Tim Hawkinson, The Whitney Museum/ The Sculpture Garden

Rough materials, around the house/off the shelf /jury rigged DIY (not expensive, but time-intensive) – crazy whimsical/inventive/humorous hand-made robot-poem-instruments.

Very large and very small scales.

Propagated self-portraiture – interconnected community in tree playing percussion instruments with different body parts.

Inflatable man self-portrait in-utero air compression plastic cow sounds.

Mundane objects made into clocks -- insane meditation on time, scale and object significance – one might not even notice these are working clocks -- a hair brush with two hairs as hour and minute hand.

Most of this won’t come across in photo or description. You have to be there. The essence of sculpture.

Tiny toy motor turning many gears increasing in size across the room with courtory cloth gear-teeth until the last wheel turns once every hundred years.

Micro Horton hears a who stuff from body growth materials- nails and hair. Their growth is also a kind of clock. From these materials, tiny bird skeleton, feather.

Percussion tree dripping water controlled by elaborate switch box. Such pleasure in the handmade construction of the switchbox, the careful but simple construction creating a personal feeling from a machine. Transparent mechanics -- you can see how everything works -- hence a feeling of honesty. A punk -I could do that- feeling of permission.

Giant blown-out tire as rearing monster.

Lee Bontecou influence/ dark whimsy.

Gaskets and air pressure/ the tubes and chambers of bodily functioning.

Uberorgan -- At the Sculpture garden on 56th. Too big for the Whitney. Football-field-scale machine/ robot instrument player piano bagpipes.

Cardboard tubes. Plastic sheeting. Aluminum foil. Materials a kid might use to build a robot costume for Halloween. Plays every hour. Plastic bag / body organ / bagpipe shapes hanging from ceiling, tubes crisscrossing everywhere like part of rainforest canopy. Giant “score” “recording” dots and dashes read by electronic eye, going up to the highest point in this outside/inside/ public/private corporate space. Birds flitting around trees. Very low cow moos/Godzilla goose honks from organ. Somehow still unassuming. Enormity, but with handmade feel/open wiring, open construction. Silver cardboard tubes hanging from ropes. Powerful Dr, Seuss vibe. It’s like the opposite of Matthew Barney, who is all about liking it when money/class war/capitalism forces its way into your dreams and calls the creative shots. Hawkinson is about constructive dreams and poetic questions that are undeniable in any space, that can’t be ruined.

What’s incredible is that work this inventive, this poetic, this anti-corporate could even be in this space at all, and that it would work when it is here. This shouldn’t have happened. It exists here the way the birds exist inside this space: they make it work. They are themselves.