Simon Starling

Simon Starling is not an artist who creates new objects for the world. His approach involves reworking, or further evolving, some already existing object. The elegance and functionality of modernism is recast and given fresh dimensions in Starling’s treatment – dimensions both epic and political in character. For instance, when producing a hand-made bike, Starling used steel from a Charles Eames chair – and then recreated the chair using parts of the bike. Through these reconstructions, Starling exposes the historical, political and economic conditions that underlie a design classic, giving new life and relevance to fossilized style icons. And so his frequently somewhat clunky remakes backlash against a clean-scrubbed modernism that has left its mark on wide swathes of our Western cultural history. The remakes represent the hand-made, amateurish and unique, in contrast to the industrially manufactured, expensive and mass-produced product. Remakes, as it were, of ready-mades. Travel is also an important part of Starling’s artistic practice. Like a modern pilgrim, Starling peregrinates from place to place, gathering material and researching his art products. In 2005 he won the Turner Prize, his Shedboatshed going on display in the accompanying exhibition. Originally a wooden shed he came across on the banks of the Rhine when preparing an exhibition in Basel, it was converted by Starling into a boat, which he subsequently used to transport the remaining shed material to Basel. There he rebuilt it in its original form in a museum. This is an artistic practice that involves circularity, creating redundancy within its own closed sequence while unfurling new narratives about the reworked object through every stage of this often elaborate process. In this way, Starling’s work offers a subtle critique of modern cultural history – and by implication, the capitalist world order. (MKT)

Simon Starling, born 1967, England