Simon Starling: Crafting the Modern

Abstract

Simon Starling’s work often engages with iconic works of modernist design, drawing on an international range of objects executed in the decades from the 1920s through to the 1960s. These have included well-known designs by figures such as Josef Frank, Paul Henningsen and Charles Eames. Focussing in detail on Starling’s large-scale installation Blue, Red, Green, Yellow, Djungel (2002), based on the Austrian architect Josef Frank’s Aralia textile design of 1928, this article addresses the complex ways in which Starling deploys notions of craft in his carefully staged encounters with modernist practice. Starling’s displays of craft process establish intricate dialogues between past and present, between his own work and that of others, thus facilitating a poetic, but at the same time politicized, meditation on questions of consumption and sustainability. Starling offers an enhanced understanding of modernism as well as a powerful demonstration of craft’s potential to function both as critique and as a means of delineating new utopian visions.