Transporting visions: on the art of Simon Starling

Simon Starling presents deceptively common objects: airplanes, lamps, chairs, plants, and cars. Altered or taken out of context, they lose their muteness, and elaborate yarns spin from them: stories linking the heroic or eccentric endeavors of individuals to larger, more complex and abstract economic and social processes of transformation. Often his works concern geographical displacements and historical repetitions. And they always look good. I mention this immediately in order to avoid giving any sense that the projects I am about to describe are merely dreary institutional critique or appropriation art arriving more than two decades late.

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Starling, born in Epsom, England, and now based in Glasgow and Berlin, is a traveler and an alert observer of forms, both natural and man-made. He brings material as well as ideas with him on his long journeys, and the most varied of these connect in curious chains. The final outcome is usually an object, like H.C./H.G.W., 1999, the wooden chair presented at Leipzig's Galerie fur Zeitgenossische Kunst that same year. Like the majority of his works, this one has a long subtitle, which condenses the wide-ranging physical, historical, and cultural conditions behind its making into one entity: "A replica of a 'Swan Chair' designed in England in 1885 by Charles Francis Ainsley Voysey, built using the wood from an oak tree from the grounds of the Villa at 11 Karl-Tauchintz-Strasse, Leipzig, designed in 1892 by Bruno Eelbo and Karl Wichardt for the geologist Herman Credner." "They aren't strictly titles; they are just one more element in the work," Starling explained in a 1999 discussion with curators Stefanie Sembill and Jan Winkelmann, and added, "not the name of the dish, but the recipe, if you like."

Before analyzing the narrative ingredients of the piece, let's take a look at the chair itself: It's a beautiful object, rather wide and offering enough space for two not-too-large people, a grown-up and a child perhaps. Its wooden legs and curved back make it quite clear why it's called a swan. The long, elegant neck on each side terminates at the top in a small bird's head, bowing. There is nothing missing; the chair seems to be complete. But some of the devices used during assembly--clamps and straps, for instance--are still attached, emphasizing that the chair is not simply a given but is rather inhabiting a phase in a process not yet concluded. Displaying the mechanics of construction, as Starling often does, seems to suggest that the chair serves some technical purpose in addition to being a piece of furniture. What could that be? Reproduced from the past and pointing to an as yet unknown future use, it's certainly a kind of time machine.

The designer of the chair, C.F.A. Voysey, whose handiwork here is so typical of the Arts and Crafts movement's ambition to integrate organic forms into cultural artifacts, was also designing a house for H.G. Wells, author of the novel The Time Machine (1895). Through its title, H.C./H.G.W., Starling's work links the venue where it's shown, the Leipzig villa originally built for Credner and later turned into a gallery for contemporary art, to that other house, built for the science-fiction pioneer with money generated from sales of The Time Machine. The chair is an alien--a guest from another era and from a different place. But the material out of which it is built is site-specific in the strictest sense: The wood was taken from an oak tree that once grew in the villa's garden. In fact, that very tree is responsible for the strange position of Credner's villa; he didn't want to remove the tree, so the house had to be built at a curious angle to the street. Eventually, when the villa was refurbished into an art gallery in the '90s, the tree had to be cut down, since its roots were threatening to damage the foundation of the building. Its trunk is still kept in the garden, where Starling found it and where this labyrinthine story started to unfold for him. He created the chair from a piece that he removed from the trunk. The sitting, however, takes place not in the chair but in the negative space the removed piece has left, turning the trunk into a bench. Practicing his own craftsmanship in homage to past craftsmen, constructing narratives that stretch across countries and continents, drawing attention to the economic elements of manufacture (sometimes by destruction), Starling layers meaning in his sculptures in a way that grants the medium both power and playfulness.