7/29/2019 Mark Godfrey Simon Starlings Regenerated Sculpture

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Simon Starling's Regenerated Sculpture

Mark Godfrey

In the late 1960s and 1970s, a number of artists abandoned the practice ofobject-making whilst rethinking the possibilities of sculptural productionDouglas Huebler indicated that sculptural concerns could be addressed bytaking photographs documenting spatial situations; Lawrence Weiner showedthat material transformations could be replaced by linguistic propositions;

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7/29/2019 Mark Godfrey Simon Starlings Regenerated Sculpture

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Simon Starling's practice is an extremely compell ing response both torecent sculptural history and to this situation of contemporary object andmaterial relatIons. His activities emerged in the mid-1990s, and now includenumerous projects realized In museums and galleries from Sydney to SaoPaolo However, Instead of tracing a chronological line of development, Iwant to locate a number of recurrent tendencies or components in Starling'spract ice As this text marks the occasion of his exhibition at The Power Plant,and the premiere of a new work Infestation PIece (MusseJ/ed Moore), I willstart with this project to glean from it five associated aspects of his workFirst, we can see that Starling often makes work by confronting another workof art, architecture, or design, usually dating from and associated with themodernist movement. A sculptural idea associated with a later period, typicallythat of the 1960s and 1970s, IS then deployed In this case, the historicalwork is Henry Moore's 1953- 4 bronze sculpture Warrior with Shield, an objectwhich Starling re - interpreted In steel, and the sculptural idea IS associatedwith Marcel Broodthaers, wh o used mussels in his 1960s sculptures in partbecause they were a cliched symbol of Belgian national identity If Broodthaersquestioned outmoded concepts of national art styles by using such overdetermined materials as mussel shells, Starling overturns similarly traditIOnalideas by implicating Henry Moore in global narratives rather than in historiesof Britishness in art By submerging his replica in Lake OntariO, Starlingalso suggests Robert Smithson who allowed Spiral Jetty to be covered bythe rising lake in Utah

Second, looking at this new project, we understand qUickly why any givenwork by Starling must be considered as an ongoing process rather thanSimply a finished object This paint is easily grasped if we compare a 'Moore'with a 'Starling' A work of art by Henry Moore is usually understood tobe a completed metal sculpture A work of art by Starling, though presentedin an art gallery, includes research carried ou t prior to any Involvement withmaterials; the transportation of materials from one place to another, often(as here). the creation of a replica; a period when objects and materials aresubjected to some active transformation (in this case, the time underwaterduring which the Moore replica became covered in zebra mussels); and thesubsequent display and documentation of the resulting object(s).

Third, the new project exemplifies Starling's tendency to conceive worksin response to the first context 111 which they are to be shown Here, Starling'swork developed from research Into tw o completely unrelated stories, bothconnected to the city in which The Power Plant is located The first was thatin the 1950s and 1960s, vanous businesses and civic authorities aroundToronto invited Henry Moore to place multiple sculptures In the city Thesecond is the more recent phenomenon of zebra mussel infestation in theGreat Lakes These creatures were accidentally introduced Into the lakes'ecosystem by cargo ships arriving from the Black Sea Starling studied these

Simo n Sl.lrhng 's Rege nerated Sculpt ure Milrk Godlr .y

lWO local tales of invasion-one cultural, the other ecological - to conjurethe ideas for his work

The fourth aspect of Starling's practice apparent in the new project is anattempt to address both historical and contemporary political, economic andenvironmental crises through sculptural production Here, Starling is concernedwith an environmental phenomenon (the invasive spread of zebra mussels)resulting from the globalized shipping Industry-an occurrence that while localto Toronto, also chimes with other situations across the world Starling tendsnot to address such crises as singular subjects, but. in his words, 'conflates' or'collapses' narratives from two divergent fields of interest to produce his work(here, art history and environmental history collide)

The fifth and final aspect of Starling's practice that can be evidenced in theToronto project is ItS absurdist streak In this case, we are confronted withthe extraordinarily peculiar fact that a pristine sculpture (a lbeit, a replica) hasbeen intentionally dropped into a lake and allowed to be smothered by shellfish.This is all the more absurd when one considers the differing fates of Starling'sreplica and that of the typical Henry Moore original The Moore will be takencare of as it changes sJowly over time, oxidizing and acquiring a patina, ina gradual transformation that is understood to enhance the work's beauty Bycontrast Starling's object seems to be doubly abused: first by being drowned,and subsequently colonized by molluscs

All five features of Starling's practice could be located in any of his recentworks To illustrate each aspect more fully, I want to look briefly at five differentprojects included in The Power Plant exhibition, each time focLising on oneof the five components Bird in Space, 2004 (2004) provides one of the clearestexamples of the way in which Starling engages art historical research. In thiscase, he looked back to the history of Constantin Brancusi's 1926 Bird inSpace When this classic modernist sculpture was first shipped to the UnitedStates, having been purchased by Edward Steichen, customs officials failedto recognize the object as art, and treating it as a lump of metal, attemptedto levy the statutory import tax on the material This led to a court case whichestablished that the metal was to be treated as an art work, exempting Steichenfrom the charge Starling linked the historical American policy on metalimportation to that of 2004 when in the wake of 9/11, George Bush introduceda measure to protect the Amencan steel industry by charging a lax onimported steel - a tax since deemed to be illegal Cognizant of these conditionsand glancing eastward to the country of Brancusi's birth, Starling shippeda slab of Romanian steel to New York, and produced a sculpture in which thisweighty sheet was propped against a wall, held aloft on inflatable jacksattached to a pressurized helium cylinder Though the key visual reference herewas to works by Richard Serra, there was a morphological affinity betweenBrancusi's sculpture and Starling's since both were made of forms held up inthe air. However, Starling made sure that his solution to the problem of floating

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7/29/2019 Mark Godfrey Simon Starlings Regenerated Sculpture

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a chunk of metal in space would be every bit as clunky as Brancusi's was ele gant The visual contrast served to underline the fact that Starling's intention inmining ar t history had nothing to do with an attempt to borrow a coveted formRather, Starling wanted to make use of the 1926 story in order to provide a lensthrough which to look at the economic policies of the Bush administration

A clear indication of Starling's approach to process is provided by Autoxy-loPVrocVc!oboros (2006). The preparation for the work was a characteristiccombination of art historical and politic81 research . Starling looked at Bas JanAder's Fall films and his fateful Atlantic crossing, and visited the Faslaneand Coulport naval bases In Scotland-home to Britain's nuclear submarines,and the nearby peace camp. Reflecting on this research, and perhaps dream ingof the possibility of Unilateral nuclear disarmament, Starling made a voyageinto Loch Long on a smal l boat The boat's engine was fuelled by a stove fedby slices of wood that Starling hacked off the boat"s bows as it chuggedthrough the water Eventually the boat consumed itself and sank In the firstgallery presentation of the project, Starling displayed a slide show of thirty -sixcolour photographs taken on board and from the shore But the work as a wholecomprises more than these Images and should be considered as a processwhich includes the voyage, the slow destruction and eventua l disappearanceof the vesse l. and the method of the project's presentation In an associatedphotographic edition, Starling produced prints of the boat, bu t burnt approximately half of each print away. By part-destroYing each photograph in thisway, and subjecting each one to the same process of destruction characterizingthe rest of the project, Starling insured that the edition did no t merely serveas a document or souvenir. but continued the logic of the work as a whole.

Just as B;rd;n Space, 2004 was conceived for its premiere at Casey KaplanGallery in New York, and Autoxvlopvrocvc!oboros drew from Starling's stay atCove Park in Scotland, BV Night .. (2005) developed as a response to the geo graphic contingencies of the venue in which It was first shown: the Museumfur Gegenwartskunst in Basel Starling wanted to produce a work which lookedat the relations between Switzerland and its various neighbours, and found outthat the Swiss had developed a cunning means of prOfiting from their country'stopography To quote from Starling's elongated title: 'By night the SWISS buycheap-rate electriCity from their neighbours which they use to pump water intoholding reservoirs_ By day they use the stored water to generate hydroelectricpower which they then sell back to their neighbours at peak-rate prices ' Toreflect on the situation described in this title, Starling looked back to a series ofphotographs made by Christopher Wi lliams in 1993 showing views aroundthe Grande Dixence dam in Switzerland, a structure which Williams had beendrawn to because it was the subject of Jean-Luc Godard's first film. Williams'sseries comprised seven images and was produced in an edition of ten. Starlinglocated three art institutions in the countries nearby Switzerland that ownedthe series, and travelled to each to photograph Williams's works in the storage

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racks He then produced a series of platinum prints that, via Williams's previousphotographs, provided an image of the kind of structure used by the Swissto harness water and therefore to maximize the potential to create and sellelectricity By shOWing Williams's photographs in their frames as objects hungon storage racks (rather than by simply re-photographing them In theirentirety or taking detail shots), Starling emphasized their Identity as editionedcommodities and as a consequence suggested a parallel between economiesof electricity trading and art trading Just as the Swiss economy is builton the kind of strategy that his title described, so it is strengthened by the artmarket (part based in Basel), by fairs and galleries through which Williams'sphotographs might have been sold to the institutions where Starling foundthem Supposing this. Starling's work also illustrated the axiom that the Swissbuy cultural products from their neighbours and sell them back to thosecountries at inflated rates

The fourth aspect of Starling's practice described is the artist's tendencyto address histOrical and current politiCS and crises through conflating variouskinds of information and archival matenal A recent project, Los Angeles,3rd-5th March 796911 To ;ndeflnde expansion can be taken as an attempt toref lect, albeit indirectly, on questions about the mediation of current eventsprevalent both in the 19605 and at the present moment. Starling's startingpoint was the presumed introspective nature of Robert Barry's Inert Gas Seriesof 1969, works which Involved the release- in areas around Los Angeles-ofvarious quantities of inert gases. Made at a time of incredible political turmoilin the United States, these works could be considered introspective because itseemed that Barry was primarily addreSSing art-world politics (for instance,making a kind of sculpture wh ich could not be brought into a gallery) However,Barry's works also provoked thoughts and questions about mediation andtrust Since the photographs accompanYing each short text showed an emptyspace (rather than documenting Barry releasing the gas), there was no wayto know if the actions had in fact been executed: viewers had to decide whetherto consider the images as records of events, or fictional Barry - so Star linginferred - was reflecting on the way in which news media altered the perception of ongoing events In order to acknowledge this previously unrecognizedpo litical facet of Barry's work, Starling collected a series of archival imagespubl ished in newspapers in Los Angeles on the same dates as Barry's releasesThe images were then subjected to the same processes of expansion asthe gases - each was blown up until the photographs became unrecogn izableThese magnified Images were then installed covering entire walls Starlingunderlined the connection between Barry's project and the mediascape of theVietnam era At the same time, his work prompts consideration of our ownrelationship to images at a moment when our knowledge of wars is inescapably filtered lhrough commercial news networks and to recall the setting ofthe project, Hollywood films

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