Written by Gregory Woollgar

Simon Starling refers to his art as storytelling*. He is invested in ideas loaded with specificity and particulars. Viewers can usually only unpack his works by encountering a back story and sifting through the facts. To bridge this distance between the final work and their dense inspirations, Starling writes heavily about his pieces. They are the essential crutch for the museum-goer. The facts and Starling’s writings on his pieces are akin to data, but more specifically they function like recipes. These recipes tell stories; usually the sidebar histories of the famous innovators and projects of Modernism. Most times as a docent, I rely heavily on these texts. In my tours, I discuss the facts of the stories Starling tries to tell, but lack time to discuss their aesthetic intentions. This is very true for his work Three White Desks, (2007/08).

The story of the work orbits a writing desk and the workings of two young creatives in 1930s London. The two creatives are Francis Bacon (1909-1992), the famous British painter, and Patrick White (1912-1990), the Australian writer and recipient of the 1973 Nobel prize for literature. Prior to amassing any artistic success, the two men in their mid-twenties were friends in London, where Francis Bacon worked as a furniture designer for a number of years. Bacon gifted his friend with a writing desk, which remained in White’s possession until he moved to Sydney in 1947 and could not bring the desk due to shipping costs. Once in Sydney, Patrick White wanted to recreate this desk, leading him to commission a cabinetmaker to make a replica based off of a single photograph, without consulting any dimensions or diagrams. The resultant desk was a very imprecise facsimile and possibly could have been offensive to the original designer had he seen it. This small history of a desk tells us this story of a slightly obsessive act of repetition. With a bit of hyperbole, Simon Starling revisits this story of replicating. He recycles this history by contracting three different desk-makers from around the world to create reproductions via a feedback loop. This network begins in Berlin with a copy made from the original photograph of the 1932 desk, which is then photographed via mobile device and sent to Sydney, Australia. A copy of the copy is produced and a new photograph is sent to London, England, where another furniture maker creates a copy of a copy of a copy for the final iteration. Three White Desks displays these three desks together on top of the shipping crates in which they circulate the world. The accompanying photo print helps visualize some, but not all, of the stories invested in the original desk designed by Francis Bacon. This work foregrounds a discussion of copying and the significance of information networks to modern life: the desks begin as material matter turned to immaterial data and then manifest again as tangible objects. It is significant that the original desk is no longer present and the repetitions are created off of this absence. They are simulations of something invisible – there is no original desk anymore. As these desks mutate form from wood to pixels and from code back to material, I think of the transmission of some ideal form. Each desk borrows certain elements from, and the essence of, the lost original, though none are precise copies.

Simon Starling’s art also operates aesthetically, a visual reading can direct the viewer to new or deeper interpretations. For as much as the guiding stories enliven his works, attention needs to be paid to the formal aspects of the pieces – they divulge much about Starling’s artistic intentions and gestures. Francis Bacon’s original 1932 desk was modelled after the precedent desks by high modernist designers such as the Bauhaus school and Eileen Grey. The white writing desk is almost purely functional, devoid of anything non-essential. The smoothness of the white-varnished wood reads as streamlined. Bacon’s desk is built of flat planes, each a horizontal rectangle. The geometry of the desk is well-weighted. The open space for sitting is offset to the left, but the cupboards are measured as to create a balanced composition. The longer cupboards to the left appear to be roughly the width of the chair gap plus the narrower cupboards on the right. The only adornment is seen in the highly-polished chrome handles which echo the horizontality of the geometry. The desk is not entirely austere though – the writing surface is smooth white leather, exemplifying Francis Bacon’s eye for simplicity and sleekness.

One of the most striking elements of Francis Bacon’s desk is how acutely Bacon, the young untrained designer, was able to align himself to the fundamentals of modernist design. His desk sits definitely in the tradition of Le Corbusier, Robert Mallet-Stevens, and Marcel Breuer. Their design innovations are numerous and storied in the history of design. Functionality and banality reign in the design of Modernism. The tenants of this philosophy are the simplicity of form, industrialism for mass production and a blankness of expression. Adornment is forgone; each element of an object is essential to its purpose. Nothing is extraneous in the design language of Modernism. Most objects are rendered flat with unexpressive colours and yield a certain utilitarianism. Some of these virtues include notions of universality and internationalism. For example, a desk in England should look the same as a desk in Brazil as both are part of a global design language. This method of material production is efficient to a remarkable degree.

For all of the accomplishments arising from this design philosophy, a miasma lingers. There is a certain tinge of whitewashing and blandness in this style. The negation of artistic self-expression and the insistence on uniformity signals a mild authoritarianism. Modernist design was not envisioned to be a space of exuberance, experimentation, and uniqueness. It is stark. It is curious that Francis Bacon so readily mimics this bland style, when his eventual artistic career is marked by decrying rigidity. His paintings are so expressive and work against the grain of the universalizing and apolitical avant-garde of the designers he copied in his youth. The aesthetic of his furniture – and ultimately Simon Starling’s recycling of the same – is perplexing then considering the richness of Bacon’s signature artistic expression. When Starling returns to Bacon’s desk, Three White Desks is equally dry and formulaic. The work is a simple instruction and administration – a copy turned into an image and back to a copy and so on. Starling does not give space for lively or colourful artistic expression. Rather, each of the desks is the fulfillment of a rigid task or contract.

At the aesthetic core of Simon Starling’s work, we see the reiterations of a fundamentally Modernist work of design. I wonder what Starling hopes to relay in the work. How do we look at this work visually? Are these three repetitions a celebration of the Modernist design innovations, which Francis Bacon so beautifully recreated? Or are we to see this as a senseless exercise of echoes critiquing the bland design language of Modernist design? I chose the latter.

*Albrethsen, Pernille. “Ten Questions: Simon Starling.” Kunstkritikk. Web.