkinson: Artist as Center of the Universe
Barbara Rosenthal
To ourselves we are invisible. We have holes, lenses, where other people have faces, full bodies. With playful wit, Tim Hawkinson presents the possibilities of the world as an extension of his body and of his capabilities, particularly the manual and sound-producing. He manifests his body as multiferous artifacts, alternative extrusions of itself, a representative human.
Hawkinson creates individual constructions of body-forms and working machines at life- scale from found or readily available components. His vast range of materials includes altered inkjet print on plastic; foam core on panel, monitor, stepladder, mechanical components, print; photomontage; wood, fabric, string; photography, drawing, printmaking, painting; inflated latex casts; fingernail clippings; inflatable plastic tubes, ducts, hardware; a children’s school desk; Polyurethane foam, sonotubes, solenoids, found computer program, and mechanical components. His talking, writing, ranting, time-telling mechanical sculptures and installations, some like robots or automatons, make us think about what it means to be human, to be communicative, to make things, and by extension ourselves, useful. Hawkinson’s pieces are funky, as if assembled in a dotty uncle’s basement workshop, not in a cool, modernist fabricator’s plant, lovingly made personal explorations of personal inspirations about personal themes.
There is a guileless, wholesome honesty, an earnest innocence about this relentless body of work. Hawkinson follows every path, and deliberate, refreshing artlessness rings throughout. Most times Hawkinson’s byways lead to an elegant solution, such as in Untitled (Ear/Baby. At other times there is ersatz, such as Ranting Mop Head, or Signature (1993). Sometimes, however, the result is unaesthetic, gross, or clunky, such as in Pentecost, 1999, in which boxy tubular brownish figures are suspended from the ceiling, awkward distances apart. Then there is the ugly, as in Untitled, 2003, in which hands grow from widespread angular fingers. The range of dramatic solutions shows Hawkinson’s imagination playing out the permutations of his strikingly original ideas, relegating aesthetic considerations such as proportion, to a secondary issue, as if mannered to think about; clearly, range trumps esthetics, as in Dada.
As in all the best art, each work is total unto itself and advocates no cause, illustrates no ulterior view. Oversized for the Whitney itself, the exhibit is supplemented by the off-site installation of Tim Hawkinson’s sonorous construction, Überorga, in the Sculpture Garden, 590 Madison Avenue (between 56th and 57th Streets), concurrent with the exhibition. The show is a testament to the open thinking of exhibition curator Lawrence Rinder, Whitney adjunct curator and dean of graduate studies at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, where the show will travel June 26 – September 5. Born in San Francisco in 1960, Tim Hawkinson lives and works in Los Angeles.
