#timsilver

Monday March 11th 2013 – PSM Lecture Series – Tim Silver

Australian artist Tim Silver creates sculptures, typically through a casting process, that force their audience to contemplate ideas of transformation and decomposition. Unlike many sculptures, Silver’s work opposes monumentality. It is not intended to last forever. It is intended to interact with the world. He discusses art and exhibition as spectacle, “presenting something not to be preserved”. His early works were often formed from perishable food goods, chocolate, bubblegum, fairy floss… Chew me up and spit me out featured action figures molded from already chewed bubblegum crawling across a gallery floor. Not everything Silver works with is edible, he also used blue-tac, silicone rubber, crayon, and eventually began to make his own blue watercolor pigment from a 1930’s recipe. 

(Tim Silver 2004)

Silver is interested in entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. He cites Robert Smithson and his ideas about entropy in the arts as a source of inspiration, “all systems and all things are in a certain state of decomposition and demise”. Because all of Tim’s work decays or erodes, documenting it is paramount. However, he hesitates to label this documentation as such due to its highly stylized nature. The photographs are works of art in and of themselves. An interesting point made by Silver was how important it is to limit, monitor and control the images of the installation process as in many cases, the images are all that will remain of the original work.

 (Tim Silver 2011)

 It’s hard to avoid comparing and contrasting Tim’s work with Todd McMillan’s (who spoke to us last week). Obviously the mediums are vastly different, but both artists feature in their own work. What I found intriguing is that as McMillan’s work matured, the transition saw him leaving the frame. The opposite is true of Silver’s work. His early pieces feature subjects that are readily recognisable, cars and skateboards and action figures; but his later work features casts of himself. The shift in his work involved an introspective train of thought, moving away from the decay of inanimate objects and material possessions, and towards ideas of mortality and our own inevitable demise.

  Image References:

Tim Silver, Adrift, 2004, Museum of Contemporary Art, viewed March 17th 2013,

http://www.mca.com.au/touring-exhibition/exposure

Tim Silver, Untitled (bust), 2011, Art Collector, viewed March 17th 2013,