Download PDF scan of original article

CABANNE: Andre Breton said that you were the most intelligent man of the twentieth century. To you, what is intelligence?

DUCHAMP: that’s exactly what I was going to ask you! The word “intelligence” is the most elastic one can invent. There is a logical or Cartesian form of intelligence, but I think Breton meant to say something else. He envisaged, from the Surrealist point of view, a freer form of the problem; for him, intelligence was in some way the penetration of what the average normal man finds incomprehensible or difficult to understand. There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary.

Breton and I are men of the same order—we share a community of vision, which is why I think I understand his idea of intelligence: enlarged, drawn out, extended, inflated if you wish…¹

Tim Hawkinson has one of those rare questioning minds that accepts nothing as given, takes nothing for granted, relies upon nothing ordinary. As much a scientist or engineer as an artist, Hawkinson gives us a close-hand view of the workings of the discovering intellect. Some who see the work will want to ask why it is considered art (to which we answer, “does it matter?”), but no one who spends time with it can help but be enchanted and amused by its sheer inventive genius.

Beyond the humor and the quirky charm, however, substantive questions are raised by the work. Some of these questions—about art as commodity, for example, and limited conceptions of “waste” and “usefulness,” which come to mind as we tour an exhibition made largely from scraps found in the alleys behind his downtown Los Angeles studio—are raised regularly by contemporary artists. Other concerns are more general: the sounds of thin robotic voices at one end of a gallery, set against the mechanical twangs of metal plucking metal at the other, prompt thoughts about technology as a social and political force, and about the sweeping technological changes we are living through.

These are absorbing and important issues, and no one has discovered a more direct and accessible visual language with which to ponder such questions than Hawkinson. On that basis alone, his art demands a major exhibition and catalogue.

But it is only the obvious part, the surface, of Hawkinson’s work that is direct and accessible, so refreshingly perceptive and generous, such a model of clarity and simplicity. There is another side, as beautiful and perplexing as a Zen koan.

For the work is also a conundrum, an unsolvable riddle about sculpture made of air and vacancies and voids; about tools built, not to assist work, but to reduce frenetic energy to torpidity; about the sounds of images; about reclaiming nature via mechanical means. This is the art of Tim Hawkinson that we are most proud to present for the first time in a museum context and that, we are convinced, will confound and fascinate the future.

ART AND INDUSTRY

Predictably, over the past several years artists have reacted against the perceived slickness of the neo-Pop eighties. One way this reaction has manifested itself is in a return to certain ideals of the art of some thirty years ago. Many artists today seek to recover the purity of conceptual and minimal approaches, but with the important difference that the new art is decidedly concrete: think of the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s notorious full-scale cast of a house slated for demolition.

Unquestionably, Tim Hawkinson’s work, too, responds to the history of art of the past three decades. Equally important, however, is its implied critique of the two key social structures it emulates: the worlds of art and of industry.²

In a cultural era defined by cynicism, Hawkinson makes works suffused with humanity and warmth. At a technological crossroads controlled by profit and automation, he introduces the cheap and home-made.

Consider Tuva, 1995 (P. 8, 53).³ Essentially a robot with a synthesized voice, the piece was made from found scraps of plastic and off-the-shelf fittings. No microchip or other hightech gizmo governs its operation—it is “programmed” with a simple set of three cams, driven by a motor at different speeds. (Other works rely on the nineteenth-century technology of the player piano.) Nor did the artist look up Voice Synthesis in a technical manual somewhere; as with all his work, the construction was puzzled out from scratch-reinvented, if you will, by Hawkinson. The title of the piece refers to the Asian nomads who have developed a method of singing several notes at once in an eerie chant—a sound much like that emitted by Hawkinson’s robot. The voice mechanism is a reed cut from a plastic soda bottle.

“I was really interested in the polyphonic vocal technique before Tuva,” Hawkinson says. “Tuva is an answer to my own frustrated attempts at polyphonic humming—a vicarious extension or complement to my shortcoming. Its strength lies in its attempt to mirror the complexity of the human voice.”⁴

Tuva may, at first, appear to be a creature a little too cutely reminiscent of C-3PO or another friendly Hollywood robot, but there are important differences. It is linked to another world culture (actual and endangered, not fantastic and immortal) and its workings are clearly visible and demystified. It is obviously not human, but it is just as obviously a human product, not a corporate one.

A commitment to transparency of means and, in Hawkinson’s words, “simple direct short cuts into complex technology”⁵ is apparent in all the mechanical works he exhibits. Extension cords lead quite obviously to the machines they feed, while pneumatic hoses and tubes explain certain works as much as they control them. There are no technical tricks in this work, no hidden levers or special effects. A machine is a machine in Hawkinson’s lexicon, even as it expresses and reflects the humanity of its maker and viewer.

SELF

Any number of essays and exhibitions have remarked on the attention given in recent art to “The Body.” Of course, the human body and its functions and excretions have frequently been an artistic source and subject at least since Surrealism. Many artists of the late 1960s and 1970s, including Vito Acconci, Judy Chicago, and Bruce Nauman, dwelled extensively on the topic.

But Hawkinson’s work, though full of corporeal images and references, is more about the self—his self-than about a generic physical body. In this, he is more aligned with Acconci than with, say, Nauman, whom he recognizes as an influence, or with his well-known contemporary Kiki Smith, to whom he has been compared. Acconci, it has been pointed out, “found a rationale for his activities that described a kind of dual persona.”⁶ His goal was to step outside himself, and to observe his own actions and reactions analytically.

Working in a more intuitive fashion, Hawkinson has, in a number of works (Self-Portrait [Height Determined by Body Weight], 1990 [P. 24]; Blindspots, 1991 [P. 26]; Alter, 1993 [P. 17]; Balloon Self-Portrait, 1993 [COVER]; Fin Within, 1995 [FIG. 1]; Hangmanofmycircumference, 1995 [P. 52]), literally constructed a duplicate physical self—”a self-portrait of his ‘unknown’ self,” in the words of one writer.⁷ Thus, he can examine aspects of his self from different perspectives than would ordinarily be possible. At the same time, he provides himself an option few of us ever have: to present alternative selves to the world, all “true” in some sense, all “accurate” in minute detail, yet distinctive and even, perhaps, contradictory.

Such works yield meanings beyond the nominal “this is a likeness of me.” The implications of a puffed-up Hawkinson model, or a lead-footed one, are perfectly clear. Hawkinson also constructs surrogate selves that are entirely metaphorical, without the allure and illusionism of the identical cast or trace. Signature, 1993 (P. 41), is an obvious example, with its image of a clumsy, imperfect egocentric. Penitent, 1994 (P. 44), a figure made of dog chews, whistles a dog-call, inviting its own destruction—the picture of expiatory self-abuse. (Or perhaps the title is misleading: the cheerfulness of the whistling also suggests blithe indulgence in something dangerous or unhealthy.)

In Pocket Self-Portrait, 1991 (P. 27), all semblance of the self has evaporated, leaving only copies of voids—once-empty spaces, now worthlessly full, where wealth and property might ideally have been found. My Favorite Things, 1993 (P. 37), an installation of “drawings” of musical albums from the artist’s collection, is both a direct recording of the artist’s visceral reactions to music and a self-consciously sentimental construction.

Hawkinson is one of those rare artists who can make art from a variety of materials, in a wide range of techniques, ignoring widely held aesthetic principles, yet create a body of work that is cohesive and intelligible as a whole. One of the ways in which such artists bring coherence to their work is by inventing new rules to replace the ones they break.

Odd consistencies show up in Hawkinson’s work, themes of a sort, though some are based upon subject matter (the alphabet [FIG. 6], self-portraits, ships, music, trees), others unconventional media (latex, bubble-wrap, plastic bottles, lace), still others on broad concepts (time, duplication, contour topography). The rules Hawkinson develops often have to do with repetition of, and variations on, these central themes.

The self-portrait again provides an example. For Hawkinson, self-portraiture is not a closed-ended exercise in self-absorption, a cliche’ of romantic angst, but a catalyst for speculation and an incentive for experiment. One series of works was created around Blindspots, a 1991 picture created from photographs of the parts of his body that he can not see. The resulting form—a pelt of the unknown self, hunted down and skinned—has been reinterpreted as (1) a lace collar, stretched across a wire framework; (2) a “lace drawing” scratched into an inked steel plate; (3) a relief map built out of Fome-Cor; and (4) an acrylic painting colored with a repentant repetition of the single phrase “Fat Head” (FIG. 2-4 AND P. 26, 38).

References to old sailing ships appear in works both early and recent. Hawkinson speculates, “Maybe the ship is this model of self-sufficiency, and I want my work to be this way—where I draw on whatever resources I have… But I don’t want to be a ship lost at sea, or stranded on a desert island.” Critical analysis, he says, and the artist’s effort to satisfy critical demands, “can be a desert island.”⁸ In Das Tannenboot, 1994 (FIG. 5), he creates an image of a ghost armada, hurtling through time and space; H.M.S.O., 1995 (P. 46), presents us with a perspective model: we occupy the center of a harbor full of tallmasted ships. Critical analysis may not produce precise meanings for such works, but they are not merely idiosyncratic, either. Just as he reinvents machines that will inscribe a signature or synthesize speech, Hawkinson has a rare ability to rediscover the fascinations and curiosity of childhood. The romance of the sailing ship and the allure of the well-crafted model still affects the child in him and in each of us, while the new context he creates for these images updates and refreshes, deepens and extends them.

CONNECTIONS AND CONGLOBATIONS, CHICKEN SKIN AND LATEX

A Tim Hawkinson exhibition is less a series of discrete encounters with individual concepts than an immersion into a cauldron of ideas—less like a narrative, more like life. Lines of energy—extension cords which themselves are woven into objects (Knot, 1991 [P. 34]; Shorts, 1993 [P. 4])—pass from object to object, suggesting the body’s nervous or circulatory systems. (In this context, the electric-cord macrame’ doilies and trousers become ganglia or tumors.⁹) Umbilical tubes and hoses issue from a giant belly-form (Reservoir, 1993 [P. 1]) to provide pneumatic nourishment to other works.

There is, in the gallery, a vague sense of the hospital, of life-support systems and prosthetics. “The medical references that a lot of people see in the work aren’t really intended,” Hawkinson says. “It’s really more about recreating a phenomenon-or becoming a phenomenon.” Perhaps a Frankensteinian project, then, to create life? An experiment gone awry? Has Hawkinson knowingly brought forth monsters? “It’s only a monster because we’re less familiar with it,” he says. “I guess the monster could become us all—seen from different angles.”

Automata of the eighteenth century are brought to mind, along with the nineteenth-century need to catalogue and collect, and the utterly late-twentieth-century prophylactic feel of latex, in the three-dimensional realization of a surreal dream where everything is familiar, yet somehow out of sequence, out of place, out of scale.

Scale is something Hawkinson knows about. There are works in this exhibition little bigger than seven inches around (Spoon Ball, 1991 [P. 28]), while Bagpipe, 1995 (P. 3), requires 1,600 cubic feet and is exhibited in Cincinnati in its own large gallery, two blocks from the Contemporary Arts Center. One work demands our detailed attention, the other can be seen from passing cars at a downtown intersection—a strong metaphor for the tension between art as contemplation and as spectacle.

Hawkinson’s frequent use of found materials is related, he has said, to his parents’ business as antique dealers. It is not simply the age of objects that attracts him, but sentiment: “I’m turned off by the preciousness and value attached to old artifacts,” he said in 1989. “I’m interested in tossed-off objects,” things that indicate “a show of concern, for example, on some anonymous person’s part, for the object, the way it was repaired or something.” The pathetic tone of much of his earliest work relied, to some degree, on the associations prompted by the found objects he used-old brackets and picture frames, a worn chair seat, a pair of canes. Today, he is likely to use more obviously worthless material, like plastic bottles and scraps of metal. Even in 1989, though, he could say, “I find a fragment of what I need and have to make up the rest. I often simulate the found object.”¹⁰

Many of Hawkinson’s early ideas are similarly recycled, recast as new works as time passes. Some of these updatings are obvious: Slug of 1992 (P. 32), for example, a kind of timepiece that works on 10,000-year intervals, was enlarged and modified in 1995 to become Spin Sink (P. 64). Some of the precedents for recent works are less apparent, though: it takes some effort to see the roots of 1993’s Balloon Self-Portrait in the eccentric Chicken (P. 18) of six years earlier. Yet the act of skinning a chicken, then building a wire superstructure in a gesture of re-creation and revitalization, suggests the idea that one might find a way to “skin” the human form as well. At the same time, it also hints at a motive for much of Tim Hawkinson’s work.

For time and the clock are constants in Hawkinson’s work, no less than his continuing interest in the self and the body. A 1988 work, Conception of Time (FIG. 8), disassembles the concept into a succession of hour hands around a central, egg-shaped form: time is not progressive, but elliptical, turning back upon itself in an unending cycle. Slug marks the passage of time in 10,000-year cycles; Steeple on Steeple (P. 15, 21), 1988, fills a room with the space of time by pointing to clock numerals widely spaced around the gallery. All these restructurings are the artist’s stand against time, a bold refusal to allow a mere intellectual construct to govern his mortality.

And a desire to restore the order of things, to repair the broken and complete the inadequate, runs through much of the work. There are conglobations (he has welded spoons together so that their bowls recover the shape of the full globe from which they take their form) and crystallizations (he has glued Dorito corn chips edge-to-edge to complete the logical polyhedron suggested by their triangular shape). All of these, his disassemblies and reconfigurations, his re-filling of the skins of things and his inventions of mechanical life, are nothing less than acts of reincarnation.

In a small loft on a busy street in an old industrial neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles, Tim Hawkinson is recovering his essence, his life. In the process, he is restoring to us our world.

1. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans Ron Padgett (New York: Viking Press, 1971), 16. ↩︎
2. “Emulates,” because the objects he makes, and his methods of producing them, really are outside predictable confines every artist today, of course, would like to make that claim—and, on the face of it, Hawkinson would seem an unlikely candidate for art scene outsider, with gallery representation on both coasts and enthusiastic reviews in major magazines and newspapers. Nevertheless, like his UCLA professors Paul McCarthy and Charles Ray, Hawkinson has managed to enter and leave the art market/media system at will, rather than succumb to it as for the world of industry, it would have no idea what to do with him. ↩︎
3. In the interest of avoiding repetition and of space, most of the works cited in this essay are not described in detail. With apologies to the reader for the added effort, he or she is referred to the catalogue illustrations and to the Artist’s Notes on the Works (P. 60-61). ↩︎
4. Letter to the author, 1 July 1996. ↩︎
5. Artist’s statement, exhibition at Ace Gallery New York, 16 September-31 October 1995. ↩︎
6. Ronald J. Onorato, Vito Acconci: Domestic Trappings (San Diego: La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, 1987), 10. In support of his interpretation, Onorato quotes Acconci: “Reasons to move: split myself in two (one part can act in relation to the tendencies of the other).” ↩︎
7. Michael Duncan, “Tim Hawkinson at Ace Contemporary Exhibitions.” Art Issues 29 (September-October 1993): 44. ↩︎
8. Unless otherwise noted, Hawkinson quotations are from an interview with the author, Los Angeles, 12 March 1996. ↩︎
9. In the margin of one draft of this essay, Hawkinson wrote: “Aneurism is good, too.” 1 July 1996. ↩︎
10. Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, “Timothy Hawkinson: Concrete Metaphors,” Art News 88, No. 10 (December 1989): 109-110. ↩︎