ART 308 Project 2 Research

Project 2- Kinetics and Interactivity
ARTIST RESEARCH: Tim Hawkinson and Rebecca Horn

Finding extensive biographical information on Tim Hawkinson proved to be somewhat difficult, but I did learn a few brief facts about his life. He was born in San Francisco, California in 1960. He later attend the University of California where he earned his MFA in 1989. Since then, he has engaged himself in numerous exhibitions and works in the United States and overseas. He currently resides in Los Angeles, California with his wife.
Hawkinson is an interesting subject as far as interactivity is concerned because, while many of his works are directly interactive, a lot of his work is indirectly interactive (which, in my analysis, will bring the actual nature of interactivity into question). As far as Hawkinson’s directly inactive work is concerned, he generally interacts with his audience based on their movements. The best example of Hawkinson’s directly interactive work is Pentecost. This work is rigged with motion detectors which power the mechanisms of the work based on the movement patterns of the audience. However, he indirectly engages his audience through visceral works and rhythm. Creating a visceral work, such as Emotor or Drip, necessarily engages the audience on a deeper level because it involves our bodies, our means through which we experience the world. He also utilizes the environment which contains his audience as a catalyst for his work which is another form of indirect interactivity. Emotor, especially, exemplifies both of my aforementioned points. This work is very visceral; its movements are not characteristic of the average face. It moves as an internal body would move. Its movements are also based on a television screen, a part of the audience’s environment.
Many of his general artistic intentions and themes were mentioned as I described his work: motion, visceral work, and rhythm. He uses motion in many of his pieces primarily to interact with his audience. For example, Emotor moves based on its environment, and, because of the ambiguity of the face, becomes identifiable to all audience members; it’s a mechanized warp of their own face, in a sense. Additionally, nearly all of his work is visceral on some level because, as I mentioned, anything involving the body or instincts appeals to every human being; the body is our commonality, our bond. Rhythm, I have noticed, is also quite important to Hawkinson. He often mentions in interviews the consideration given to rhythms in his work. He says of his piece, Drip, “But beyond I guess for me it’s more about different rhythms. I mean there’s this visual rhythm that is carried throughout the piece, the twists and turns of the material and the pattern created by the sound of the dripping water.” He incorporates rhythm into many of his other works as well, and, in fact, rhythm is a constant concern for Hawkinson and his work.

Sources:
1.) http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/hawkinson/index.html
2.) http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4802237
3.) Pacewildenstein.com

Rebecca Horn was born in 1944 in Michelstadt, Germany. She studied in Hamburg at Hochschule für Bildende Künste (University of Fine Arts). She began studying there in 1964.
Horn also uses interactivity in a bizarre way because she does not set up her work for the audience to interact with. Her work is based around her interaction with a created object which then causes the audience to interact with it vicariously or at least react to it. My second source said of her: “she researched in her performances the new experience of space, the poetical relaying of psychological states and physical limitation. Rebecca Horn's main focus is the interaction of object (or actor), viewer and environment. [She says,] ‘There are only participants.’” Her work, Unicorn, created in 1970, is a decent example of this. I’m not sure whether the woman involved is her or an actor, but, in any case, the person involved wears a large, white horn on her head. She interacts with her environment through the horn, the movements she must make in order to control the horn. An even better example of this is her piece, Bodylandscapes, which is a mask made of pencils. Again, she creates an object that she must learn to use in the world. In this case she must relearn how to draw with a different body part.
So, the themes of Horn's work in general are physical limitations, physical experimentation, and, primarily, interaction. He work is an experiment in object making which then evolves into an interaction with a warped object or an entirely different object. Another example of this is her work, Finger Gloves. She creates gloves with long, pointed black fingers, and then she learns how to move with them in a gallery-oriented space. So, as with much of her work, it is an experimentation with movement and interactivity with an usual object. The audience, then, interacts vicariously through her performances, and they also interact directly simply by watching and respoding to her created objects.

Sources:

1.) http://www.namenderkunst.de/rebecca-horn/e/index.shtml
2.) http://www.rebecca-horn.de/pages/biography.html
3.) http://www.csw.art.pl/new/99/rebecca_e.html

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