Sarah Stanners\, Post Doc toral Fellow in the Department\, 2009-2010 will present on her work-in-prog ress in this term's only session of Close-up.
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Serendipity and the Work of Simon Starling
Contemporary artist Simon Starling (b. 1967) won the Turner Prize in 2 005 for dismantling a riverside shed in order to build a boat\, only to dis mantle the boat in order to rebuild the shed within a museum. He says that his prize-winning artwork Shedboatshed is "…about trying to connec t things\, connect histories\, connect places\, connect ideas and somehow t he vehicles are a sort of integral part of that process…"1 Starling's conce ptual aims are almost always pursued by physical means. With Autoxylopy rocycloboros (2006)\, the artist salvaged a sunken boat from Scotland' s Lake Windermere\, redeployed the vessel on Loch Long\, equipped it with a steam engine\, and powered the engine with freshly chopped sections of woo d from the boat itself until its demands resulted in its own sinking. Throu gh a series of observations\, made possible by research and the formation o f a network of relationships (both practical and intellectual)\, this artwo rk connected a myriad of ideas to make a statement about society's ridiculo us and self-destructive consumption of resources.
"It’s luck but it’s also just about identifying something’s significance\," says Starling abou t the observations that led him to make Autoxylopyrocycloboros. As a corrective to the understanding of serendipity in scientific innovation\ , Mark de Rond states\, "…serendipity signals the ability to single out ‘co rrect pairs’ of observations that may have nothing in common except that th ey can be meaningfully related." De Rond and others (in a wide ran ge of disciplines) have resuscitated the etymology of 'serendipity' to emph asize that it is an ability\, not an event\, and therefore a consequence of agency\, rather than chance. A serious consideration of serendipity in the visual arts is due and therefore my postdoctoral work aims to assess the c reative mode of meaningfully relating what is seemingly unrelated. Looking to the recent art of Simon Starling\, who recycles or replays sculptural mo des of the twentieth century within a contemporary art framework\, will all ow me to demonstrate that the serendipity observed in the resulting artwork or exhibition installation is an engineered aspect of the artist's creativ e process. Serendipity is a matter of strategy. Some artists speak of using a certain amount of luck to steer their creations\, but I argue that seren dipity is\, in this case\, the agency of the artist.
Between 2006 and 2008\, I had the chance to closely observe Starling’s creation of Infe station Piece: Musselled Moore (2006-08)\, which was commissioned by t he Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto. At the time\, my resear ch was concentrated on Henry Moore’s impact on Toronto and so\, along with many other people\, I became a part of Starling’s working method\, which is open\, and – like a net – cast widely. I found that I was a researcher wat ching another researcher at work. With Starling’s work\, and much conceptua l art in general\, the process is paramount but not often displayed. My cur rent research now aims to reflect on the processes involved in a selection of Starling’s projects and other artists who similarly cultivate the condit ions for serendipity as a part of their working method.
- Sarah Stann ers
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Image: Simon Starling\, St rip Canoe (African Walnut)/Work in Progress\, 2007-2008. Wood en canoe\, mannequin.
LOCATION:Frederic Lasserre Building\, Room 210 GEO:49.267665;-123.255830 URL;VALUE=URI:https://ahva.ubc.ca/events/event/serendipity-and-the-work-of- simon-starling/ ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://ahva.cms.arts.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/37/2021/05/889.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Vancouver BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 DTSTART:20100314T100000 TZNAME:PDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR