When Marcel Duchamp shipped Constantin Brancusi's sculpture Bird in
Space to Edward Steichen in 1926, New York customs officials
refused to accept that it was a work of art, instead levying the
standard import tariff for a manufactured object. A legal battle
ensued, with the courts eventually declaring Bird in Space an
artwork and therefore exempt from the tariff. Seventy-eight years
later, visitors to Simon Starling's exhibition at New York's Casey
Kaplan Gallery were confronted with Staling's own Bird in Space
(2004): a two-ton slab of steel from Romania (Brancusi's country of
origin) leaning against the gallery wall and propped up on three
inflatable cushions. The United States had recently introduced a
new import tax of twenty per cent on foreign metals, which Starling
circumvented by labelling this unaltered chunk of European steel a
work of art. Its plinth of cushioned air not only introduced a
second, more representational valance to the work but also brought
to bear the traditional sculptural parameters of weight, gravity
and balance. Starling's art frequently traffics in deception. It
also traffics in traffic, meaning the circulation of goods,
knowledge and people (usually the artist himself). Many of his
works circle back on themselves, taking an idea on a journey that
ends at its point of origin. Wilhelm Noack oHG (2006), for example,
is an elaborate helical steel structure designed to loop a
thirty-five-millimetre film of the workshop in which it was
fabricated. The circuitous path that the film takes through the
towering metal structure is the perfect visual metaphor for the
work's own circular logic, a self-regulating system that adds up to
much more than the sum of its parts. Starling is a key figure in
one of contemporary art's most significant recent developments: the
linking of artistic practice and knowledge production. Although
this tendency flourished with Conceptual art in the 1960s and
1970s, in recent years it has taken on a new intensity. Unlike the
Conceptual artists, however, many of whom strove for a
language-based dematerialized art, for Starling the object is
always at the work's heart. Economies, ecologies, coincidences and
convergences are all simply means to an end - although 'simply' may
be the wrong word to describe the transformation of thousands of
miles of travel and hundreds of years of history into a single
sculpture, film or photograph. Starling's other predecessors are
the Land artists, such as Robert Smithson, with whom he shares a
fascination with entropy and other natural forces. But he is truly
an artist of the current age, setting out to understand and
illustrate the complex processes through which the natural and
human-made realms interact. The five platinum/palladium prints that
constitute One Ton (2005) show a single view of a South African
platinum mine. Together the five prints contain the precise amount
of platinum salts that can be derived from one ton of ore,
succinctly illustrating the enormous amount of energy required in
the extraction of precious metals. Born in England in 1967 and now
living in Denmark, Starling has been the subject of solo
exhibitions at museums around the world, including the Hiroshima
City Museum of Art (2011), Kunstmuseum Basel (2005) and the Museum
of Contemporary Art in Sydney (2002), and his work has been
featured in major international group shows, such as the Venice
Biennale (2009), the Moscow Biennial (2007) and the Sao Paulo
Biennial (2005). Awards include the Turner Prize (2005), the Blinky
Palermo Prize (1999) and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for
Artists (1999). In the Survey, Dieter Roelstraete presents a
comprehensive overview of Starling's work, examining circularity
and serendipity and the their relationship to historical research.
For the Interview, Francesco Manacorda and the artist discuss the
central role of time in his work. Janet Harbord's Focus scrutinizes
Wilhelm Noack oHG (2006) as an example of material cinema. Artist's
Choice is a extract from Flann O'Brien's 1996 novel The Third
Policeman, a fantastical conversation about bicycles swapping atoms
with their riders. Artists Writings include five project
statements, all of which consist, in varying proportions, of
history, science and speculative fiction.
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