Simon Starling

I have my own little history of contemporary art that traces the progression of appropriation from the birth of photography to the present day. The camera gave artists the means to “borrow” from reality, taking what painting could only approximate and using the familiar gestures of choice and framing to somehow draw out artistry while inserting authority into a fragment of the everyday. Next, Duchamp broke the frame and placed the everyday object itself in the gallery, the consequences of which we are still dealing with. Then the so-called “appropriation artists” of the 1970s yanked objects qua commodities off store shelves, magazine racks and gallery walls, their selection and framing directed this time to a confusion of artistry and authority. Finally, to add a bit of sophistication to the strategy, artists began to adapt or assemble found events, ideas and (most interestingly) pre-existing art works into new arrangements. From what I hear, Nicolas Bourriaud’s book Postproduction (which I haven’t read) addresses this school of thought. I see it in any number of contemporary artists from Douglas Gordon to Zin Taylor. End of history lesson.

On viewing Simon Starling’s recent exhibition at The Power Plant, I can only make sense of his extremely variegated practice by thinking of him as the offspring (or maybe younger brother) of sophisticated magpie artists like Rodney Graham and Stan Douglas. Both use units (be they ideological or material) of the (oft-times forgotten) past as the building blocks of their work. It’s no surprise that VanCity curator Reid Shier (at the time, at The Power Plant, now back west at Presentation House) gravitated to this Scottish lad and initiated the commission that acts as the centrepiece of the exhibition. Like that of the proponents of the Vancouver School, Starling’s tack is not simply a non-linear approach to recent art history, drawing on the free floating strategies of modernism and its aftermath to re-engage with the contemporary world; it is a multiple appropriation that draws on parallel histories of art, politics and culture to mash-up discrete “things” to reveal, if not create, connections previously unacknowledged. Graham does it with the marginalia of the humanities. Douglas does it with the ruptures in history. Starling does it with symbolic synchronicities in both.

It’s a rich field to mine (to plow?), but it risks becoming an art of footnotes, appreciated only with a guidebook in hand to identify the references and their significances. Douglas, with his densely packed installations, is often accused of being lost in the stacks, accessible only to those in the know. In response, he stresses the legibility of his works to a general, mediasavvy audience. Starling’s body of work passes or fails on the balance of evocation versus explanation in a literal way. An artist with a basement inventor’s bent, he always provides instructions with his work; the wall labels explain the specific context, arrangements and outcome of each work. The works don’t work when they merely illustrate the accompanying text. Practically all of Starling’s photo-based work suffers this fate (Autoxylopyrocycloboros, 2006, a slide show, was shut down due to technical difficulties for most of the exhibition and I never got to see it). For example, By night the Swiss 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 then sell back to their neighbours at peak-rate prices (After Christopher Williams/ After Jean-Luc Godard), 2005, (yes, that is the full title) suffocates under the intricacies of its explanation, leaving the ostensible work itself, an arrangement of photographs of photographs of dams in museum and gallery archives, drained of energy, inspiration and meaning.

However, when they do work, as with the three major sculptures on display, Starling’s objects stretch the imagination well beyond their conceits and don’t, in fact, rely on them to have an initial effect. An innocent (dare I say, ignorant?) viewer could have a field day contemplating the possibilities of Bird in Space before any mention of Brancusi or Bush (as in George W). A passing knowledge of not-so-recent art history (or a previous visit to any good art museum) would trigger a reflection on the aesthetics of the slab of metal weighed against the practical and economic efforts to keep it in place, suspended just so, inches from the fragile white walls of the gallery. A little experience with gardens is all that’s needed to begin to survey the possibilities of Island for Weeds. Add some awareness of current environmental concerns and you’ve already got more than your money’s worth. Learning about invasive species and Scottish botanical history is gravy.

A passing knowledge of parasitic biology comes in handy when faced with Starling’s wonderful local addition Infestation Piece (Musselled Moore), but it’s not essential. Site specific like many of his works, this sculpture is a recast of Henry Moore’s 1953–54 Warrior with Shield that was subsequently submerged into Lake Ontario for over a year, only to re-emerge encrusted with zebra mussels, a foreign species that came to the Great Lakes in the ballast tanks of ocean liners and has since choked the ecosystem with its invasive growth. The final destination of the myriad paths that brought mollusk and Moore to Toronto is an alien object that represents perhaps the next level of appropriation, where borrowing becomes collaboration as the artist works with living creatures to imbue the work with process as process (not simply the representation thereof). This is art that is not simply about the present, but of the future. ■

“Simon Starling: Cuttings (Supplement),” curated by Gregory Burke, was exhibited at The Power Plant from March 1 to May 11, 2008.

Terence Dick is a writer who lives in Toronto.