subscribeTim Hawkinson at Blum and Poe Gallery, Los Angeles, May 22-June 26, 2010
by Michelle Plochere
In contrast to the morbid formality and enforced quietude of the Blum and Poe gallery space, the cold, dead hand (culled from rotten apples and banana peels), that greets the visitor at the start of the Tim Hawkinson show, seems comparatively warm and welcoming as it emerges, zombie-style, from its hygienic white display column, more alive in its organic state of decomposition than anything else that is to follow. This literal reveal of the hand is a thematic precursor for the show, as it foregrounds the play between the animate and inanimate, motion and inertia, the useful and the useless, entropy and evolution, craft and junk.
In the next room, a sculpture of cardboard tubes, cylinders and wheels made from rolls of tape and other useful products, almost casually tossed in the corner, suggests not the dog of the title so much as a kinetic sculpture waiting to be spun and twirled – an improvisational toy harvested from trash cans in an alleyway. A large pen and ink drawing becomes a meditation on circular forms, suggesting an elaborate four-level freeway interchange to nowhere – a closed system in which the mark of the hand and the process itself are left visible through penciled outlines; it is decidedly imperfect in its ode to rationalist form – rationalist form in service of the irrational.
The hands appear again in a collage piece, as clasped fingers become the tread of a tire in Bike, and the body is re-made into machine, but again, the closed system, of possible/impossible motion, is represented – wheels will spin, but go nowhere. And another piece presents entwined fingers and toes —rough, frayed and imperfect yet insistent on their grooves and rivulets — echoing circularity turning inside itself.
But there are two major set pieces in the show, that, along with the opening hand (a proper pun), form a Gothic narrative for the 21st century that slowly unwinds itself through the gallery rooms as such aforementioned ancillary pieces build upon one another.
Orrery, taking its title from the word for a mechanical model of the solar system, utilizes the leitmotif of the spinning wheel and makes it literal, if not functional: an 8 foot tall crone sits at a wheel, her dress pattern kaleidoscopically rotates, the bun in her hair spins, her eyeballs turn in their sockets, and the mechanical movements are sticky and imprecise. Her skin is made of melted plastic grocery bags, that, in spite of the still-visible logos, coalesce into an eerily realistic color, and the entire cross breed of sculpture – construction – engineered attraction is made from what are, to all appearances, entirely recycled materials. And even as it is the detritus of consumer product that is put on display, it is process and craft that are revealed – much is left undone in this piece in which the works are exposed, even though a tautology of motion is the only thing being produced.
The denouement of the show, a bookend to Orrery, is Candle, an over-scaled mechanized candle of dripping foam, in which cascading material is taken in at the bottom, and returned through a pulley system. A door at the back shows us the mechanical contrivances inside, and the interior it exposes is shiny and gold, reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel’s oven/crematorium. The candle holds symbolic value, but its flame is inert and stagnant, in spite of its constant machine-driven flickering. In its perpetual, relentless “recycling,” it serves in memoriam to a wasteful and onanistic consumer-driven culture that is less dying than undead; the narrative is brought full circle and a hand again reaches up from its grave.
