A Last Gasp in New York

It feels good to be back home, Bush, after a long trip! This morning we were up early—-still on NY time!—-and took a long walk down to the beach and along the shore to the village for a cup of coffee and a bowl of porridge (that’s oatmeal, Bush: some English words I just can’t give up. Or choose not to). So we’ll soon be back to business as usual, you and I. But first, I need to wrap up our trip with three cheers for Tim Hawkinson. His show at the Whitney was the highlight of our art experiences there.

I think I mentioned his “Ueberorgan” on our brief stopover in New York on the way to Egypt: a vast work, too big for the museum, installed in the atrium of a mid-town high-rise, and a pun on the word “organ”, since it looked like nothing so much as a collection of giant innards which doubled as a weird and wonderful musical instrument operated by a jerry-rigged computer. Tim Hawkinson is an artist who is unafraid to explore the human condition, specifically the vulnerable body—-in most cases, his own—-that strange, physical equipment we’re given to walk around in, in the equally odd world of contemporary technology. In some of his pieces, he takes apart what he can see of his own body, or what he can’t see, and puts it back together in improbable assemblages of photographic detail. In others, he takes the detritus of the body-—hairs, fingernails—-and assembles them into tiny sculptures: the skeleton of a bird, a spider’s web.

Hawkinson’s machines, including the complex electronics that operate them, are all pirated and put together from superannuated and discarded parts. The essence of the machine in the normal world is the purpose for which it was created, but Hawkinson’s mechanical and electronic constructions have purposes so disproportionate to their complex structure that you stand agog, lost somewhere in between awe and hilarity. Thus, the long series of improvised cogs, from the tiniest, spinning wildly, connecting through gradually increasingly sizes to the largest, which purportedly will take nearly a century to make a single revolution. Or the musical timpany machine, where suspended male figures are animated in various parts of their anatomy (eyes, nose, ears… yes, Bush, even penis!) to tap on long tubes at irregular intervals, producing, each one, a different click or clack in a bizarre symphony of sound.

The show is hugely entertaining, certainly, but it has a serious side. One of the more interesting insights I picked up from teachers, along the way to a doctoral degree in literature, was the notion that the tragic vision is viable only in a world where the gods are seen to play a significant role in human destiny. In a world abadoned by the gods, the closest we can come to tragedy is not the social realism of a Tennessee Williams or a Eugene O’Neill, but the farce of a Pinter or a Ionesco. Hawkinson’s work looks at the predicament of being trapped in this curious, all-too-physical, human body in the context of the seemingly rational, post-enlightenment world of science and technology, and exposes the disconnect between desire and experience, the loftiness of our aspiration and the comic lowliness of our actual performance.

That’s, anyway, as I see it, Bush. But there’s really no need for such heavy analysis. The best thing is, just go there and enjoy it. I trust the serious part to speak to you without words.