The Hechinger Collection celebrates the ubiquity of tools in our lives with works that incorporate tools and hardware in their imagery. Challenging our expectations, the Collection explores the transformation of utilitarian, everyday objects while appealing to the builder in all of us. In 1978, hardware industry pioneer, John Hechinger, Sr. found his new corporate headquarters efficient but sterile: "the building seemed to rebuke the fantasies that a hardware store inspires. For anyone whose passion is work with his or her hands, a good hardware store is a spur to the imagination." Already the owner of Jim Dine's Tool Box, Hechinger began collecting art that highlighted the company's very livelihood: "It was the hope that surrounding employees with artistic expressions of the same objects they handled in the tens of thousands would bring a sense of dignity to their jobs."

As Hechinger discovered early on, the collection's narrow focus strikes a rich and diverse vein in modern art. At present, the collection includes over 370 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, and folk art, primarily from the post World War II era. Spanning a wide range of styles and themes, the Collection honors the dignity of common tools, where form and function are inextricably linked. From world-recognized to emerging, the more than 255 artists are mostly American, but with notable exceptions, such as Arman, Fernand Léger, Anthony Caro, Oleg Kudryashov, Ben Nicholson, Jean Tinguely, among others.

Another hallmark of the Collection is that it often blurs the distinction between high and low art by identifying art with labor and tools. Jacob Lawrence, three of whose works from the "Builders" series are in the collection, affirms: "I like tools. I like to look at them. I think they are very beautiful. And they have a history. In many of the religious panels of the Renaissance, you see the same tools as carpenters use today. They haven't changed much since then, so they've become a symbol of order and aspiration to me."

Put another way, the Collection highlights the act of creation as work and stresses the simple fact that artists use tools, at times of their own fashioning, to make art: While artists know this, many prefer to make the finished product seem effortless. Much of the magic in the Hechinger Collection, however, stems precisely from the way artists acknowledge the importance of tools and hardware in the artistic process. It is to John Hechinger's credit that as a collector, he not only recognized this early on, but he also made it the overarching theme of the Collection.

In the words of sculptor John Van Alstine, whose Kouros is part of the Collection: "Tools are extensions of the artist's hand, allies in his aspirations and symbols of his labors and ultimate accomplishments." Similarly, evangelist Howard Finster equates tools with civilization and patriotism on a painted Stanley Thrifty saw and its cover: "Tools help build the whole world...Mountains of people use tools...Tools come first and America was built second. Without tools we could not maintain the world. Humans and tools belong together today."

Many of the works in the Collection incorporate found objects as a means to break down the barrier between art and life and as a way to give new life and meaning to the detritus of society. This tradition, which began in the early part of the 20th century with Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, continues to be an active strategy at the dawn of the new millennium. Ken Butler uses an array of tools to fashion his Saw Blades/Scythe/Guitar, which can be played as a percussion instrument. In Tool Dictionary, Colleen Barry-Wilson offers a reliquary of urban discards, by combining the organic delicacy of handmade paper with the industrial permanence of hand tools.

Mr. Imagination, as self-taught artist from Chicago, goes as far as to give his recycled paint brushes distinct personalities. Endowed with faces made from beads, bottle caps, and other cast-offs, they become reincarnations of the artist and the ancient African dignitaries that appeared to him during a four-week coma. Additional works coming out of this folk and decorative art tradition are Beverly Buchanan's Home Town Shotgun Shack, Mark Blumenstein's Saw Bird, and James Surls' Rebuilding. The Collection also includes a Baltimore screen painting, a whirligig, a pickaxe coat of arms, several trade signs and store shingles (a Stillson wrench, an axe, a giant pocketknife and padlock, a climbing man, and assorted painted wooden saws), and a traveling tool board.

Some of the most powerful and enduring works in the Collection pay homage to the intrinsic beauty of the tools' shape and design as evidenced in the studies of tools by Walker Evens, Berenice Abbott, Hans Namuth, and F.L.Wall. Admiring the "fine naked impression of the heft and bite in the crescent wrench," Walker Evans wrote in the 1955 portfolio, Beauties of the Common Tool: "Among the low-priced, factory-produced goods, none is so appealing to the sense as the ordinary hand tool. Hence, the hardware store is a kind of offbeat museum show for the man who responds to good, clear 'undesigned' forms."

Many artists play with function, often overturning preconceptions with great wit and fantasy. Claes Oldenburg, for example, enlarges and transforms a three-way plug into a goofy animated character. Vladimir Salamun improvises on the adage, "two heads are better than one," in his Siamese Hammer Joined at the Handle. Humor makes a regular appearance, as seen in Stephen Hansen's tableaux of hapless everymen at work. Other artists exploit a tool's associative properties. Especially evocative in this regard is Arman's School of Fishes, in which hundreds of visegrips appear to swim in an eye-dazzling pattern. Still other artists explore the collagist possibilities of using tools. Michael Malpass welds together with consummate skill hundreds of tools and metal scraps to create large, steel globes. Artists, including Jim Dine, James Rosenquist and Lucas Samaras, draw attention to tools' omnipresence in our society by creating contemporary icons.

The Hechinger Collection is a wonderful time capsule, tracing the change in production from hand to industrial to computer. Works like Charlie Brouwer's He Always Carried His Own Ladder to the Job and Jonathan Borofsky's Hammering Man are tinged with bittersweet nostalgia about the passing of hand labor: "...the boring, monotonous repetition of the moving arm implies the fate of the mechanistic world...The figure symbolizes the underpaid work in the computerized world." By contrast, Jean Tinguely's Tools 85 is a clanking, irreverent comment on technology and consumption, in which each tool performs its customary action but produces nothing, and in Mark Kostabi's bizarre Power Tool Baby, a featureless alien baby has been enlisted as a worker. More recently, in his digital installation featuring dreams of "changeling shovels," Colin Ives juxtaposes the role of the tool as an extension of the hand and of the mind.

As author Pete Hamill describes in his essay in Harry Abrams 1995 book, Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, the Collection "tells us something about who we are and where we come from. It even suggests, with a smile or a whisper, where we might be going." Already an exhibition series at the National Building Museum, Washington, D.C., we are delighted to share the Collection for the first time with viewers over the internet. We thank Geno Rodriguez for this opportunity, and invite you to enjoy the exuberant creativity, consummate craft, and sheer fun of this exhibition.

Sarah Tanguy
Curator
Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection