T H E P H E N O M E N A O F M AT E R I A L / D I S P O S A B L E C U LT U R E
Aaron Hauck, High Technology Forager; Always, 2011, enamel on acrylic, 40 x 18 x 6 inches. SHANNON FITZGER ALD, C UR ATOR
Aarron Hauck’s installation Transmutations of the Stone Age and “I Generation” is a contemporary archeology and anthropology inspired by the tools used by the prehistoric Clovis culture that inhabited regions in North America (including Oklahoma) approximately 13,500-13,000 years ago. In a smart threedimensional inquiry into material culture and social history, Hauck explores cultural construction and its impact on society and the environment. Hauck’s exhibition focuses on the evolution of Clovis culture, a Paleo-Indian culture characterized by and named for its mass-production of distinctive stone and bone projectile tools known as the Clovis point, first discovered in North America in the 1930s. As masters of their environment, Clovis culture invented and manufactured various sized bifacial fluted points of superior technology that served as a tool critical to their survival through usage and trade. Hauck, intrigued by the culture’s absolute reliance on these tools—instruments produced for and by its own people—creatively considers the evolution of tools and trade, the local and global, and imports and exports to address a contemporary material economy and society’s all-encompassing obsession with technology, gadgets, access, and communication. With humor, Hauck combines astute observation with subtle alarm to explore commodity and consumerism that resoundingly exposes an inherently fractured history of disconnect, and perhaps discontent, as prominently found in the most connected generation in world history, the internet generation, better known as the I Generation. This generation grew up on technology and without a frame of reference to the past, they possess an expectation of always being present, a drive to be first, and participate in a peer race in which their engagement with technology is a mindset critical to the construction of their identity. Hauck exploits this dependency with the creation of a 21st century Clovis point, ripe for consumption anew. Exaggerated in scale and with an exacting color palette and heightened plasticity the Clovis points act as commercial signage and comprise seductive wall and floor pieces that dazzle and attract the eye. Only upon closer scrutiny does the viewer realize that the glossy combinations are direct visual quotes abstracted from the branded identity of the worlds’ biggest corporations: Wal-Mart, Target, AT&T, Coke, McDonald’s, and Apple. The artist purposefully selected these companies based on the direct impact they have had on his life, beginning as an infant, and for the potential they have to affect his entire generation. In combination, the installation successfully underscores the magnitude of these profitable engines’ global impact and worldwide dominance. This transference communicates a sense of absurdity, waste, and alarm. In a second series, Hauck has manufactured nearly 100 hand-made, individually cast polyester and polyurethane Clovis points that are historically accurate in scale. Presented in locked display cases as an archaeological find or recently discovered cache, each point is individualized and “branded” with a wide variety of colors, textures, adornments, and hand painting. Read now as signature ritual implements, they function to parody the way contemporary society seeks to personalize, stamp, tag, mark territory, and own everything. Hauck’s multilayered exploration into the nature of cultural mining and appropriation, through a faux archeological lens, provides a contemplative space for thinking about our own individual, social, and environmental footprint. Hauck’s transmutations direct ones’ attention to the phenomena of disposable culture. Just as outdated technology, mobility, and the environment led to the decline of the Clovis population, Hauck subtly warns of a similar fate. Shannon Fitzgerald is an independent curator and writer in Oklahoma City.
22
23