SimonStarling
"British-born, Berlin-based artist Simon Starling's sculptures - an Eames chair made out of a Marin Sausalito bicycle; a Fiat built in Turin, driven to Poland, and reconfigured with Polish parts - arrive as the final outcomes of processes that encompass research, travel, and seemingly absurd personal initiative. By mapping the complex, interconnected physical and cultural trajectories of an object,"
Cuttings
Vernacular of construction
"The choices of materials usually have their origins in mass manufacture rather than, say, art history." Phillip Kaiser, 2006, Interview with Simon Starling in Simon Starling, Cuttings, Hatje Cantz Publishers, p. C6.
Dismantling a system: closed loops
"Phk: You very often dismantle a specific system and literally visualise a deconstruction. How self-referntial are these circular processes?
SS: I think they aspire to a state of closure. They model themselves on a scientific understanding of a closed system. But I think the degree of closure varies quite radically from work to work. These systems are clearly a device for investigating other things and are therefore not self-referential; they talk to the wider world. It isn't reductive in the sense that, say, Robert Morris' The Box with the Sound of its Own Making (1961) is."
- Phillip Kaiser, 2006, Interview with Simon Starling in Simon Starling, Cuttings, Hatje Cantz Publishers, p. C8.
Nonlinear History
"When Manuel De Landa's 
A Thousand Years of nonlinear history was published some years ago, it seemed to come at a perfect moment for me. His interdisciplinary approach to historical processes as they occur in the development of society, language, physical systems such as thermodynamics or geology, etc. seemed very peorsuasive to me."
- Phillip Kaiser, 2006, Interview with Simon Starling in Simon Starling, Cuttings, Hatje Cantz Publishers, p. C10.
Experience as Art / Objectless art in which yous till get to make the object
"Starling does produce objects, but his circuitous travels and peripatetic research are equally part of his finished works. Take, for example, Three Day Sky (2004), a work that relocates a piece of sky from Spain's Tabernas Desert onto a gallery ceiling in Glasgow. As Starling Describes it: 'Over a period of three days... two large solar panels were used to harness 200 amp hourse of energy just outside the secure confines of the Solar Platform of Almeria. This stolen energy from the sunniest place in Europe was then transported to an autumnal Glasgow in two large lead acid batteries where it was then used to power a spray gun to crudely recreate the sky over the Spanish desert. The three days of desert sun captured in the batteries allowed for just over an hour of spraying time.'" -Reid Shier, Gases and Pastas and Lead into Gold, in Simon Starling, Cuttings, Hatje Cantz Publishers, p. C23-24.
"Starling's projects are paradoxical for how they grow in imaginative spaces that are shrouded and unavailable, producing objects that are a small trace of larger, preternatural compulsions. While Starling's extraordinary labour - his travels and research, the amateur craftsmanship and hours spent on outdated and arcane techniques and technologies - could, of course, be detailed and mapped, descriptions might only serve to shutter and close down his artwork's disparate readings and alchemical power." -Reid Shier, Gases and Pastas and Lead into Gold, in Simon Starling, Cuttings, Hatje Cantz Publishers, p. C26.
RePlaced : Cables-Pots-Cables
"Starling tells the story of Mozambique cable thieves " stealing overhead electrical cables and melting them down, casting three-legged pots to disguise the metal and then selling it across the border, where it is sometimes made into electrical cable again and sold back to the power companies to replace missing cables." -Reid Shier, Gases and Pastas and Lead into Gold, in Simon Starling, Cuttings, Hatje Cantz Publishers, p. C25.
Rotary cuttings and GordonMattaClark
"In Rotary Cuttings, Starling cut two circular sections out of the twelve-centimetre thick plaster wall of the Museum fur Gegenwartskunst and, using a large metal arm, rotated them by 180 degress in order to insert the cutting from the bottom of the wall into the hole left by the extraction above, and vice versa... In its method, the work harkens back to Gordon Matta Clark's architectural interventions, and specifically to ''Conical Intersect' (1975), a large cone shaped excision Matta-Clark made in two adjascent 17th century buildings designated for demolition near the Centres Georges Pompidou in Paris. But where Matta-Clark's projects are violently, strikingly reductive, Starling's are elegantly circular - enacting a closed system where what is excised is replaced; that which is created, destroyed; and what is set in motion, returned." -Reid Shier, Gases and Pastas and Lead into Gold, in Simon Starling, Cuttings, Hatje Cantz Publishers, p. C25.
A centrifugal trajectory
"Now, 'site-specific' does not always equal 'site-specific'. Starling has essentially modified the historical concept, inasmuch as he has clearly made short shrift of the unity of time and place, which plays a substantial role in classical site-specific practices. In fact, every one of his projects involves several different times and places. It would almost seem that he exploits the site-specific approach only as an excuse to take off and pursue a centrifugal trajectory. And no effort is too great (travelling, research, etc.) to do jsutice to this diversity." -Kurjakovic, D. 2006. Hide and Seek in Simon Starling?s Scenarios, in Simon Starling: Cuttings. Hatje Cantz Publishers, p C28
Not Process Art
"Starling makes use of what other historical contexts call 'the phenomenology of making' (Robert Morris, 1993. Some notes on the phenomenology of making: the search for the motivated, in Continuous Project Altered Daily, The Writings of Robert Morris: Cambridge/ New York, 1993, pp 71-93) - and what me mihgt call processual art. I intentionally waive citing examples although certain historical predecessors are no doubt relevant and Starling himself has occasional;ly mentioned such practitioners as Asher, Weiner, Burden, etc. But he does not in any way cite process art as such. Far more important is the effect of a certain rhetiruc that emanates from process art and that resonates in Starling's installations." -Kurjakovic, D. 2006. Hide and Seek in Simon Starling?s Scenarios, in Simon Starling: Cuttings. Hatje Cantz Publishers, p C32
Confronted with inversions and reversals
We are constatly cofronted with inversions, mirror images of situations, reversals from positive to negative and back again, and altered proportions." -Kurjakovic, D. 2006. Hide and Seek in Simon Starling?s Scenarios, in Simon Starling: Cuttings. Hatje Cantz Publishers, p C33.