Photographs from San Francisco’s Folsom Street Fair and Up Your Alley Fair will be projected onto Tim Hawkinson’s Bear sculpture, temporarily bringing together two different histories and presences creating a dichotomy of reverberations and sensations.
Date: Dec 5, 2008Start Time: 5:00pm
Duration: 15 minutes
Location: Calit2 Court Yard
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One walks beyond the engineering buildings to reveal a work from the Stuart collection by Tim Hawkinson, that being “Bear”, 2005. This massive construction in its arduous yet some how precarious positioning looms over you in front of Atkinson Hall. As the sun sets we start to see that there is a projection onto this playful boulder sculpture, a list of photo files. Then promptly at 5:00 (apparently we were a minute early) the images start to appear, a slideshow is looping which displays mostly nude persons in various stages of subserving and dominating one another or simply smiling at the camera. Through conversation with Rodriguez we discover that we are watching the photo documentation of exhibitionism at the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco.
Why project images of bondage oriented exhibitionitionism onto a massive stone construction of a teddy bear? There is an obvious and therefore practically didactic dichotomy of hard material physicality with soft flesh virtuality and the adult images of explicit sex bondage with the youthful image of a child’s teddy bear. In that there is the violent oscillation of sex against innocence and the perhaps an examination of the sensuous versus the sensitive. Beyond that the surface oriented demonstration doesn’t leave space for problematizing or constructing a discourse, but rather inertly presents itself for the viewers enjoyment.