Tim HawkinsonCircuits and Sounds

Installation of Tim Hawkinson’s Überorgan (2000) at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2007. Video produced by the J. Paul Getty Museum. Andrea Nasher Collection.

Tim Hawkinson is a collector of musical instruments. While not a musician, he likes “that these little objects have a voice and can be manipulated.”1 The artist’s best-known installation, Überorgan (2000), is a colossal music machine: a system of plastic bags, ducts, and pipes that inflates, bellowing to the score of a player piano. Forced air rushes through metal horn-shaped funnels and several miles of plastic sheeting that form large balloons and extensive tubes snaking through multiple rooms. Covering the square footage of a football field, it breathes and groans like a living organism. The organ is at once an instrument and a gargantuan system of entrails. Hawkinson, who is interested in the logic of systems of both humans and machines, is drawn to “interference patterns—the way overlapping patterns can create another pattern or rhythm.”2

  1. Tim Hawkinson, in “In the Studio: Tim Hawkinson with David Coggins,” Art in America, May 2009, 88. ↩︎

  2. Tim Hawkinson, in “In the Studio: Tim Hawkinson with David Coggins,” Art in America, May 2009, 88. ↩︎