Art Review: “Zoopsia: New Works by Tim Hawkinson”
By Mara Zehler
April 10, 2007 9:00 p.m.
In “Zoopsia: New Works by Tim Hawkinson” at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the artist’s hand might be trumped by the artist’s mouth.
It is the artist’s mouth, after all, that forms the suckers on the arms of “Octopus,” one of four works commissioned by the Getty for this exhibition. In this large-scale photographic collage, images of Hawkinson’s pink mouth, pressed up against the glass of a scanner, line the insides of the octopus’ twisting body. Hawkinson investigates the transformation of organic forms and issues of the body by metamorphosing and reshuffling parts of his own body to replicate the octopus’ undulating corpus, at the same time creating a sort of absurd and horrific self-portrait.
This project at the Getty is perhaps most notable because it is one of the museum’s recent forays into contemporary art, and in this case, it specifically highlights the work of a Los Angeles-based artist who received his MFA from UCLA.
In the intimate space of the installation, Hawkinson has created four objects that are connected by their animal forms but which also play off of one another in the artist’s different approaches to each work.
The ink-brushed “Dragon” stands opposite “Octopus,” but Hawkinson mimics a more traditional medium than photo collage: Chinese ink paintings. The artist adopts a medium that looks traditional but also breaks with this form as the ink drips and bleeds from the curving ink lines of the dragon.
The title of the exhibition, “Zoopsia,” appropriately refers to a visual hallucination of animals, and Hawkinson invokes this meaning in his objects. His works playfully make use of and investigate common and industrial items that the artist has manipulated in order to create zoological forms.
“Bat” is a life-size bat that hangs from the ceiling, formed out of plastic RadioShack bags, twist ties and mixed media. By blasting the plastic bags with a heat gun, Hawkinson has produced rather realistic bat skin, but reminders of the material’s origin are still in plain sight: The red letters of the RadioShack logo color the inside of the bat’s ears.
In “Leviathan,” the artist mimics a display that could be found in a natural history museum. The backbone of a prehistoric animal, held in place by metal rods, is made up of tiny rowing men that evolve out of a kneeling human form that also stands in for the skull of the animal.
Hawkinson has molded these tiny vertebral oarsmen out of Sculpey clay and Crayola Model Magic, items that are more likely to be found in the art supply boxes of slightly younger artists (read: 5- to 7-year-olds). But in using these materials, Hawkinson creates interplay between nature, man and the sometimes ridiculous trappings of contemporary life.
The loaded title, “Leviathan,” at once refers to a monster and, in its Hobbesian context, to a social structure composed of many men and headed by one, as the vertebrae and head are literally formed in Hawkinson’s piece.
Accompanying “Zoopsia” is Hawkinson’s “Ãœberorgan,” which occupies the space of the museum’s central rotunda and evokes Hawkinson’s interest in the body. This piece, first commissioned for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, is making its West Coast debut.
Gazing up at the bus-sized balloons and the cardboard tubing that snake around and through the round forms leaves tiny-by-comparison viewers feeling as though they may have found themselves in the belly of a central-rotunda-sized giant, as the forms of the “Ãœberorgan” are reminiscent of a digestive tract. These soft, airy forms and the brass horns of the organ play off against the hard, white lines of the museum’s architecture.
In addition to its visual components, the “Ãœberorgan” plays an almost melodic scrambling of traditional hymns, pop songs and improvisational tunes using a light-sensitive note decoder and a 250-foot-long scroll marked with black dots and dashes that indicate the notes and length of the music.
Hawkinson’s use of museum space, both in the central entrance and in the more intimate installation of his commissioned works, adds humor and sense of play to the serious modern architecture of the Getty, a place usually noted more for its classical collections than for its contemporary endeavors.
-Mara Zehler
E-mail Zehler at
