The humour that pervades Lockhart's work provides a key motif, and brings consistency to the variety of media and forms of display. It both undermines and underscores his installations, collages and sculptures. The joke is repeated ad infinitum in his collages of album sleeves and book covers, where he carefully grafts extracted material onto each surface as a way of spelling out text or adding an image. Do-Re-Me (2008) a hand-cut and reconstructed vinyl record cover of the Sound of Music, or Some Die Hard (2008) a collage made from the cover of the eponymous book, play out onomatopoeia and tautological jokes. If camouflage hides an object, this strategy reveals it twice. Moreover, what is physically subtracted or added is not intended to transport the viewer elsewhere, but serves to underline and reiterate what is already present. The viewer undertakes a journey but arrives once more at the exact spot of departure.  Such strategies of circularity were extensively used by conceptual artists, notably Bruce Nauman, Joseph Kosuth and Ed Ruscha.  Repetition adds nothing, but nothing is not nothing, it is something.

The repetitive and predictable joke works similarly to the pratfall, beloved of silent cinema. The critic Jörg Heiser maintains that the slapstick tumble is closely associated with Modernity, arguing that increased mechanization and thus control renders the human body awkward and prone to pratfalls; this accumulation of similar events may, at first sight, seem simply repetitive, inuring the spectator to its earlier delights. However, though repetition lowers the threshold of what is acceptable, it can actually augment the expectation and enjoyment of the action; in cinema, slapstick teaches us that, although we sense the inevitability of the next physical gag, there is no way of telling how it will occur, and it is the combination of knowing and not knowing that heightens our involvement.

'In being told a joke, we undergo a particular expression of duration and digression, of time literally being stretched out like an elastic band. We know that the elastic will snap, we just do not know when, and we find this anticipation rather pleasurable. It snaps with the punch-line, which is a sudden acceleration of time, where the digressive stretching of the joke suddenly contracts into a heightened experience of the instant.'

Humour is particularly effective in environments that require sobriety and a fixed purpose, such as in places of work. These are locations where even minor transgressions and acerbic commentary have an increased impact due to the stratified and often repressive nature of work.

Lockhart refers to the hieratic world of commerce and its mass produced objects while borrowing terms from both the office and the science laboratory (research, observe, experiment, present). By foregrounding mock-corporate iconography, as in Flat Pack Mini Mac (2008), he examines the codified absurdity of the workplace with its empty hardware, and well-rehearsed actions and exchanges: vacant public gestures that filter through to the private world of the individual, tainting and marring every intimacy. Show me a Happy Worker and I'll show you a Liar (2004) shows a series of partitioned spaces displaying objects, images and diagrams employed in the workplace: computers, screens, graphs. His title is once more tautological, simply reiterating what we already know, that we do not work for pleasure. This statement of the obvious leaves no room for the apologists of the office, yet, accustomed as we are to covert messages and hidden meanings, its bluntness nevertheless succeeds in destabilising its propositional message. It is in the nature of propositions that they can be both true and false, thus inferring that the liar may be the speaker, the artist.

In the present leisure has been directed toward consumption, and unlike work, remains largely unsupervised. Without control, consumption may lead to hoarding, an affliction known as Collyer Syndrome, named after two brothers in New York who were found dead in their house in 1947. Having spent years hoarding things as a way of barricading entry to the dwelling, they were both found dead by the police who had responded to neighbours' complaints, engulfed by the multitude of material.

Lockhart's Memphis Soul Stew (2010) and Tron (2002) both feature storage spaces that have crossed the boundary into accumulation. Notable examples of this tendency can be seen in the work of Dieter Roth, Jason Rhoades and Tomoko Takahashi. In their installations the arrangement of objects, both crafted or found, proposes a form of archive that has overcome its own taxonomy. The existence of a system is usually referred to as a key distinction between the collector and the accumulator: the former's holdings are carefully archived and displayed, while the latter's activities are characterised by chaotic accretions that eschew reason and control. It is curious then that one of Lockhart's more controlled installations is entitled Accumulator (2003), which comprises groups of similar objects, including defunct speakers, arranged as a choir of silent voices. However, the tendency to collect too much leads the collector into a double crisis; taken to its limit, overloaded with objects and data, the system is threatened with collapse, and, in addition, the individual's own position as controller becomes unstable, since, according to the philosopher Jean Baudrillard, he collects himself. As objects have the upper hand, the subject capitulates, thus revealing a pathological relationship. Artists, unlike collectors, may indeed be drawn to this marginal and precarious state, since the nature of things is revealed in extremis. Perhaps it is then inevitable that the artist, drawn to experimentation, is destined to hoard. This activity exposes a form of process, a state of constant becoming, in which nothing is fixed or stable, in which the ordinary undergoes a transformation into art. It is this power over the mundane, to select and to name that gives a kind of added value to the artistic process.

Lockhart's recent research has taken him to revaluate the nature of craft. Although his work does not exhibit traditional skills that might be associated with making, his sculptures and objects display a dedication to tactility and palpable, emotional surface value.  He wonders if  'objects with "emotionally soft edges", [would] begin to allow deeper levels of interaction […] and offer more than the sum of their parts?'  It is unsurprising then, that the artist's search has taken him to work directly with members of the public, through participatory events and consultancy. Objects, after all, reveal themselves in the patient process of making, and then, once more, in the encounter with the audience.

'In order to see things, we must first of all look at them as if they had no meaning, as if they were a riddle', advises the historian Carlo Ginzburg, to begin with nothing. We read objects and understand the world around us by observing how things fit together in chains of signification. But even in the everyday, objects are far from simple and unambiguous. Objects and processes are the result of often complex social and cultural traditions. The BBC4 radio programme A History of the world in 100 Objects sets out to examine key artefacts from the British Museum, but the object functions in the way of a tail, which, when pulled, reveals a much larger creature. The artefact therefore becomes a placeholder for a much larger material culture. In this way, the object is split; it is at once the thing in itself, and a kind of map for a cultural hinterland to which it gives access. For the artist, rather than the historian however, this fetish object, that is, a thing that stands in for something else, is often the actual goal. The context to which it provides clues is not the wider world, but the stratified artworld, with its complex topography and specialist codes.

Lockhart, as a bricoleur, appropriates ranges of commodities by placing them in a symbolic ensemble, which serves to erase or subvert their original meanings: figures, toys, books, shoes, and beer mats - markers of the banal, the discarded and the absurd. The result is a model of a cosmology, a social order of signs that represents the individual's relationship to the world. The artist John Baldessari describes bricolage thus:

'Art from materials found in the world's heap of words and images, found in old photo files, found in trash cans, found in the suits of dead men, found like hoarded old strings and wine corks in drawers. Make it new by recomposing and rearranging and readjusting the world's image hoard into recombined, fresh life, thus granting their rebirth, their reincarnation.'

The first difficulty for the artist is to frame the image required, to select and name the found object; but once removed from its situation, untangled from the laces of familiarity, the object is reduced to a blank. It is then ascribed a new mission, and finally, it is inserted once more. It is this reinsertion that is especially complex, and relies on location and timing. Lockhart presents us with situations and interventions, in the knowledge that contemporary art, restless and mobile, brooks no fixity. The resulting work displays aspects of the transitory or nomadic; The King of the Swingers (2000) and Jam (2005) are both installations of variable dimensions that utilise a range of simple materials: string, lights, speakers. Here, Lockhart responds to the topography of the gallery site through material interventions. The King of the Swingers is also available as a Travel Edition (2002), a flight case packed with the essential components for the installation. The work reveals the pragmatic realities of the contemporary artist's displacement, journeying from one place to another, in the manner of a latter-day circus entertainer or travelling salesman, a sentiment echoed on www.thinklockhart.com, the artist's website and forum, organised as mobile creative business, that develops products and strategies. Art, after all, is no longer confined to a single geographic location or indeed methodology, having expanded outward as part of a globalised culture. In addition, the Travel Edition also reveals something further about the nature of displacement. In the film The Accidental Tourist (1988) the central character Macon Leary, who writes travel guides for a living advises that 'the business traveler should bring only what fits in a carry-on bag. […] Checking your luggage is asking for trouble. […] There are very few necessities in this world...which do not come in travel-size packets.' Leary's tips for the frequent traveler characterize displacement as a fraught activity that can best be handled by sealing yourself in a hermetic bubble, by lightness of touch and fleet-footedness; he exposes the underlying melancholia of this separation between the individual and his surroundings. Lockhart's flight-case is then a nod in the direction of artistic pragmatism, tinged with a bittersweet sense of the human condition today. In a globalised world, all places gradually lose their identity, melding into a single kind of space, described by the sociologist Marc Augé as a 'Non-place'. We pass through transitory spaces, typified by the departure lounge in an airport, always mobile, never settling; we are reassured to see that Lockhart and his miniaturised, stripped down inventory held in a secure case, will be on the passenger list.

Martin Heidegger, quoted in: Brad Stone, Curiosity as the Thief of Wonder: an Essay on Heidegger's Critique of the Ordinary Conception of Time, Kronoscope 6.2, 2006, p.205-29

Jörg Heiser, All of a Sudden:Things that Matter in Contemporary Art, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2008, op.cit.

Simon Critchley, On Humour, London, Routledge, 2002, p.7.

Jon Lockhart, Pursuing an emotional Equilibrium through Design Within Utilitarian Objects, www.thinklockhart.com

Carlo Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes, Milan, 1998

John Baldessari:  Somewhere Between Almost Right and Not Quite ( With Orange), Guggenheim Museum Publications, New York, 2005,

p.53

The Accidental Tourist, Lawrence Kasdan (Dir.), Warner Bros, 1988.

Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Verso, 1995, op.cit.