Human body in its many forms
Pace Gallery in Palo Alto is sparkling. Or at least, the large, rotating crown at the entrance is.
Set on a pedestal that resembles a walker, the crown, titled “Juggernaut,” is the central piece of Tim Hawkinson’s exhibition, “All that glitters, Must come down.” Hawkinson, a San Francisco native, is best known for experimenting with self-image and personal transformation by working with his own body in unexpected ways.
In a show titled “Garden Variety,” he used his own fingernails to create bird skeletons, and casts of his lips for a globe-like sculpture. It is this “endless variety,” the many unconventional uses of the body, that earned the show a spot as one of The Chronicle’s top 10 visual arts events of 2016.
“Juggernaut” is a bit different.
Hawkinson speaks about the work in a way that threads of connection emerge between his obsession with the human form and the bejewelled sculpture; the piece is about another kind of change: adolescence.
When talking about the title, he points to the walker-
like construction under the crown. That, he explains, is the Juggernaut. In Hindu theology, the Juggernaut was a large wheeled caravan that bore sacred images of gods from one palace to another. Hawkinson says it was known for its unyielding quality, even running over some onlookers, as if it were not a human creation, but rather a natural phenomenon. This relentlessness mirrors what he calls the “unstopability of growing up,” as the tiara makes a passage from one stage of life to another.
“Really, it’s about womanhood,” says Hawkinson, whose daughter, 14, is at a turning point herself. The crown reminds him of children’s plastic toy tiaras — convincing at first, but upon a closer look it’s clear they are poorly made. This, for Hawkinson, parallels the experience of growing up and realizing that things aren’t as shiny as they once seemed.
“Juggernaut” is, in fact, made of everything you wouldn’t expect: pool ladders, resin and more than 400 egg cartons that make up the crown, representing the number of times a woman will ovulate in her life. In this way, it is more reminiscent of his other works focusing more explicitly on the human form.
In the next room, pale body parts erupt from a denimlined bathtub. The inspiration for the piece came when Hawkinson was in his own bath: “I was lying in the bathtub and my knee was breaking through the surface ... and my knee was a whale!” That observation engendered the work’s coy literary title: “Bather (Moby Dick).” If you look closely, you can make out a whale head in the crevice of the emergent knee, and fins formed from awkwardly poised toes.
“He’s been into body stuff,” says Hawkinson’s sister, Lori Staples, standing in the denim room with her daughter, Alexis. “He’s always finding a new way to ...” Staples trails off and her daughter cuts in: “explore the body.”
Alexis Staples looks down at the piece next to her, which — as if to prove the point — looks like a disassembled and blindly reassembled series of body parts. “What? My homunculus-looking thing?” Hawkinson asks. The piece, called “Venus,” alludes to the paleolithic figurine Venus of Willendorf. Except in Hawkinson’s version, “The knees turn into breasts, there’s a small head, big butt.” As with “Juggernaut,” the work engages in a long tradition of art history and literature, but with a gendered twist.
The room is scattered with these “homunculus” body parts. And if you look closely, you start seeing more and more denim, not just in the bathtub, but in between the nebulous knee-breast of these pieces. Hawkinson talks about how denim is ubiquitous — walking down the street you see many people wearing jeans with skin poking through holes in the knees or thighs. But the denim, perhaps unwittingly, also contributes to the exhibition’s focus of womanhood.
Denim Day, April 24 every year, commemorates victims of sexual assault by encouraging participants to wear denim garb. Even inadvertently, the fabric suggests the threat to women’s bodies that accompanies physical maturation; growing up doesn’t just mean seeing the world in a new way, but also being seen differently by the world. These unwitting links between “Juggernaut” and the rest of the pieces give the collection a depth and continuity that aren’t apparent on a first pass.
Even so, the tone of the collection isn’t ominous or politically weighty — it’s quite the opposite.
“I just think it’s so clever,” Pace Palo Alto President Elizabeth Sullivan says when looking at “Bather (Moby Dick),” her favorite piece.
And she’s right. There’s something whimsical about his titular playfulness; it is this childlike spirit paired with the eerily unidentifiable body parts that make the work distinctly Hawkinson.
Each of his pieces, whether made from plaster or nail, cloth or carton, is a state of transformation. It’s not just his daughter’s womanhood, but his own aging body.
“It’s about what’s on the verge of becoming about something else,” he says, something that any teenager, mother or recent college graduate can understand, but that is often hard to confront.
In a way, that’s what Hawkinson has been doing his whole career. After walking through “All that glitters, Must come down,” one gets a sense that Hawkinson has always been concerned with points of transition, of becoming. By putting these strange, bulky, disfigured human parts in front of people, he forces his audience to look transition in the face — or at least in the strangely whale-like knee.