Body rhythms


The first time I saw and wrote about Tim Hawkinson’s work, I got him wrong. It wasn’t entirely my fault. The show I had seen—though it spanned a fair range of Hawkinson’s breathlessly inventive sculptural production—was installed in a tiny gallery. In that space the work seemed like a liter of juice poured into a thimble, and the gallery was far too small to accommodate any of his larger works. Plus, you had to read the artist’s notes to understand what was going on; I fell into the trap of taking a binary route to conceptualization. Hawkinson, I felt, was an identity artist gene-spliced with a process artist, making self-portraits in the most abstruse manner possible. That perception was reductive but not entirely unreasonable. What I didn’t realize is that I’d done the artworld equivalent of starting a metafictional novel—by, say Georges Perec—about three-quarters of the way in. The delicate build-up of ideas, the rich formal schema, and the whip-smart complexity of the oeuvre were necessarily lost on me. For the California-based Hawkinson is perhaps the most imaginative US artist working today…


The full text is published in "tema celeste" No. 84, March-April 2001.




Martin Herbert