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Tim Hawkinson: The Mechanical/Scientific Approach to Hybrid Art
Contemporary art and culture is a hybrid of multiple styles, mediums, genres, and theories. The scientific and mechanical aspect of creating art must not be overlooked in the hybridity equation. Tim Hawkinson is the epitome of the hybrid artist: part painter, sculptor, scientist, tinkerer, engineer, and imagineer. His contraptions are awesome in nature for their sheer inventiveness, mechanical ingenuity, overwhelming workmanship, and synthesis of deep ideas and concepts. He manipulates readymade, everyday materials to function as thought-provoking gadgets. In Hawkinson’s work, the hybridity lies in his ability to create compatibility between physics and metaphysics.
“The desire to know what fills or animates the apparent cosmological void, and what, if anything, exists beyond life and after death have been the central questions of human existence for virtually all civilizations. Philosophy attempts to answer these questions through logic and speculation; science through experimentation and analysis; religion through contemplation and revelation. Hawkinson frequently conflates these three pursuits in his art, producing works that share their attributes in unseemly combination.” (Fox, 35).
Each type of hybrid art and culture examined this semester is unorthodox in nature—each breaks away from traditional art forms and make new ones. Hybrid art reinvents viewer paradigms and in doing so expands audience type. Pop art, street art, anime, photography, music, and film—we examine how each medium pushes the envelop with new methods, materials, and subject matter, resulting in new audience reaction, and ultimately, a certified legacy in our cultural history.
Biography
Tim Hawkinson was born in San Francisco, California in 1960 and currently resides in Altadena, California. He graduated from San Jose State University and earned his Masters of Fine Arts from University of California, Los Angeles in 1989.
Hawkinson’s work has been shown both across the United States and abroad: the Venice Biennale (1999), the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, (2000), the Power Plant in Toronto, Canada (2000), the Whitney Biennial (2002), the 2003 Corcoran Biennial in Washington, D.C., the Whitney Museum and Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2005, and the Getty Center in 2007. [1]
His Work
The Mechanical 'Wow'
Tim Hawkinson’s work achieves the WOW-factor that appeals to all the human senses. His work lures and engages viewers, and encourages them to look more closely at the objects.
First, viewers study the work to understand the mechanical nuances, which are tedious, arduous, minute, and fantastic. Audiences are captivated by the pure ingenuity and inventiveness of Hawkinson’s gadgets. Hawkinson gladly discusses the technique and origins of his works, but he refrains from interpreting them.
Secondly, once viewers understand the mechanics of the work, they find themselves digging deeper into the conceptual framework of the objects and the theoretical and emotional implications of the contraptions.
One prominent example of Hawkinson’s ability to create functioning machines out of every date materials is Signature.
Signature was Hawkinson’s first work to reflect artificial intelligence. It functions as a machine that endlessly and mechanically produces a facsimile of the artist’s signature, yielding a pile of papers on the floor with his scrawled insignia.
Not only is this a laudable mechanical achievement, because Hawkinson created a self-functioning machine, but it is also provocative in its theoretical inferences. What does a signature imply? In the pile of papers beneath the mechanical hand, these signatures are nothing more than ink scribbles on scratch pieces of paper. But, at the core of a signature, is an intimate human identity. A person’s signature represents significant emotional, intellectual, monetary value; it reflects an individual’s existence. Mechanically produced signatures are devoid of human presence, and therefore, the signature has no inherent value. The machine-generated scribble is endless, pointless, vain, lifeless; but ironically, the machine’s signature will outlast the lifetime of the human signature, which dies upon the individual’s death.
“The mechanical logic of Hawkinson’s works is always hobbled and inefficient, and the way they solve problems or fulfill tasks is forever on the verge of mechanical breakdown or dissolution. Only (our) faith and (Hawkinson’s) dogged maintenance keep them going. They are chronically on life support. And that is their reason for existence: to churn and drone endlessly, to toil chronically on the threshold of giving out, or giving in, or giving way, but to keep on giving nevertheless. Hawkinson attempts to achieve perpetual motion. His works push at being inextinguishable, immortal” (Fox, 39).
Tim Hawkinson employs great physicality in constructing his artwork. “He rarely outsources it to the army of professional fabricators and artists’ assistants that actually produce most of the work in this most industrial of cultural communities.” (Harvey, 54). It is his body, in fact, that not only exercises that actual work of his projects, but it is also his body that is the core concept—the soul—of much of his work. The human body is centrifugal to much of Hawkinson’s work, beginning with the appeal to the human senses.
Appeal to the Senses
Überorgan is not only a magnificent mechanical feat and enormous man-made contraption, but it truly appeals to the human senses. Überorgan is a monumental sculpture and fully functioning musical instrument. It consists of twelve giant polyethylene balloons, which are inflated and cinched with fishnet casing. Each balloon weighs nearly 75 pounds and is suspended in the air via a system of pulleys, ropes, and steel cables. One of the balloons in the installation (the number of balloons in an installation is dependent on the size of the space) is a “feeder” balloon and the others are “satellite” balloons. “The satellite balloons [are] connected to the feeder balloon by translucent tubing, and the feeder to the hidden air compressor, which inflates them with 1,500 cubic feet per minute of air pressure.” (Emerling). When all the balloons are positioned and connected in the air, horns made of cardboard tubing and aluminum foil are attached. Each horn represents a note of the chromatic scale. “These attach to the balloons via a reed assembly made up of polycarbonate sheets inside plastic cookie jars. Next the organ is attached to a homemade electronic console that reads a 250-foot-long hand-painted score of dots and dashes that passes over light-sensitive switches as it runs through a floor-to-ceiling system of rollers. The switches cue the opening and closing of a valve, allowing air to pass through the reed assembly and blow the horn” (Emerling). The horns bleat and moan is a slow, melodic fashion, compressed to fit into a single octave. However, if the viewer listens closely, the foghorn-like noises are actually recognizable melodies from hymns and pop classics. Hawkinson captivates his audience with his appeal to their curiosity and the marriage of audio and visual senses.
Listen to the Überorgan here: [2]
Another example of a work that merges the audio and visual senses is a series of 15 untitled record drawings, made in 1992-93. The drawings resemble 43 inch diameter vinyl records. Hawkinson chose random intervals of music from a variety of sources, carefully and systematically editing them to equal units of time. The, with his arms suspended and out-stretched, he played the musical intervals, all pieced together. As he listened, he simultaneously used his right hand to draw his impressions of the melodies and his left hand to record his responses to the rhythms. The discs on which he inscribed his interpretations of the music were covered in gesso and wax, thus creating physical and visual transcriptions of aural analogue recordings. Hawkinson used his body as a recording device, creating a tangible image from something fleeting and transparent. By decoding music and then re-encoding it visually, he created a new form of hybrid art.
Trompe D'Oeil
Hawkinson’s work is visually playful. The trompe d’oeil affect runs rampant in examples such as Feather, Bird, Egg, Bear, Octopus, and Root Ball, all of which trick the eye using unlikely materials to represent natural, realistic objects. The subtle illusions are an effective method for engaging viewers in the work and then gently probing them to connect the conceptual dots hidden behind the artistic and mechanical creativity
Recycling human materials, as in Feather, Bird, and Egg, imbues Hawkinson’s work with a biological presence. “Hawkinson reveals the degree to which the visual norms of the human form are the result of conventional ways of seeing” (Rinder, 19).
In Feather, Hawkinson uses his own neck hairs to meticulously and exactly replicate what appears to be a real bird’s feather; Bird is a minute skeleton composed of the artist’s own nail clippings, which in this context, give the appearance of bones; and Egg is a delicate mixture of his nails and hair, ground up to create the substance for what is mistaken as a paper thin eggshell. “Believable even at a close distance, these works reveal Hawkinson’s attention to detail as well as his obsession with life, death, and the passage of time” (Fantasy Art Now). [3] While these works are mystifying for their unusual materials and lifelike resemblance to their intended object, they also are self-reflexive. All are organic objects, but Hawkinson enhances this quality more so by re-creating them with new recyclable materials from his own biological self.
In works such as Bear, Octopus, and Root Ball, Hawkinson uses different materials to give the impression of another, entirely different substance. The 300 ton, 20 foot tall sculpture, Bear, for example, is composed of eight granite boulders, an ironic choice of materials for an object universally associated as soft and cuddly.
Hawkinson anthropomorphizes and reinvents the image of the Octopus by photocollaging his own lips, hands, and fingers to recreate the malleable figure of the octopus. By disembodying and mutating his own body in order to reinvent another, Hawkinson is a hybrid magician.
The knarled roots and many rings of Root Ball appear nothing short of real, aged, petrified tree bark. However, the clever use of cardboard, rope, and string achieve a haunting similarity to the organic matter of this tree stump. The trick of perception highlights Hawkinson’s inexhaustible imagination, and underscores the infinitesimal recreations of an object’s physical existence and visual reality.
Themes of Tim Hawkinson’s artwork
Tim Hawkinson’s wide array of materials and his scientific approach yield peculiar, idiosyncratic, and hybrid artforms. “Tim’s work is very sophisticated in its engagement with art history…the exploration of organic form spatial relationships, human anatomy and the natural world, as well as an interest in art and science—these are elements of Tim’s work” (Emerling). In addition to the experimentation of shape, composition, and texture Hawkinson’s work also represents significant conceptual investigation. For Hawkinson, “the mundane materials and images of everyday American life contain the seeds of disturbing reflections on consciousness and the nature of being” (Rinder, 15). His artwork teems with themes of the metaphysical: both corporeal and spiritual in nature. Physically, he uses his own body to reshape the genre of self-portraiture and to examine the visual expression of emotions and aura. Spiritually, Hawkinson alludes to Biblical stories but maintains a secular approach to his work; he does not impose religion on his viewers. Lastly, the theme of time is of central importance to Hawkinson. He creates clocks in order to translate the ephemeral nature of time into something tangible and visible. Through each of these three themes, Hawkinson challenges and reshapes viewers’ interpretations of reality and the integrity of forms.
Corporeality and Self-Portraiture
Hawkinson’s work is visceral. The human body, specifically, Hawkinson’s own body, recurs in various shapes and mediums. He examines self-portraiture by re-imagining images of himself through complicated sculptural systems but with unassumingly simple materials.
“There are certain recurring interests in my work and ways of looking at things, maybe having to do with the way I get ideas and the way ideas are formed ... really obvious categories. The first thing that I think of is the human form and using my own body as the reference point, ways of depicting and referring to that, and 're-looking' at that through different eyes” (High Beam Research). [4]
The human body provides the foundation on which Hawkinson speaks to the ideas of life and death. While a human has a limited lifespan, battery-powered devices can live on forever. Reinterpreting himself with different forms of technological and different artistic mediums, Hawkinson recreates his legacy and infinitely extends his aura of physical being.
- Emoter (2002)
Emoter, for example, is “a poster-size photograph of his face overlaid with cutouts of his eyes, ears, mouth and nostrils. They all move, though not in sync, changing the overall facial expression to somewhat skewed looks of horror, happiness, fear and anger” (Freudenheim). Hawkinson relinquishes his self control to a motorized machine, whose random electronic signals determine his facial expressions. Who is actually in control of one’s own body? Our emotions and reactions are dependent on external factors: on the environment and other people who influence our activities and experiences. Placing control of his visual expressions in the operations of a machine simplifies his environment. External influences no longer have control over Hawkinson’s face. On the contrary, his random expressions now alter and shape his viewers’ reactions when they look at Emoter. Is Hawkinson commenting on the human dependency of machines and technology? Is our culture so engrained in this mentality that we allow our emotions to be shaped by the mechanized face of Tim Hawkinson?
- Balloon Self-Portrait (1993)
Hawkinson re-encoded the idea of a self-portrait in his piece, Balloon Self-Portrait. By covering his body in latex, he created a malleable cast of himself. Then, he attached it to an air compressor to inflate the latex balloon. Floating weightlessly above the viewer, this impression of Hawkinson is very different than that of Emoter. While Emoter captured and redefined Hawkinson’s facial expressions, giving his self-portrait a life of its own, Balloon is empty, lifeless, and static but for the constant flow of air pumping into it. It is devoid of soul and spirit despite the exactitude of its human resemblance.
Benjamin
How does Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura and originality play out in Hawkinson’s work? For Benjamin, technical reproduction does not preserve authority. As a result, the aura of the original object withers as it is further removed from its natural existence. Contemporary artistic perception evolves with changing mediums. Both of these evolutionary processes diminish a work’s originality.
From Benjamin’s paradigm, Hawkinson’s reinterpretation of his own body is a corporeal decay of aura. In both Emoter and Balloon Self-Portrait, Hawkinson’s body is recognizable in human form, but its life is purely mechanical in nature. Emoter is imbibed with an electronic flow of blood through veins of wires and sensors. And Balloon Self-Portrait has respiratory ability, but only via its air compressor. Both pieces are mechanically alive, but biologically lifeless and emotionally empty. Emoter is based around the facial emotions and expressions on Hawksinson’s face, but none are genuine; they are all randomly programmed and emitted through technology.
Spirituality and Christianity
Themes of Christianity are abundant in Hawkinson’s work: allusions to cruciforms, auras, Biblical stories, hymns, and intimations of transubstantiation. Despite the Christian references, Hawkinson’s artwork is not religious; it embodies a secular spirituality. His work speaks to the contemplations of time and eternity and to the metaphysical.
Pentecost (1992) consists of 12 life-size cardboard humanoids modeled after Hawkinson’s own physical dimensions. Each figure is contorted in a different position on branches of a large tree made of cardboard tubes. At the end of each branch there is a drum head, and the figures are mechanically programmed to tap against each respective drum using a different body part. The result is a continuous activity—of physical motion and rhythmic noise.
The Biblical story of Pentecost refers to when the Holy Spirit bestowed the gift of language upon all twelve apostles, so that they understood each other in their different tongues. The direct Biblical allusion is appropriate for this mechanized tree of life, where twelve human figures communicate with each other via a rhythmic code of beats. The rhythms are derived from Christmas carols, but they are more difficult to recognize in this re-encoded musical context.
The theme of communication is centrifugal to the intertextuality of Hawkinson’s work. Through Pentecost’s nonverbal, mechanically programmed language, viewers are struck by the sometimes robotic nature of human interaction and understanding of one another. “Within his oeuvre, Pentecost distills all of Hawkinson’s modes, methods, and meanings into a potent, pulsating, stupefying ecstasy. As with all of Hawkinson’s art, it is speaking of transcendent knowledge, through the body, in strange tongues.” (Fox, 39).
- Pentecost (1999)
The Essence of Time
Hawkinson expresses the duration and passage of time in divisible, measurable units; his inventive clocks are visual representations of intangible, immaterial essence of time. True to his resourceful nature and use of readymade materials, Hawkinson plays magician by creating functioning clocks out of objects such as a tube of toothpaste, a can of Coca Cola, a measuring tape, a plastic bag of packing peanuts, a manila envelope, and a hairbrush. Each work is cleverly mechanized to the hour. For example, on the tube of toothpaste, the paste extrusion shows the minutes and the open cap shows the hours; the pull tab on the Coke can counts the minute and the sipping hope counts the hour. The measuring tape, itself a device of numbers and divisions, is looped and motorized so that twelve of its inches move through the twist tie twice daily; the two ends of the twist tie on the packing peanuts mimic the hands of a clock; the metal clasps of the envelope do the same; and two barely visible hairs attached to the hairbrush rotate, the first once an hour, and the second twice a day (Rinder, 193).
The ephemeral nature of time gains permanent sustenance in Hawkinson’s clocks. He reinterprets the function of everyday objects, altering their original purpose. Would Benjamin laud the renewed aura Hawkinson instills in his clocks? Or is the re-contextualization a threat to his coveted concept of originality?
Codes may assume or rely upon certain socio-economic understanding. Clocks serve a very pragmatic purpose that crosses all boundaries of culture. Everyone can appreciate Hawkinson’s clocks to some degree: for their mechanical ingenuity or for the deeper, encoded meanings about time and existence.
Perhaps Baudrillard’s idea of the hyperreal is hidden in the layers of Hawksinson’s meticulous inventions. Clocks are not representations of time; they merely function to record time. Clocks are signs, simulacrum of time. Humans have an external relationship with clocks, because they rely on them to maintain the patterns and schedules of their lives. The purpose of a clock is not to make humans rethink their reality, but to preserve it. Yet, Hawkinson’s clocks push these conceptual boundaries: with his own hands he alters the purpose of household objects, elevating them to powerful, life-controlling machines.
- Clocks
- Spin Sink (1 Rev./100 Years) (1960-)
One of Hawkinson’s clocks is particularly impressive in form and function. Spin Sink (1 Rev./100 Years) is a 24-foot long sequence of interlocking gears and discs which ascend in size from a half inch in diameter to six feet in diameter. Each disc is made of insulation board, plywood, metal, and gear teeth of corduroy fabric. Spin Sink is a clock that counts to one hundred years. Powered by a remarkably small toy motor, the different sized gears revolve at various speeds according to their respective sizes. The smallest gear, for example, spins 1,400 times per minute. The largest gear makes one full rotation once a century.
Hawkinson reexamines the function of a clock in Spin Sink. “The notion that all time, whether measured fast or slow, exists on a single continuum is expressed by the mechanical interdependence of the series of gears” (Rinder, 26). Rather than counting forward infinitely, Spin Sink is made to track a specific—and impressive—unit of time. The frantic speed at which the tiniest gear rotates reflects the hectic pace of life to which so many Americans are victims. The largest gear, which makes one revolution per century symbolizes the passage of time as a long history: a history that is established from all the other 23 gears that precede it. Spin Sink encapsulates both the big picture of life and the small moments of real-time.
Conclusion
Is science and mechanical engineering considered art? There are certainly elements of chemistry involved in the mixing of paints or the firing of ceramic glazes. So, why can’t other branches of science also morph into artistic endeavors? Does the context of a gallery or museum qualify Tim Hawkinson’s work as art? Would its definition and application change with its environment?
Tim Hawkinsons marries physics and metaphysics in his visually captivating and mechanically awe-inspiring objects. His no-brow work epitomizes the collapse of high-brow and low-brow into each other. It is unpretentious in nature and design, but it holds its own in the company of elite contemporary works. “Tim’s work is very sophisticated in its engagement with art history…the exploration of organic form, spatial relationships, human anatomy and the natural world, as well as an interest in art and science” (Emerling). Hawkinson re-defines, re-contextualizes, and re-encodes everyday objects, and thus explores the themes of the human body, religion, and time. Similar to the way music, street art, and body art are hybrids of many preceding artistic styles, Hawkinson’s inventions and interpretations build upon past techniques and genres from all of art history.
The sheer physicality of the construction process and the enormous sculptural nature of some of Hawkinson’s works, such as Überorgan, Pentecost and Spin Sink are laudable feats of engineering. Likewise, he employs the same labor-intensive strategy to create works of miniature scale and delicate structure, such as his clocks, Feather, Bird, and Egg. In the smaller works, the artist’s hand is undetectable, creating the trompe d’oeil effect. Conversely, in the large works, Hawkinson does not attempt to cover up his layers of handicraft. In fact, he deliberately avoids perfection in many of his large scale finished products. During the installation of Überorgan at the Getty, “one of the preps said, ‘You better take that piece of tape off that’s stuck to the netting.’ [Hawkinson] said, ‘What are you talking about? We’re going to leave the tape on.’ The balloons pick up these little attachments, dust has crept into the seams. It has gathered this nice patina that plays well off the beautiful pristine building.” (Emerling). Exposed cords, collected dust, and remaining bits of tape all help tell the story of creation and evolution of Hawkinson’s works, thus highlighting and elevating simple objects as parts of an esteemed whole. Hawkinson’s art may not be sexy and sleek, but its rough, industrial, homemade appearance makes it non-threatening for viewers of all age, culture, and level of art knowledge.
Each form of art studied this semester exemplifies the intertextuality and hybridity of cultural expression. Tim Hawkinson’s use of science perpetuates the dialogue about the rise, the fall, and the rebirth of various art forms. This very class, CCTP 725, is itself a hybrid form of education, merging the concepts and styles of a seminar class with the technology-based Metapedia. Students bring new ideas and examples to the table each week, expanding the breadth and depth of the paradigms through which we understand art. The ebb and flow of discussion establishes an original aura to the class atmosphere each time. The renewal of scholarly concepts helps construct and reconstruct the grammar of cultural meaning, just as Hawkinson molds, attaches, drills, tapes, fuses, and plugs intellectualism into his primitive, commonplace art objects.
Works Cited
“Artists Speak: Tim Hawkinson.” High Beam Research. 01 February 2004 School Arts 08 December 2008 <http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-112985854.html>.
Emerling, Susan. “Artist Tim Hawkinson floats an idea at Getty.” The Los Angeles Times. 3 March 2007: E1.
Fox, Howard N. “Speaking in Tongues: The Art of Tim Hawkinson.” Tim Hawkinson. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2005.
Freudenheim, Susan. “A Mop that Talks and Other Creative Liberties.” The New York Times. 13 February 2005.
Harvey, Doug. “Tim Hawkinson: Gargantua.” Art Review. 10 (2007): 54-61.
Kimmelman, Michael. “Wonderment and Wackiness with Gravitas.” The New York Times. 11 February 2005.
Knight, Christopher. “ART REVIEW; Pumping in some new life; There's fresh art on the travertine of the Getty, that repository of history. Call it a few baby steps toward being contemporary.” The Los Angeles Times. 25 March 2007: F1.
Rinder, Lawrence. “My Favorite Things.” Tim Hawkinson. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2005.
Schwendener, Martha. “Art in Review; Tim Hawkinson.” The New York Times. 25 May 2007.
Sheets, Hilarie M. “Mops, Drops, and Jumbo Baby Ears.” ARTnews. 104.2 (2005): 126-9.
Smith, Richard. “Tim Hawkinson at Ace Gallery.” Artweek. 29 (1998): 29-30.
“Tim Hawkinson: Biography.” Art:21. 13 November 2008 <http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/hawkinson/index.html>.
“Tim Hawkinson: Biography.” Fantasy Art Now. 20 November 2008. <http://www.fantasyarts.net/hawkinson_bio.html>.
