Information about Tim Hawkinson's work can be found here.

Why does Tim Hawkinson like to play with himself so much? Why does he goof around with his own body, measuring it and categorizing it? Why does he make such beautiful little things with the detritus that falls from it? Why does he make such charming and amusing things at all?

The fact that Tim Hawkinson's work is so damn pleasing is bound to annoy a certain kind of person right off the bat. The caricature of such a person is easy to draw. For them, something worthwhile is something difficult, even something unpleasant. Truth, on this reading, is hard and crystalline like Parmenides' big, well rounded, metaphysical ball. It is not a ball you take to the beach. It is a ball that you hold up to the sick joke of the actual world and find that world wanting. It is a ball that you look to as a guide through all that is fallen. Plato called this bunch of ball lookers the Friends of the Forms. They knew where truth was, and it weren't in no damn crickedy mechanisms or goofy honking machines with flong bompers. (One could imagine Dr. Seuss giving Hawkinson's work some of its titles).

Hawkinson makes big billowing swagamuds and they wizzle and cahumpher. He tingles with little lingpingers that citchel and citchel until they've completed a full cycle. That's to say, he's interested in the way things work. He is at home with mechanical things. He treats them as human. He is an anti-Ludite. He isn't interested in protecting the human from the machine, he is interested in the ways that humanness and machineness overlap and intersect and make other interesting things.

Since the advent of scientific method, the way that measuring affects, transforms, and determines the world has been an object of scrutiny and reflection. And it has often been a worry. Hawkinson's attempts to measure and record various dimensions of his own body are best understood in this light. But as in the mood of the rest of his work, Hawkinson treats the tools of measurement as an opportunity for art less than as another example of man's fallen condition. The potentially alienating and objectifying aspects of the act of measuring aren't ignored by Hawkinson, they're appropriated as tools. That is what is most intriguing about Hawkinson. He has a sense of humor and a sense of the absurdity of the human condition after so many technological revolutions, but he isn't cowed by it. He takes it and moves forward again. He treats the world as if human beings are constantly able to habituate themselves and move on. Criticism is over (the most recent version of it at least) and Tim's OK with that. He is proof of the continuation of things.

Once asked about his Uberorgan (a giant installation of pipe organs created out of huge balloons) he said, "It makes a pleasing loudness that I can feel in my gut." Don't give the bastards a foothold Tim, don't ever.
- posted by morgan @ 9:46 AM