High-wire art

For his mid-career survey exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Tim Hawkinson has suspended wires and electrical cords high overhead throughout the capacious ground-floor galleries of the Anderson Building. The wiring is there to provide power for the machinery and computers that operate his often kinetic art. Think of it as a homemade power grid -- a replica in miniature of something vast on which we all rely but about which we pay little attention until it’s not there.

Hawkinson’s art is sort of like that too. As a garage band is to a philharmonic orchestra, so Hawkinson’s technological tinkering is to science and industry. His art speaks to social experience and human mortality. But part of the work’s attraction is the way it peels back its systems of operation like layers of an onion, displaying them for your contemplation.

Take “Emoter,” a self-portrait of the artist as a young cyborg. A cut-up inkjet print showing the artist’s face is mounted on a panel of plastic and foam core, which hangs on the wall. Electrodes fastened to the face are connected to mechanical components, mounted like a high school science project on a nearby stepladder. There, light sensors are affixed to a television monitor, and they send random signals in response to the broadcast program.

Walk up to Hawkinson’s portrait and, accompanied by soft buzzing and whirring, his face begins to change expressions. Eyebrows rise. Nostrils flare. Lips part. Some expressions are familiar, some freakish.

While you’re puzzling over the portrait’s apparent reaction to your presence in the room, and how the goofy effect is accomplished, it suddenly dawns that grins, a furrowed brow and other bemused expressions are washing over your own face too. Who’s the real “emoter” here? Hawkinson or his audience?

Who is responding to what -- the picture to you or you to the picture? Is the title a pun for e-motor -- that is, an electronic motor, which reacts mechanically to outside stimuli? Does the flickering TV tube reside at the heart of this emotional circuitry? How mechanical (or preprogrammed) are our own responses to experience?

“Emoter” also puts you in mind of multi-user computer programs, the kind that run over the Internet and allow multiple users to participate in role-playing games. In virtual reality, “to emote” is to indicate the performance of an action, usually with a facial expression of emotional state. Hawkinson’s theatrical self-portrait represents the face of a new world -- familiar and freakish, but one we all now inhabit.

The entry gallery multiplies many of these effects by a factor of at least 10, although the commanding sculpture filling that room dates from three years before 2002’s “Emoter.” Titled “Pentecost,” it is a gigantic tree-form, cobbled together from big cardboard tubes papered in a pattern reminiscent of tree bark.

A dozen figures made from carved and stacked sheets of polyurethane are perched in and around the tree’s spreading limbs, which branch out to encompass the large room. The end of each hollow branch has a membrane stretched over it, turning the limb into a drum; each figure taps on it in a syncopated rhythm. The popping and tapping, amplified by the hollow tubes, echoes loudly throughout the space.

It doesn’t take long to discover a motion detector suspended from the tree trunk. (A suitcase strapped to the trunk holds electronic innards.) Excited drumming from every corner of the space responds to your arrival, like creatures in the forest warning one another of a stranger’s approach. Once triggered, though, the primitive communication system is indistinguishable from music.

Humanity and music assume numinous contours, underscored by the sculpture’s title. “Pentecost” refers to the seventh Sunday after Easter, when Christians commemorate the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the 12 apostles. Physics merges with metaphysics in Hawkinson’s best work.

There are 65 sculptures, drawings and mixed-media works in the LACMA show, co-organized by (and seen at) New York’s Whitney Museum earlier this year. Among the most remarkable is one that is also among the simplest. It is composed of nothing more than two dozen gears, graduated in size, that are lined up next to one another on a metal stand. It’s a clock.

The title of this motorized 1995 sculpture is “Spin Sink (1 Rev./100 Years).” A tiny gear at the left end is spinning at 1,400 rpm -- so fast it appears stationary. As the gears get bigger and bigger, the gear train absorbs the velocity until, finally, the spin is reduced to one revolution per century at the other end. That means the enormous gear at the right -- some 8 feet in diameter -- is spinning so slowly that it appears stationary.

Just like the tiny, whizzing gear at the other end. Only different.

This beguiling sculpture recalls an earlier distant cousin -- an untitled work by Charles Ray that is composed of a white disk embedded into a white wall, flush with the surface but spinning fast. The wall appears solid, but actually it’s in motion.

As a demonstration of scientific mechanics, it also recalls sculptures by Chris Burden, who has made numerous works that seek to demystify the operations of our highly technological age. Hawkinson graduated in 1989 from UCLA, where Ray and Burden taught. His work is a classic example of how provocative influence can be absorbed by a gifted younger artist and wholly transformed into an aesthetic all his own.

Another self-portrait, this one a sculpture composed of a pair of legs extending from the feet to the shins, recalls an even earlier precedent. Bruce Nauman, whose pivotal work opened a wide field of sculptural exploration in relation to the human body, made a 1966-67 piece called “Feet of Clay”; a photograph of his own feet (and shins) shows them daubed with modeling clay. Hawkinson’s sculpture is made from lead, and it extends only as far as the shins because that quantity of the heavy metal weighs the same as the artist’s entire body. It’s a funny sculpture -- as if a body had sunk down into itself. And the shift from Nauman’s clay to Hawkinson’s metal simultaneously casts the work as a kind of monument to a venerated elder.

Hawkinson, like many other artists, also has an affinity for Nauman-style puns. Bright orange electrical cord, for example, is woven into a pair of “Shorts.” (I suppose the charged garment could also be called “Hot Pants.”) “Signature Piece” is a mechanical sculpture that writes the artist’s signature, endlessly. A tour de force installation at LACMA consists of a gallery wall covered with a latex skin painted white, then pumped full of air by a generator: “Breathing room” is made manifest.

Hawkinson has also used tubing to connect this air-filled wall to a latex cast of his own body, suspended from the ceiling. His mannequin floats serenely overhead, like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon, tethered to the context. Connections between objects, and between an object and its environment, are central to the meaning in his work.

Writing in the catalog, LACMA curator Howard N. Fox aptly describes Hawkinson’s sculptures as “metaphysical machines.” That recurrent spiritual edge is one of the most interesting aspects coaxed out by the survey.

Sometimes the spiritual dimension can be obscure. Take 1989’s “Untitled (Ear/Baby),” a framed oval drawing of a human ear, which hangs at a 45-degree angle from the wall. Look behind the drawing, and the ear canal has metamorphosed into a birth canal, in which a tiny fetus and umbilical cord have been assembled from scraps of newsprint.

The assemblage is like a secular version of the Archangel Gabriel whispering the Incarnation into the Virgin Mary’s ear. The word is made flesh. Few younger artists -- Hawkinson was 29 when he made “Untitled (Ear/Baby)” -- deal convincingly with themes that fueled Western art half a millennium ago.

The LACMA survey is nicely installed in the Anderson Building’s notoriously awkward galleries (it has breathing room). It gives a good overview of an artist whose work seems eccentric but is actually embedded within a larger continuum.

The timing is propitious too. Hawkinson is just completing his first major outdoor commission for the estimable Stuart Collection at UC San Diego -- a 20-foot tall, 217-ton pile of eight carefully selected and stacked boulders, elaborately stabilized and pinned together with hidden metal bars. The boulders form a gigantic teddy bear.

This remarkable sculpture is installed in the new courtyard of the Jacobs School of Engineering -- and is itself a monumental feat of technical production. Hawkinson has brought modern technology to bear on the construction of a monumental tribute to playfulness, childhood imagination and the tensions between security and precariousness that a teddy bear of stacked boulders suggests. It speaks volumes about the complex satisfactions offered by his art.

*

‘Tim Hawkinson’

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.

When: Noon to 8 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays; noon to 9 p.m. Fridays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; closed Wednesdays.

Ends: Aug. 28

Price: $5 to $9

Contact: (323) 857-6000, www.lacma.org