Tim Hawkinson
Signature1993

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Artist or Maker: Tim Hawkinson
United States, California, San Francisco, active Los Angeles, born 1960
Title: Signature
Date Made: 1993
Medium: School desk, paper, wood, and metal; motorized
Dimensions: 37 x 28 x 24 in. (93.98 x 71.12 x 60.96 cm)
Credit Line: Gift of Kristin and Tony Krantz
Accession Number: M.2017.191
Classification: Installation Art
Collecting Area: Modern Art
Curatorial Notes: Tim Hawkinson engages the intellect with a ticklish anti-intellectualism. Habitually, he dances with both science and pseudo-science and uncannily subverts rationality while drawing upon its very attributes. Outgrowths of Hawkinson’s systemic transpositions are his playful, hysterical machines, which share something of the antic spirit of Dada. As early as 1988, Hawkinson began making mechanized sculptures, but Signature was his first work to evoke something akin to artificial intelligence. Mechanically programmed like a player piano, it continuously cranks out intelligible information, in this case a facsimile of the artist’s signature. A signature is the merest physical incarnation of that most ineffable and altogether immaterial concept, the self. An autograph is almost nothing, really: a scribble of ink on paper that alludes to something else—a complete mental picture of a human life—that cannot possibly be contained anywhere. Yet an autograph can carry enormous emotional, intellectual, and monetary value as the rarest physical evidence of a person’s existence in time and space. But Hawkinson’s mechanically produced signature is as devalued as a signature can be, cranked out endlessly, pointlessly, absurdly. The vaunted ‘rationality’ of machines is reduced to a vain conceit, and the signature becomes a kind of vanitas, a tragicomic reminder of death.

Tim Hawkinson
Signature1993

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Tim Hawkinson
Signature1993

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