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 São 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.
