Here's a brief and wildly over-generalized history of art:

Once upon a time, art had a simple purpose: it imitated life. The Mona Lisa, the self-portraits of Rembrandt, the Death of Marat – pictures of the world, of life. Then art started to veer off course a bit. The Impressionists began to blur the boundary between the depiction and the act of depicting. Then the Cubists started taking some serious liberties with form, the Fauves with color, the Futurists with time. This all came to a head with the Abstract Expressionists, who finally flattened the picture frame and squashed out of it any lingering hint of depiction. (A Pollock isn't a picture of anything, except paint.)

For decades afterward, the art world carried the Abstraction stick up its butt. This meant that the imitation of life wasn't something an "earnest" artist could do anymore. Any type of depiction that followed was of the Campbell soup-can variety: really another kind of abstraction, just on a meta-level. So for a long time, it seemed nobody knew how to depict life anymore, except in a "been-there, done-that" kind of way.

And just in time to save the day, comes Tim Hawkinson.  Emotor, shown above, is a self-portrait sliced into pieces and rigged up to a series of motorized wires. The resulting portrait is in constant motion through a series of captivatingly weird facial expressions. The eyes wink and widen, the lips sneer and smile, the eyebrows arch and flatten, in a fluid and creepy ballet that is an imitation of life, but somehow more than that: it's an imitation of being alive.

Much of Hawkinson's vast and wacky ouevre imitates life, but never in the classical sense. Pentecost  features a series of hanging figures that drum out a syncopated rhythm with their bodies against a massive tree-like structure. Blind spot is another self-portrait, depicting the parts of the artist's own body that he can't see – his face, back, shoulder-blades, and anus – sewn together into a single contiguous surface, forming an entirely new species of creature.  Signature Chair is a plodding and faithful mechanical creature, which tirelessly signs the artist's signature on a piece of paper, drops it on the floor, and starts over with a fresh piece.

None of these pieces are depictions of life in the pre-Abstraction sense, but something altogether new: they explores that weird, wonderful, and genuinely innovative place where the imitation of life becomes something alive in itself.