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Recycled History

A Conceptual Artist Who Invites Serious Reflection

'A Gold Merchant/James Bond' from 'Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima)' (2010-2011) ENLARGE


'Metamorphology," the needlessly forbidding title of Simon Starling's midcareer retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, is a well-intentioned word designed to express what a shape-shifter the British artist has been.

His engagement with transformation was first widely observed in 2005 when he won the Turner Prize, in part for "Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No. 2)." A documented performance as well as a feat of carpentry, it involved his remaking an old wooden German shed into a boat, piloting it down the Rhine River, then hammering it into a shed again once he reached Basel, Switzerland.

There, in a museum, the leaky structure resides. (It hasn't made the Atlantic crossing. To plug this hole in the survey, Mr. Starling's first major U.S. museum show, the curators have substituted a more recent nautical adventure.)

As with many Conceptual artists, a lengthy wall text is required for his pieces to make sense. Some visitors may continue to feel, even after learning about all the Modernist art-history references that guided his hand, that the destination isn't worth the trip.

Not that you need a graduate degree to be impressed by Mr. Starling. Convoluted though his thinking can be, his art has evident respect for labor and skill, avoids sensationalism and mockery, and invites serious reflection, even laughter. The environmental warnings embedded in many pieces are never doctrinaire.

His primary concern is archaeological. He wants to expose, as senior curator Dieter Roelstraete puts it, "the accrued histories of things." The fewer than 20 works here—sculpture, photography, film and video installation—faithfully represent Mr. Starling's whirring, digressive mind.

Take, for instance, the five platinum prints in "One Ton II" (2005) in the first room. The scene in the photographs is a pit mine in South Africa. The weighty title, we are informed, refers to the amount of ore that must be disgorged from the earth to extract 28.3 ounces of the precious metal used to make these prints.

In other words, what we see in a work of art is, in part, the materials that compose it, and those in turn are the residue of human muscle and ingenuity, and of economic forces and industrial processes we should be more aware of.

Born in England in 1967 and living now in Copenhagen, Mr. Starling studied at the Glasgow School of Art, an institution famous for training artists to be attuned to the social context of making and exhibiting art. (During the past 15 years its graduates have dominated the annual Turner Prize. The list of others from there who have either won or been short-listed includes Douglas Gordon, Nathan Coley, Richard Wright, Martin Boyce and Karla Black.)

Mr. Starling tries to be cognizant of place when designing or installing his art. "Bird in Space" (2004), made for one of his New York gallery exhibitions, refers to a landmark legal case from 1926 when Constantin Brancusi's bronze sculpture was seized by U.S. Customs and taxed as a functional metal utensil. In 1928 a judge ruled in Brancusi's favor, a decision that opened the door to artists eventually having the right to declare almost anything a work of art.

Mr. Starling's updated version consists of a 4,900-pound slab of steel that leans against a wall. The skinny pedestal for this massive object, which could be a 1970s-era Richard Serra, is a trio of helium-filled inflatable rubber bladders. Lettering on the slab declares it came from a foundry in Romania, Brancusi's birthplace. What isn't visible is that the metal was imported into the U.S. only after years of deal-making over steel tariffs by unions, world-trade organizations and politicians, including George W. Bush and Tony Blair. By extension, probably every object found in any museum in the world is there not only to showcase artistic talent across the ages, but also because behind-the-scenes forces, including tax laws, have fostered their collection and display.

Mr. Starling often tunnels so deeply into art politics that any chance of having a more direct communion with an audience is lost. "Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima)"—an installation from 2010 combining a 30-minute narrated video projected on a screen with carved wooden masks on sticks—has more walk-on players and heavy themes than a PBS miniseries. Selected here for its relationship to local history, it alludes to Henry Moore's sculpture "Nuclear Energy" (1964-66) at the University of Chicago, installed to commemorate the site of the world's first nuclear reactor. Not content with that episode for drama, Mr. Starling braids it together with the stories of art historian and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt, Ian Fleming and James Bond, financier and art collector Joseph Hirschhorn, and Colonel Sanders. Interwoven with their biographies is a Noh drama about a 16th-century Japanese nobleman.

It's not that Mr. Starling fails to connect the dots between, say, Hirschhorn's shady uranium investments in Canada and Modern art and the atomic age; it's that the tale is better suited to an essay or a novel or a documentary film. The Japanese masks of the characters, which we see being carved in the video and which occupy one half of the room, are superfluous.

"Autoxylopyrocycloboros" (2006), among Mr. Starling's most popular works, is more effective and compact. Marking his return to the water and to reclamation, it's a 4-minute slide show that chronicles his 4-hour ride in a small wooden steamboat on Scotland's picturesque Loch Long.

He had rescued the antiquated craft from the bottom of the lake. During the course of his trip, Mr. Starling and his fellow crew member ruthlessly dismantle the boat, sawing off the gunnels and then working their way down, feeding boards into the stove that powers the engine. By the end nothing is left but the floor, and the boat sinks again to the depths of the lake.

With a title that joins Greek words for wood, fire and circularity, the piece has been read as a caution against our heedless use of the earth's resources. But it could just as easily be seen to be in favor of Cold War energy solutions; Loch Long is also home to two of Britain's nuclear submarine bases. Environmental politics aside, it's also like a silent film comedy: Laurel and Hardy go to sea.

Mr. Starling's career, according to the jargon of some curators, has been about "interrogating" Modernism. With its numerous allusions to Marcel Duchamp, Brancusi, Moore and other 20th-century artists and movements, his work is clearly well versed in the divagations of history. He has a scholar's nose for luminous facts that have been dimmed or buried by time.

But to walk through a show of his is like being assigned to read commentaries when you'd rather be spending a few hours with the original. Long before Mr. Starling and his mate burned their own boat, Buster Keaton stripped the wood off a train to power it in "The General," as did the Marx Brothers in "Go West." In the past, those who created funny bits about the paradoxical need to destroy things to survive were called entertainers, while anyone who does the same thing today, more self-consciously and less humorously, is called a Conceptual artist.

Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

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