Simon Starling’s work can be described as an intensive quest that involves travel, research and the possibility of making connections between different places, objects and historical and cultural circumstances. Starling’s unique and highly distinctive ideas are as humorous as they are erudite and he undertakes specific projects in relation to particular contexts. His trips, the importance of which are equal to or greater than the final destination or end result, reveal hidden relationships, submerged narratives and stories that involve the transformation of one object or substance into another. Starling literally and metaphorically juxtaposes different structures and dynamics. He reveals connections between different times and places. His investigations are, as their very etymology suggests, routes “in pursuit of a mark” or “in search of a clue.” In Starling’s thinking and in his working procedures one step follows another and eacha discovery leads on to a new connection. As in a laboratory, the margin of error is part of the process itself. Like a chain reaction, new references or relationships come into being and contribute to establishing new ways of looking, thinking and acting.
At the end of all this research the tale appears. Starling is an investigator, a traveller and also a narrator. The texts and books that accompany his works are an intrinsic part of them, while the data that he brings to light is essential in helping us to come closer to the process and the connections that he establishes. The relationship between narrative and sculpture is constantly renegotiated and explored. Narratives thus accompany works imbued with a powerful presence in the exhibition space. His projects take the form of installations involving elegantly made objects, photographs, films and books. Starling combines and mixes technical strategies in the same way that he plays with the cultural baggage that he brings to bear as a whole on the activity.
Changes of scale
The exhibitions that Simon Starling is presenting at the Contemporary Arte Centre of Málaga and at Tate St Ives have the same starting point: direct intervention on the architecture of the two institutions with the aim of articulating a group of works that turn around the ideas of change of scale, miniaturisation and magnification, the transfer of digital data into a physical or sculptural form, and, in the reverse direction, the translation of real form into data. The two exhibitions are complementary and in both cases the relationship with the place is modified. The notion of history also plays an important role, referring to recent political and architectrural histories in the case of the new work created for Málaga, and to the ancient geological resources that created Cornwall’s economic base as a mining region, as well as the town of St Ives more immediate cultural history as an important international modernist art colony.
At Tate St Ives, Starling begins by confronting two different and geographically remote institutions. In the Tate’s building he is creating an exact 1:1 scale reproduction of a gallery space from the Pier Arts Centre in Orkney, Scotland. Both Tate St Ives and the Pier Arts Centre overlook the sea, one at the very Northerly tip of the British Isles and one at the far West, and both have a strong relationship to the 20th century artists colony in St Ives . A couple of years ago Starling showed his slide work Autoxylopyrocycloboros (2006) at the Pier Arts Centre. The creation of that work involved sailing on Loch Long in Scotland in a small, “customised” steam boat that was fuelled by the wood of the boat itself until it was finally reduced to a minimum and sunk. On the one hand, the work was inspired by the culture of protest against nuclear submarines, which are frequently to be seen in the waters off this area. On the other, it constitutes a good example of the artist’s sense of humour, which is often subtly expressed but which is certainly present in his work and which at times comes close to that of Tom and Jerry cartoons or the Danish artist Peter Land2. The reconstruction at the Tate of the Orkney gallery creates a spectacular collapsing together of these two disparate spaces, with the replica room appearing – in the curved, glass-fronted gallery space at Tate St Ives – like a kind of ship-in-a-bottle. The work follows on from a number of other architectural sculptures Starling has made over the last few years that often revist an historic narrative or story, but in this case it quite literally re-presents and reinvestigates a piece of his own ‘recent history’. Autoxylopyrocycloboros is again installed in the space, exactly as it was, accompanied now by one other work, a painting of a steam boat by the St Ives based fisherman and artist Alfred Wallis. Executed in St Ives in around 1934, the painting is now part of the collection of the Pier Arts Centre, returning to St Ives within the ‘hull’ of the replicated gallery space, set adrift from its usual place. The result is the creation of a number of submerged narratives, of a double-loop type, in which each of the elements and situations appear as related.
The starting point for the principal work in the exhibition in Málaga, 1:1, 1:10, 1:100 (2010), is the reality of the building that houses the Centre, the former Wholesale Market, which is a construction of straight lines and cubic forms that was adapted to the triangular form of the site. The main exhibition gallery emphasises the triangular form of the museums’s ground-plan and Starling makes full use of this fact by exhibiting a partial architectural model of the Centre. In addition, and in the same gallery, he shows a model of the museum on a smaller scale. Finally, he proposes building a new one, but this time using materials derived from the construction of the Centre itself and taken from some of its walls. The idea of using the museum’s own walls is, as Starling noted in a conversation last October: “A way of denuding the museum in order to reveal the Fascist-type architecture of the end of the 1930s concealed beneath it. It is no more than a playful way of speaking about the amnesia induced by the new walls and panels that cover the museum’s front façade.”
Starling’s new model incorporates the model of the museum, which is not visible and is located “enclosed within the new model” and almost buried in the manner of a mausoleum. Like a set of Russian dolls, the result is the creation of a space that is a hybrid between the model and the building itself, as a result of which the museum houses its own model and, at the same time, generates another one from its own materials in a sort of loop of scales, materials and different functions. As Sean Lynch noted in a text on the exhibition that Simon Starling held in Limerick,2 Starling’s work relates to the ideas of the principal characters in Flann O’Brien’s book The Third Policeman (1967). The book, with its interest in atomic theory (it focuses, for example, on the atomic theory that proposes the progressive hybridization of the cyclist and the bicycle through material transformation), features a series of somewhat peculiar characters ranging from an eccentric scientist to a man condemned to death, and uses them to discuss the way the world is constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed. One of these characters, a policeman who enjoys craft activities in his spare time, makes a small wooden box that contains another identical one inside it and so on up to twenty-nine boxes, of which only thirteen are visible.
Modifying gestures
Starling’s project relating to the CAC Málaga and Tate St Ives buildings has given rise to a group of works that focus on the notion of particles or atoms and which are based on the idea of the transfer of an image’s data or codes into physical or sculptural form, or vice versa. One example is Particle Projection (Loop) (2007). As in most of Starling’s works, the starting point lies in the context. In this case the project was conceived in relation to the inauguration of the Wiels Art Centre in Brussels, which is located in an old distillery. Starling appropriated two references from Belgian culture, which, in characteristic fashion, he ultimately linked up: a famous building from the 1950s and an artist who was a pioneering and fundamental figure for an entire current of subsequent artistic practices based on “institutional criticism.” From the starting point of all these references, which he used as his working material, Starling produced a new image of a technology on the point of disappearing.
The references and their interconnections in themselves constituted a story that needs to be explained here. In 1957, the artist Marcel Broodthaers was employed as a labourer on the Atomium building designed by André Waterkeyn for the 1958 Brussels International Fair. The design of the building took the form of a schematic representation of a metal crystal, the abstract symbol of the concept of an atom. Broodthaers recorded the construction of the pavilion in a series of photographs that were subsequently published in the newspaper Le Patriote Illustré. When the Atomium was restored, fifty years after it was built, and the deteriorated aluminium was replaced with new triangular panels, a series of black and white photographs was taken that exactly reproduced the one taken by Broodthaers at the time of construction. In a Berlin chemical lab, one of the negatives of the photographs documenting the restoration of the Atomium was stripped of its layer of gel to reveal the silver particles of the developing agent. Seen under an electronic microscope, the fragments of these particles had a spongy, spectral appearance that created a different type of “architecture”, filled with labyrinthine structures in constant mutation. One of these particles was then returned to the photographic film, which was considerably enlarged, creating a suggestion of ghostliness.
Particle Projection (Loop) can be presented both as a film projection and as an object in the form of an installation in two display cases, with the 35mm film and the blown-up contacts of the original photographs, expressing this idea of a loop. In this sense, Starling conceives of his works not so much as unique but rather as a constellation of objects, texts, images, books and even talks, which are in some way connected to the main body of the work.
Morphological translations. The case of Henry Moore
Translation is another key concept for Starling. Working close to the global vision of artist Antoni Muntadas’ “on translation”, Starling transforms or translates one thing into another, from language to codes, from science to technology, from the visible to the invisible, etc. Above all, he is interested in what happens during the process, what changes, what is lost and what appears, and the relationships that are established. Pursuing the idea of data transfer, Project for a Meeting (Chicago) (2010) is a new work in which Starling returns to his interest in the art of Henry Moore, one of the most celebrated sculptors of the modern movement. Allusions and references to modern art are habitual in Starling’s projects. On the one hand they act as witness to the failure of utopias, and on the other, they express the recovery the nostalgic impulse that underpinned them. Project for a Meeting (Chicago) consists of a series of three uranotypes and is part of a body of research on the history of two very similar sculptures by Henry Moore, Atom Piece and Nuclear Energy, which are located in two strikingly contradictory contexts: the place where the first nuclear reactor was built at the University of Chicago – the starting-place for the so-called Manhattan Project to develop atomic bombs for use in war – and the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, the latter located in the city that suffered the terrible consequences of the atomic bomb. The series of three images created by Starling offers a fictitious union between these two works, which are almost identical apart from their size. To close this circle of interconnections, the uranotypes were made using an almost obsolete developing process whose principal constituent is uranium oxide.
The relationship between Atom Piece and Nuclear Energy is a significant one. Atom Piece was a working model for Nuclear Energy. Moore himself explained how he devised the project: “It’s a rather strange thing really but I’d already done the idea for this sculpture before Professor McNeill and his colleagues from the University of Chicago came to see me on Sunday morning to tell me about the whole proposition. They told me (which I’d only vaguely known) that Fermi, the Italian nuclear physicist, started or really made the first successful controlled nuclear fission in a temporary building. I think it was a squash court – a wooden building – which from the outside looked entirely unlike where a thing of such an important nature might take place. But this experiment was carried on in secret and it meant that by being successful Man was able to control this huge force for peaceful purposes as well as destructive ones. They came to me to tell me that they thought were such an important event in history took place ought to be marked and they wondered whether I would do a sculpture which would stand on the spot.”3
This is not the first time that Starling has been interested in the work and artistic personality of Henry Moore. In Silver Particle/Bronze (After Henry Moore) (2008) he took a small black and white photograph taken by Moore himself of his sculpture Reclining Figure No. 4. Starling made a circular cut in the photograph, extracting the image of one of the photograph’s silver particles. For this project, Starling again used an electron microscope and software designed to build models from multiple images made from different angles. The detail was scanned and manipulated to produce a 3-d model that was translated into the form of a sculpture that was extremely similar to Moore’s own. In fact, Moore’s working method consisted of making small models that his assistants would enlarge to create his sculptures.
The translation from photography to sculpture using a chain of reproduction refers to the materiality of the work, as Starling sees photography not just in terms of its importance as image, memory base and document but also as a receptacle of metallic particles or, as the artist has noted on various occasions, “as a field of potential sculptures”.
Starling’s interest in Moore undoubtedly relates to the latter’s status as sculptor of the modern age, but also to his own research on artistic institutions. Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima) (2010), is a work that belongs to a three-part exhibition that Starling is currently preparing for the Modern Institute, Glasgow, the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. In it, Starling is undertaking in-depth research into the connection between Moore and the Cold War. Project for a Masquerade consists of the presentation of nine characters, subjects of the Eboshi-ori, a traditional work of Japanese Noh theatre. Six of them are represented by a wooden mask, two of them by bronze masks, and another by a hat. The work tells the story of a young nobleman who, with the help of a hat maker, disguises himself in order to escape and start a new life in eastern Japan. In this story of personal reinvention, Starling adds figures associated with Moore within the context of the Cold War in order to look at the double life of Atom Piece, which was first made as an independent sculpture but which subsequently acted as the model for Nuclear Energy and which had to undergo a change of name, in part because the word “piece” in the title could be confused with “peace”, a term far removed from its nuclear context and from the Cold War.
The characters in Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima) include Henry Moore, who is the hat maker; Enrico Fermi as the messenger; Joseph Hirshhorn as Kumasaka, an opportunist bandit; James Bond as the gold merchant; Anthony Blunt as the hat maker’s wife; and Atom-Piece-Nuclear Energy as Ushikawa, the young nobleman. The mixture of real and fictitious characters and the fact that the principal role is taken by a sculpture, as well as the female role played by Anthony Blunt, are all indicative of Starling’s refined sense of humour. Starling had established connections on earlier occasions between Moore and the Cold War when he analysed his relationship with Anthony Blunt, a double agent who worked for the Soviet NKVD and for the British MI5 service. Blunt was also well known in the art world as a professor of art history at London University, an art critic, champion of Moore’s work and director of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Through Project for a Meeting (Chicago) and Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima) Starling analysed Moore’s role as the creator of an homage to the father of nuclear energy, while bearing in mind that he was one of the public sponsors of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Tightening the loop still further, at that same period Moore sold around fifty sculptures to Joseph Hirshhorn, a businessman and collector who described himself as “Mr Opportunity” and who made his fortune in petrol, gold and uranium prospecting in Canada in the 1960s.
The physical existence of photography
In another recent work, 1:300 (After Wilhelm Wagenfeld) (2010), Starling returns to his interest in photography as an emotional receptor and also as an element with which to explore its physical existence through the elements that create the images and which are presented in 3-D. The work consists of a series of hand-blown black glass balls, a series of offset prints, and pins for hanging the photographs. The images depict modernist glass objects designed by Bauhaus and inspired by Modernist designers. The size of the glass balls relates to that of the half-tone dots punctured by the pin with which the images on hung on the wall above. Starling’s work arose as a consequence of a large installation made by him in Pouges-les-Eaux, France, in 2009, entitled La Source (demi-teinte). The venue in Pouges-les-Eaux was an old spa where water with health-giving properties was bottled. In this installation Starling presented a light-box that showed a blown-up reproduction of an early 20th-century photograph of the floor of the building where he was now exhibiting, covered with carefully lined up rows of bottles. The workers who carried out the bottling could be seen in the background of the image. Starling made a circular cut in the image. In addition, inside the building he constructed a walkway that ran along one of the narrow corridors, while a series of ramps connected the walkways to the stairs leading to the upper rooms. On the grey concrete floor he arranged 1,036 black glass balls that were hand-made in six different sizes. The effect was that of a huge mesh that produced a distorted vision of the architecture of the building itself. The connection between the black glass balls and the original image was as direct as it was remote: the circle that Starling had cut out of the photograph was blown up to the scale of the building so that each of the dots of the printing was “translated” into its corresponding black glass ball. Seen from the upper balcony, the glass spheres could be read as sections of two of the bottles and a fragment of the floor from the image in the light box.
La Source was an extremely complex project. 1:300 (After Wilhelm Wagenfeld) is a reduced-scale version of the same project that that refers in a more precise manner to the ambiguous space between mass manufacture and bespoke craftsmanship
Stones, evolution and dissemination
In the case of Archaeopteryx Lithographica (2008) connections were established between theories of evolution and a type of technology of reproduction that contributed to their dissemination. The work comprises two complementary elements: a sculpture and a group of gelatin silver prints. The sculpture, “Archaeopteryx Lithographica” takes its name from one of the most important fossils ever found. Through this work Starling explores a key moment in the 19th century when the growth of offset printing had a major influence on the dissemination of theories of evolution which, through this newly discovered fossil, had been able to establish a relationship between dinosaurs and birds.
Archaeopteryx thus became a lithographic series consisting of six lithographs that link the various realities of the image: a lithographic reproduction of the text photographs, the photograph of the lithograph of the fossils on the lithographic stone, the lithographic impression of the photograph of the fossils, etc.
Journeys through history and technique
D1-Z1 (22,686,575:1), made in 2009, should be singled out with regard to the above-mentioned idea of transferring data from one medium to another and even from one dimension to another.The work refers to what was considered to be the world’s first programmable computer, the Z1. It was designed in 1936 by the engineer and artist Konrad Zuse (1910-1995) and occupied an entire room. With 172 bytes of memory and the ability to add, subtract, multiply and divide, the Z1 was privately financed and literally home-made in Zuse’s parents’ apartment in Berlin. Completed in 1938, it was “programmed” from a punched tape fed into a reader. Zuse punched his programmes on 35mm photographic film.
D1-Z1 is a 30-second long sequence showing an image of the machine itself in action. As is sometimes the case with Starling, the laborious effort involved in his working methods seems out of proportion to the results, while on other occasions these methods seem to come close to a critique of the pressure to achieve dramatic effects and to save time characteristic of the present day. The images in D1-Z1 (222,686,575:1) are thus generated using animation technology, including surface-rendering programmes produced in Berlin. Creating this simple, 30-second animated sequence, which depicts the punched film reader (a small part of the huge machine) required 3,992,837,240 bytes of information, in other words, more than 22 million times the memory of the Z1. This virtual, computer-generated reconstruction was then transferred onto 35mm film and was shown on another celebrated piece of mid-century technology, a Dresden D1 projector, which had been adapted for loop projection.The projected image, which is slightly blurred, shows the machine itself in action, with the film moving through the it. As hypnotic as it is formalist, the work is nothing less than an homage to Zuse’s perseverance, which is close to Starling’s own. It also involves a humorous approach to a way of doing things which is far remote from present day practices. In fact, all the machines and techniques brought together in these projects, from Zuse’s computer, to film developing with uranium, or the use of artisan, hand blown glass in the modern day, are used by Starling as elements in a reflection on a contemporary reality that seems to us far more de-materialised.
Using this approach, Starling creates a journey between two different contexts: historical and technical. He combines high technology with low technology to produce an image of the first prototype of a programmable calculator. Starling’s interest in the image starts from the relationship that it could establish with the machine that reproduces it, with a desire to show the mechanism, what it represents and its historical and social connotations.
Like another, earlier work, Wilhelm Noak oHG (2006), in which a 35mm film projects the construction of a staircase while the actual film gradually rolls itself around this same staircase, D1-Z1 (22,686,575:1) documents its own method of creation. In both cases we reencounter the loop in relation to the history of the technique and the support of the film, both of which take on contemporary meaning in a space filled with new implications.
Six degrees of separation
Starling’s working procedure, in which he gradually establishes a chain of connections that might seem theoretically inconceivable, connects to the theory that was proposed in the short story Chains (1929) by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy and popularised in a play by John Guare. Karinthy maintained that anyone in the world could be connected to anyone else through a chain of acquaintances that involves no more than five intermediaries. The six degrees of separation with which Starling’s works not only connect people, but also facts, situations and discoveries.
Three Birds, Seven Stories, Interpolations and Bifurcations (2008) recounts the story of a European architect from whom an Indian maharajah commissioned an ambitious architectural project. In 1929 the young, European educated Maharajah of Indore, Yeshwant Rao Holkar (1908-1961), commissioned the German architect Eckart Muthesius (1904-1989) to design him a palace. The project ultimately become one of the most famous buildings of European Modernism with regard to design and technology and involved the work of leading names such as Le Corbusier, Eileen Grey, Marcel Breuer, Lilly Reich and Constantin Brancusi. The latter designed a Temple of Liberation to house some of his sculptures of birds, but this was never made. The palace also had air conditioning (unusual in India) installed by Heinz Riefenstahl, brother of the famous filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.
Reality and fiction combine in this tapestry of names and contexts and Starling makes reference to the account offered by Muthesius himself, who to some extent “fictionalised” his involvement in the project: when he presented it to a European public he retouched the images, concealing the roof that did not conform to Modernist precepts.
Another project involving journeys is Red Rivers (In Search of the Elusive Okapi) (2009) which offers an account of the expedition undertaken by the zoologist Herbert Lang in the Belgian Congo. The purpose of the trip, which was sponsored by the Natural History Museum in New York, was to look for the okapi, a ruminant similar to a small giraffe. Starling films a canoe trip, taking as his model one of the traditional 19th-century canoes made in North America, which he painted with brown stripes to suggest an okapi. The journey starts in a wooded area (that could almost be the Congo) and ends in the city of New York, presenting a slow transition in which culture takes over from nature. It concludes in the place where Lang’s adventure started, in the Natural History Museum of New York, in front of the diorama in which an okapi is to be seen. Just as Lang took thousands of photographs and recorded the okapi for the first time, developing his prints in an improvised lab in a tent, Starling filmed the photographs of his trip under the red light used in developing rooms. The result is to give the impression that the images have been selected from contact sheets, blown up, and developed, etc.
The film refers to American history and its complex relationship with Europe, as well as to the power of photography as a tool of communication and knowledge. The reddish tone that brings to mind the safety light in developing rooms and which turns the river into one of the “red rivers” of the title, also recalls geo-political tensions in the context of colonialism.
Consumption and its paradoxes
Another work that connects to and dismantles locations and contexts is the installation The Long Ton (2009). It consists of two large blocks of marble, one of which is suspended from the other through a system of pulleys. The larger of the two comes from China and weighs over a tonne, while the other block, which is made of Carrara marble, is its absolutely exact replica although it weighs only a quarter of the Chinese one. Their similarity does not extend to their value, as despite having travelled thousands of kilometres, the Chinese block is worth the same as the one from Carrara, even though the Italian one is significantly lighter and smaller.
One Ton II (2005) also draws attention to the contradictions and nonsensical elements within modern-day global consumption. The concept of this work focuses on the amount of energy needed to produce a small amount of platinum. A tonne of the mineral extracted from an open-cast mine in South Africa, shown in Starling’s photographs, was needed to produce the platinum used to hand develop the five platinotype prints that make up this work. Once again Starling refers to the complexity of the modern world. Among the uses of platinum, which is a highly prized precious metal, is that of catalyser in hydrogen fuel cells, which are one of the most promising sources of alternative energy of the future. In addition, platinum is used in the platinotype method of photographic development, widely employed between 1860 and 1920 but now obsolete.
One Ton II is closely related to Exposition, the work made by Starling for the Espai 13 of the Fundació Miró in Barcelona. Here, the artist juxtaposed cutting-edge contemporary technology and the evolution of the modern movement, taking as his starting point the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition, an event that was a showcase for both German technology and design of the period, with magnificent displays designed by Lilly Reich. Another key element in Exposition was once again platinum, which has a double role in this work; firstly in the photographs on the wall that show some of the designs by Lilly Reich for the display on German engineering at the 1929 Exhibition, and which were printed using the platinotype technique; and on the other, in the way these photographs are lit, using a hydrogen fuel cell, in which platinum is a key element as it acts as a catalyser that enables the necessary reaction between hydrogen and oxygen to come about, resulting in the production of electric current and a residual amount of water.
In the exhibitions in Malaga and St Ives, Simon Starling has focused on recent history and its connections with the present; on the Fascist past of the architecture of the Contemporary Art Centre of Málaga; on the conflictive past of the Cold War; on the past expressed through obsolete technologies; on St Ives’ past as a mining town and a cultural colony; and on the artist’s own recent past through, for example, the re-presentation of Autoxylopyrocycloboros in a full size replica of the gallery in which it was previously shown.
Whether constructing architectural models using material from the building itself, inserting one building inside another, magnifying small particles, transforming data into 3-D objects, making technological processes visible, rediscovering epic undertakings and journeys, making efforts out of all proportion to the results obtained or recalling bizarre stories, Simon Starling has evolved a conceptual approach and a working method based on journeys, routes, geographical shifts, translations, transformations, superimpositions, reproductions, loops and turns, and which mix genres, time-frames, techniques, humour, gravity and poetry. As the jury that awarded him the 2005 Turner Prize noted, Starling is outstanding for his: “[…] unique ability to create poetic narratives that draw together a wide variety of cultural, political and historical references.” Through his deconstructions, reconstructions and connections, Starling reveals the complexity of the real, the jumbled, crowded nature of the world in which we exist and its relationship to the most recent past.
1. In the case of the Tate, it was originally built in St Ives to celebrate and represent the Tate’s collection of works by artists associated with the colony, including Barbara Hepworth, Naum Gabo, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron and Peter Lanyon. In the case of the Pier, it houses the collection of Margaret Gardiner, a patron and collector who was a frequent visitor to St Ives through the middle of the last century, and who bought many of the works in her collecton from the artists living and working there.
2. The Danish artist Peter Land made a video entitled The Lake (2000) in which he dressed as a hunter and presented himself about to shoot duck from a boat. His first shot made a hole in the boat, which slowly sunk.
3. Lynch, Sean, “Simon Starling and assorted notes on The Atomic Theory”, in Concrete Light, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick, 2008, p. 11
4. Henry Moore quoted in Art Journal, New York, Spring 19, p. 286.
