Tim Thyzel
by Joe Hill

Art in America
October 2000
For "Street Works" his New York debut, the German artist Tim Thyzel presented seven groups of photographs and sculptures that reveal a refreshingly witty conceptual vision. Rucksack (1992), the earliest photo group on display, consists of six C-prints depicting the artist in Hamburg wearing an eco-green public trash can as a backpack. Views of Thyzel standing beside a twin bin, sitting atop another or walking near other young backpackers set the tone for his subsequent preoccupations, ranging from performance and documentary photography to sculpture and installation. The single photograph Double Arm Cast (1994) shows the unfortunate artist, his arms welded together in a U shape by plaster bandages, seated in a train and oblivious to the concerned and befuddled expressions of elderly travelers in the adjacent handicapped seating. In both these early works, questions of the artists' dis-empowerment and marginal place in society readily come to mind.
An interest in refuse and the individual's difficult relationship to the urban environment informs all of the works on display, but Thyzel's humor turns what could be a depressing analysis of contemporary life into an amusing, even optimistic form of resistance. Moveable Park (1999) is another eye catching, utilitarian oddity in the public realm. Thyzel planted a 6-by-3-foot flatbed hand truck with grass and had himself photographed on it around New York. He crosses Fifth Avenue, Abbey Road-Style; reads a book beneath a turquoise-striped beach umbrella in Father Demo Square, at Bleecker and Sixth; lounges on his precious rectangle of turf in a paved Chinatown park where he almost loses it to a band of enterprising children.
The most unusual and resonant works in the exhibition, however, were the sculptural objects. Thyzel's Crystal are Clorox jugs cast in concrete (his preferred sculptural medium) and joined together in irregular molecule-like arrangements of varying sizes. Installed together, these knobby sci-fi works suggest a squadron of benign satellites or probes from another world. More engaging still are the Wheelies, concrete casts of miscellaneous cardboard boxes that have a surprising range of surface textures due to packaging tape and corrugation. With only one or two wheels attached (often the lilliputian office-cart type), few of these pitiful objects could achieve mobility. The sturdier Wheelies, derived for a child's plastic shopping cart or a metal fold-up adult version, have been crushed or therwise rendered useless by the wieght of the material. Though Thyzel clearly sees urban life as survival of the fittest and cleverest, even the physically challenged of these improbably recycled objects offers an inspiring hint of heroic perserverance.