Simon Starling at The Clever Object

Not so long ago, yours truly was over on that other side of the pond where they make sure not to leave the crisps in the boot when they fill up the lorry with petrol. The reason? Nothing other than a seminar Old Ken likes to call Clever Object, in this case part three.

As has been the tradition of this seminar series, the discussion of historical cases and theoretical readings has been juxtaposed by conversation with contemporary artists. This time, the artist in question was 2005 winner of the Turner Prize, Simon Starling (who we see seated at the center of the picture above in what I can only charitably call a "nice" sweater).



Starling is perhaps best know for his work Shedboatshed (seen above) in which he transformed a garden shed into a boat, sailed it down a river, and re-installed it in the Tate as a shed. Now, to summarize the work in as cursory a manner as I have just done is certainly contrary to the spirit of Starling's practice. Not only is he a formidable raconteur who considers his stories (so he told the seminar) to be "part of the work, if not artworks themselves", but his objects have sufficiently long gestation that they effectively gather stories around them -- stories that Starling can prune and reshape. He becomes a curator of his objects' stories.



Suggestive of this way of working is an installation he developed at MassMoca called The Nanjing Particles. At the core of this project was a photograph (magnified and perforated in the installation shot above) representing Sampson's Shoe Factory which stood (or, possible still stands) opposite to MassMoca in far western Massachusetts. During a labor dispute in the 1870s century, the factory managers fired all the would-be unionizing workers, replacing them with Chinese laborers. We see these Chinese workers in the foreground of the repeated photographic image. Background as it appears to be in this installation shot, the photograph becomes both backstory and groundwork for Starling's subsequent intervention.

What he did was this: harvesting tiny deposits of silver crystals from the regions of the photograph punctured in the installation, Starling inspected the crystals at tremendous magnification with an electron microscope. Then, selecting a few crystals that seemed particularly interesting -- and that were neither excessively "figurative" nor otherwise referential -- he ran them through a 3-D modeling program, which gave them virtual dimensions. From these simulations, Starling then fabricated table-top objects - - globular things generated upon the extensively-modulated form of certain highly magnified crystals selected by the artist and then mediated through a software program.



Now, at least so it seems to Old Ken's pea brain, part of what is happening here is that Starling is offering a literalization and, consequently, a reductio ad absurdam of some of the more squishy sentiments expressed by dear M. Barthes in later life. If it is true that photographs are effectively contact relics embued with the trace of the things they depict, so Starling's objects seem to say, then here are those "depicted persons" -- those Chinese workers -- up close and personal. Or, if that's not convincing, then maybe we might reconsider our stories about exactly what it is that is happening in photographs.



I'll leave all of that to some photo-historian brainiacs and get back to Starling. Because after he was finished with his model-making, he sent them off to -- where else? -- China to have them transformed into these massive and massively-reflective objects.



The fact that the beholder cannot not but see themselves in the "telltale object" (in Starling's words) is certainly part of the point as is the fact that it has had to retrace its steps to China to be re-incarnated. For me, this is some of Starling's more compelling work. It spins its web and enables serious conceptual questioning out of an ordinary artifact, thus escaping the feeling of preciousness that clings to many of Starling's other, frequently art-based (if not art-obsessed) works. And whether or not we want to follow recent philosophers who have theorized the "constrained design" of scientific models as crucial to their ability to generate epistemic agency, it is by Old Ken's lights a liberating notion that a humble photograph of Chinese workers can, monad-like, generate this new world.