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Casey Kaplan

Lockdown Lamps

Over a 6-week period during the Coronavirus lockdown in Copenhagen, a time of relative isolation for a normally peripatetic artist, Simon Starling has produced 10 new home-made lamps inspired by Italian designer Achille Castiglioni's iconic 1962 Toio lamp. The Home-made Castiglioni Lamp series continues Starling's ongoing interest in the origins of familiar design objects.

Simon Starling
"Home-made Castiglioni Lamp (Buffalo)", 2020
Oil can, concrete, Polyurethane foam, fishing rod, steel,
linen thread, car headlamp, transformer, luggage strap, cable
85 x 8.26 x 4.9” / 216 x 21 x 12.5 cm

Simon Starling
"Home-made Castiglioni Lamp (Motaquip)", 2020
Oil can, concrete, Polyurethane foam, fishing rod, steel,
linen thread, car headlamp, transformer, luggage strap, cable
75.19 x 7.87 x 4.52” / 191 x 20 x 11.5 cm

Starling’s new series of sculptures re-prototype Castiglioni’s Toio lamp and return a presently mass-manufactured design back to its roots in a number of readily available found objects, in line with certain past works that track particular materials or ideas back to their origin. “HOME-MADE EAMES (FORMERS, JIGS & MOLDS)”, a 2002 photographic work by Starling, playfully reimagined the Eames-designed, first industrially manufactured plastic chair into handmade copies. In 2001, Starling began a series titled "Home-made Henningsen, PH5”, for which the artist replicated aluminum modernist hanging lamps designed by the architect Poul Henningsen (1894–1967). Using discarded and recycled materials, in opposition to the factory-made, high-concept yet affordably-priced originals, Starling aims to return objects “to a kind of innocent state, taking an existing object and rethinking it again, as if for the first time.” (Quoted in Simon Starling: Cuttings, p.C5, 2006).

LEFT: Simon Starling
"HOME-MADE EAMES (FORMERS, JIGS & MOLDS)", 2002 (detail)

RIGHT: Simon Starling
“Home-made Henningsen PH Lamps”, 2005 (detail)

Throughout the process of making each lamp, a number of large format photographs were developed in the artist's studio darkroom, made to document the process. The darkroom was built to record and consider the work unfolding in the studio through documentation. Like painters observing the evolution of their canvases through a mirror’s reflection, this process offered a certain critical distance.

Starling’s studio, Copenhagen

Starling's studio, Copenhagen

Materials in Starling’s studio, Copenhagen

Starling's studio, Copenhagen

Typical of Castiglioni’s approach to evolving designs from a collage of repurposed objects – in this case a fishing rod and a car headlamp – the re-prototyped lamps begin to evoke their possible origin stories.

Simon Starling
"Home-made Castiglioni Lamp (Super Visco-Static)", 2020
Oil can, concrete, Polyurethane foam, fishing rod, steel,
linen thread, car headlamp, transformer, luggage strap, cable
77.1 x 7.8 x 4.5” / 196 x 20 x 11.5 cm

Simon Starling
"Home-made Castiglioni Lamp (Texaco)", 2020
Oil can, concrete, Polyurethane foam, fishing rod, steel,
linen thread, car headlamp, transformer, luggage strap, cable
75.5 x 8.6 x 4.7"/ 192 x 22 x 12cm

Perhaps, they conjure images of the Milan-based designer making an escapist fishing trip by car through the Italian countryside.