Inventing an Edgy Carnival of the Human Condition

Tim Hawkinson’s sculpture “The Fin Within” began life as a plaster cast of the space between the artist’s legs and feet. With the deft addition of some well placed crosshatching and other markings scratched into the wet plaster, the long vertical shape that fans out at the bottom was subtly transformed into the evocation of a fish tail with scales.

Hawkinson’s sculpture of the void between his lower extremities suddenly became a very witty image, in which mythical sea creatures such as mermaids and -men come to mind, together with scientific intimations of Darwinian ancestry. The sculpture performs like exceedingly odd evidence proving the complex history of the human animal--up from the bogs of nature and culture, so to speak.

“The Fin Within” is one of about two dozen Hawkinson works currently on view at the Pasadena Armory for the Arts in a provocative, playful and well chosen exhibition organized by gallery director Jay Belloli. All but two works date from 1995.

The sculpture is also likely to put you in mind of P.T. Barnum. Remember Barnum’s Fiji mermaid? The great American huckster and showman had sewed together a monkey’s torso and a fish’s tail to make a wondrously confounding sideshow attraction.

Hawkinson isn’t a huckster--he always lets you in on how his eccentrically inventive sculptures have been made--but he’s definitely a showman, in the all-American mode typified by Barnum. And why not? The artist, 35, graduated from art school in 1985, when the blinding lights and extreme razzle-dazzle of the international art world were reaching their most carnival-like incarnation. Hawkinson’s aesthetic sensibility is in keeping with the moment of his own genesis as an artist. Barnum is his fin within.

So is Bruce Nauman. “The Fin Within,” along with several other works in the Pasadena show, identifies the precedent of Nauman’s work since the 1960s as a principal inspiration on which the younger artist builds. In the mid- to late 1960s, Nauman made numerous sculptures whose form described the space in, around and under various mundane objects, including his own body. Where Nauman’s work is wry and succinct, though, Hawkinson’s goes for baroque.

Hawkinson’s use of his own body as a template reverberates throughout the show. Sometimes it’s self-evident, as in a sculpture suspended from the ceiling and made from several dozen belts on a wire armature, which describes a full-length standing figure. (The descriptive title is “Hangmanofmycircumference.”) Other times it’s more abstruse.

“Humongolous” is an acrylic painting of a flayed torso, arms and legs, executed on rag paper that’s been mounted on fabric and hung from the ceiling like a banner. It’s less a ferocious image of individual justice and punishment, like Michelangelo’s skinned self-portrait in his “Last Judgment” fresco or the classical story of the flaying of Marsayas, than it is a monstrously fascinating vision of art and its tenuous place in current American society. The flayed and flattened skin is pointedly likened to painting’s surface “skin,” whose standard is here being held aloft as horribly painful and discomfited.

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By contrast, “Bagpipe” can easily be seen as a funny metaphor for a human bag of bones. A bigger-than-life-size vinyl bag, pumped full of air from an overhead ventilation shaft, is pierced with cardboard carpet tubes that act as the bagpipe’s tooting chanters. Like “Ranting Mop Head,” a sculptural android built from a computerized kitchen mop that furiously beeps and buzzes when you enter the room, “Bagpipe” is activated by an electronic motion detector. When the sculpture senses that someone is nearby, its woozy music begins to play. A touchingly pathetic gesture toward seduction is made.

The overhead ventilation shaft also pumps air into “Vault,” a sculpture that derives from an adjacent walk-in safe at the Armory. Hawkinson has made a seamless latex rubber cast of the safe’s interior. The flow of air is not enough to inflate this clumsy and pitiful rubber room to its full dimensions, so the casting sits collapsed and exhausted, partially leaning against the gallery wall as if gasping for breath.

If an architectural environment is a man-made skin separating inside from outside, “Vault” is an anthropomorphic sculpture that seems to be struggling to find a useful life.

Not all of Hawkinson’s art is so directly oriented to the body or bodily metaphors. “Trajectory”--one of the show’s most compelling works--follows a loopy history of vehicular transportation in an end-to-end sequence of 17 toy vessels. The models begin at the left with a Viking ship, continue through carriages, cars and airplanes, and end at the right with a space capsule.

Suspended from the ceiling, this historical super-ship is built inside a throwaway bottle, composed from a variety of disposable plastic containers. Imagination is its own best vessel.

Hawkinson possesses a wonderfully inventive skill with materials. One favorite moment in the show comes in a large, wall-bound cardboard sculpture called “Bedwarmer.” Its surface features a drawing of a woman surrounded by floral patterns--a drawing made from carefully cut pieces of heavy-duty strapping tape. The drawing is invisible to the eye until the linear filament within the tape catches the light, making the woman’s image flicker in and out of view like an ethereal apparition.

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Two conventional, far less satisfactory paintings also suggest that Hawkinson is at heart a sculptural materials man. The paintings present potentially restive ideas but without much visual skill.

The artist is also immensely prolific--sometimes too much so. Prior gallery shows have seemed to need editing, while a few works here could have been dispensed with.

Still, Hawkinson is an artist of unusual gifts and this is a show of exceptional verve. Feeling uncomfortable within your skin is not an uncommon experience for a wide variety of artists, not to mention other human types. Hawkinson mines that edgy territory with a wonderfully inventive eye and finds in it a lively mix of humor, terror and pathos.

* Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, (818) 792-5101, through Sept. 1. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.