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| Simon Starling: C. A. M. Crassulacaen Acid Metabolism, 2005 installation shot, courtesy Void |
Curatorial foresight or sheer luck, Void clearly staged a coup in hosting C. A. M. by Simon Starling. The exhibition coincided with his nomination and subsequeUnt winning of the 2005 Turner Prize. A new work, C. A. M. Crassulacaen Acid Metabolism, names the process where by cacti reduce water loss by taking in CO2 at night, enabling their survival in the harsher daytime desert climate.
The exhibition consists of several verdigris bronze cacti sculptures that are in fact radiators. They are arranged in a cluster in Gallery One, and neatly negotiated by copper piping which leads to a central-heating unit in Gallery Two. This Spartan arrangement suitably evokes the desert, warmed by the cacti, albeit to not quite desert aridity. A darkened Gallery Two holds all the elements of production. A large screen displays a film of the casting and colouring of the radiators; as the film ends a single spotlight illuminates the heating unit in a corner of the gallery, thus succinctly closing the circuit of production and display.
The work was inspired by two
accounts of marketable exchange
out of nothing. One account is
from the self-explanatory title of
a previous photographic work:
The Swiss by night buy cheap rate electricity from their neighbours which they use to pump water into holding reservoirs. By day they use the stored water to generate hydroelectric power which they sell back to their neighbours at peak rate prices.
Similarly the artist cites a story of South African cable thieves, who steal miles of copper overhead cables. Recasting the stolen metal as pots, they sell these as scrap in neighbouring countries. Large quantities of the scrap are purchased by the cable companies only to be made into cables. Both are ironic accounts of international exchange, one more legal yet no more perverse than the other. The documented manufacture screened in Gallery Two is an oblique nod to Starling’s interest in the Arts and Crafts movement, in its demonstration of the acquired skills called for in the casting and colouring of the sculptures. It is these finely researched narratives and specific skill-acquisition that are distinctive features of Starling’s work. The inverted mimetic of the heat exchange extends to grander eccentricities which are on display at Tate Britain – for example, Tabernas desert run, 2004, comprises an improvised electric bicycle and an accompanying watercolour of a cactus made with the aid of the bicycle’s only waste product, H2O; or Shed boat shed, 2005, which does what it says on the tin, so to speak. (It is a perfect double inversion, the work making what disappears into the object: shed into boat, journey down river, boat into shed. It mimics a kind of ergonomic efficiency, mercurial in its poetics. The lineage of these landscape traversals could be traced back to earlier English conceptualists such as Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy. However, the play of inversions of productivity and redundancies that shape Starling’s work marks the paradigm shift from Long et al to a focus which is more sensitive to ecologies and economies, and the imprint of capital. Starling’s elliptical circuits and reconfigurations of technologies and nature deliberately counter the velocities and trajectories of Modernity.)
Starling says he is enchanted by Lawrence Weiner’s idea that an artist is someone who, unhappy with the relationship between people and things, seeks to change that relationship.
It is somewhat ironic that Void had the curatorial vision to show Starling. The artist-run space has supplanted the now-closed Orchard Gallery, shut down by the city council’s cutting capital expenditure. The Orchard was the one gallery in the ‘UK’ whose director, Declan McGonagle, was nominated for the Turner Prize. The nomination was for staging seminal exhibitions, such as one in the mid-eighties on Conceptual Art working with landscape and journey, hosting the likes Richard Long and Lawrence Weiner…
Congratulations to Simon Starling and all at Void.
Damien Duffy is an artist.
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