Because greater Los Angeles is the land of cars and of plenty of places to park them, it is also home to untold numbers of garage tinkerers, who practically live in the lairs next to their houses, dreaming, puttering, fixing and fiddling.
It is probably safe to say that none of them have spent time recently constructing a frighteningly realistic-looking flying bat using only twist ties and black-plastic RadioShack bags that have been shriveled into bat skin with a heat gun. Or transforming gobs of children's modeling clay into what appears to be a large backbone of a prehistoric animal — except that, if you look closely, the vertebrae are actually tiny oarsmen and the curving ribs their oars. Or piecing together a huge bright-pink collage photograph of an octopus whose suckers are actually close-ups of a man's wet mouth squished up against the glass of a photo scanner.
The tinkerer in question here is a full-time one: the artist Tim Hawkinson, 46, who has become renowned over the last decade for works that push the ideas of personal industry and invention to fantastic and often absurd conclusions: a crude machine that endlessly signs his signature; a bird skeleton made from his fingernail clippings; a contraption that simulates Siberian throat-singing by using plastic soda bottles. For the last several months Hawkinson has been at work on four new pieces that extend his eccentric exploration of the natural world, the body and the detritus of modern life. But the works will serve another purpose as well, that of announcing the intentions of the J. Paul Getty Museum in nearby Brentwood to venture more boldly into the world of contemporary art.
The museum commissioned the works — the bat, the backbone, the octopus collage and an imposing ink drawing evoking a dragon — and displayed them beginning Tuesday, along with a monumental work by Hawkinson called Uberorgan, never before shown in Los Angeles, which will fill the museum's cavernous entry hall with bellows the size of school buses.
The works will not become part of the Getty's collection. But the exhibition will be the first in a series of projects planned by the museum's curators as a way of rethinking how contemporary work can illuminate and play off of the Getty's core collection, of antiquities, Old Master paintings, 18th- and 19th-century decorative arts and photographs. The Getty's photo collection, one of the world's best, is the only component of the museum with significant modern and contemporary holdings.
In past contemporary exhibitions at the museum the connections drawn between new and old were generally explicit. Departures, a 2000 show, asked Los Angeles-area artists like John Baldessari and Lari Pittman to choose pieces from the permanent collection and make works responding to them.
Hawkinson's work might be seen as having more in common with a carnival funhouse than it does with a museum, especially one like the Getty. But Peggy Fogelman, an assistant museum director and the curator working with Hawkinson, said his work struck her as a perfect beginning for the new projects because of his almost obsessively broad interests in materials and subjects, including art-historical ones like portraiture, sculpture and the act of drawing.
"I kind of like to think of this as the Getty's maturing into more confidence and faith in contemporary art, that the connections will be there without having to impose them," said Fogelman, who was visiting Hawkinson's neat concrete-floored studio one recent morning to see the finished works together for the first time. "Hopefully what this inaugurates is a more regular engagement with artists for contemporary projects."
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