Tim Lewis has always had a preoccupation with endowing objects with properties they don’t naturally possess. He has made a chair walk across rooms on a pair of crutches, the humanising prop somehow distracting from the improbability of such an event. Lewis’ cast of assisted ready-mades and creature-like constructions have typically explored the boundary between nature and fabrication, mixing intricate mechanics with a dextrous appreciation of both art and artifice.
But when confronted with the latest addition to Lewis’ mechanical inventory, we are aware that the boundary itself has shifted. Pony 2008 is an ostrich-like anatomy constructed from mechanical arms, as athletically human as they are programmatically robotic. Less animated object, more independent entity, Pony is the outcome of Lewis’ attempt to fashion a creature through mechanics in the same way that genetics engineers using science. Moving across the floor towing an empty carriage, the ‘ostrich’ promotes itself as a servant broken free of its master; autonomous rather than interactive, it mocks the notion of the object-as-vehicle by refusing either passenger or puppet-master.
In this exhibition of new work at Flowers Central, Lewis questions the role of the artist as maker just as he critiques an a priori understanding of what is natural. Nature, for Lewis, is a made-up concept, as constructed and as transient as the permutations of an evolving art world and as fickle as fashion. In Code 2008 a crudely mechanical bird is made to nest in the perfectly tapered toe of a Jimmy Choo shoe, its 4 inch red stiletto heel jarring with the rustic bird, which is itself ‘de-naturalised’ through a performance of robotic movements and Morse code.
This new breed of sculptures inhabit a post-natural world where the object is both distrusted and fetishised, and the artist is at once elevated to engineer and ‘absented’ by the autonomy of the entities he creates. A mechanical arm repetitively scrawling a naive facsimile of Michaelangelo’s Face of God brings this partially familiar world into focus: whilst the artist may have given up God in order to become him, the artwork intervenes in this cycle of creationism by asserting an autonomous existence and making the image anew.
