by Mark Dery
Yet another drumming automaton, Drumming and Drawing Subhuman, can thump out a furious tattoo on two drums or, in a nod to Tinguely’s auto-creative art machines, create abstract doodles by drawing on paper with a charcoal “finger.” A third drum enables an audience participant to improvise a rhythm; once the robot’s computer has analyzed the rhythm, the robot plays it back, beat for beat, then swivels to face the easel on which its sketch pad sits. The percussive pattern is fed into the machine’s random drawing program, affecting the speed of the actuators that control the writing finger–“adding more randomness,” as MacMurtrie puts it. “It affects both the pace and types of gestures the robot makes,” says the artist. According to MacMurtrie, the nonobjective charcoal drawings cranked out by Drumming and Drawing Subhuman “make the abstract expressionist school look rather pathetic; [they look a lot like] Cy Twombly crossed with Franz Kline.” When the robot completes a one-minute masterpiece, it bows ceremoniously and makes a “tah-dah” gesture with its drawing arm, like a conductor flourishing his baton; the drawing falls at the feet of the audience member and the writing finger, having writ, moves on.
Pistons clicking nervously, compressed air wheezing through their pneumatic lines, MacMurtrie’s creations are oddly affecting. Beset by Parkinsonian tics and crippled on occasion by an arthritic stiffness, they look as if they belong in a rest home for elderly automata. Nevertheless, a coiled energy lurks in their rattletrap forms; even the creakiest of these beings can spring into sudden, spasmodic life, given a few burps of air through the right tube.
It is no accident that they move with a flat-footed, earthbound gait that crosses the hunkered-down stance of a martial arts practitioner with the slip-sliding shuffle of a marionette. MacMurtrie-who holds a master of fine arts degree in new forms and concepts from the University of California at Los Angeles-studied martial arts at the University of Arizona at Tucson, and maintains an ongoing interest in puppetry.
“I have no technical background whatsoever,” he explains, “but, in a way, I have an advantage over engineers because I approach the making of these robots from an anatomical viewpoint. I say, ‘Hey, that piston is a muscle, that universal joint is a shoulder,’ and then I apply those revelations to what I know about the body. As a result, my machines aren’t rigid; they’re graceful in a spastic, awkward way.”
In their earliest incarnation, MacMurtrie’s “techno-puppets” existed only as two-dimensional grotesqueries. They appeared in his painting Breakdown of Society as body parts littering the streets of a megalopolis fallen into anarchy. In time, they slithered off his canvases, reincarnated as painted latex skins. MacMurtrie wore them in ritualistic performances that invoked the Aztec hieratic practice of dancing in the flayed skins of sacrificial victims. “Painting just couldn’t hold what I wanted to do,” MacMurtrie told an interviewer. “Everything literally started breaking out of the canvas; I had more paint on my body than the canvas.”34 Soon, the skins were fleshed out with flabby padding, mounted on articulated armatures and born again as tottering, human-sized puppets in elaborate tableaux. Ultimately, they evolved into their present, robotic state.
Old Man Squatter, the first of MacMurtrie’s race of machine men, was inspired by a lowly door piston acquired while the artist was completing his graduate studies in Los Angeles. “I realized that it acted like the rubber puppets I was making,” he remembers. “I constructed him from junk, stripping bicycles for cables. He’s held together with nuts and bolts, string and twisted wire, because I didn’t know how to weld when I built him.” When activated, the aged automaton rises grudgingly from its crouching position to stand erect, rolling its Ping-Pong ball eyes; one hand shakes a spear–“defending the forest against technology”–while the other taps out a pitapat rhythm on its amplified metal belly.
Brett Goldstone, a kinetic sculptor with whom MacMurtrie collaborated on several performances during his time at UCLA, exposed the budding roboticist to advanced pneumatics. Upon moving to San Francisco in 1988, MacMurtrie honed his newfound skills by creating the Tumbling Man. “I didn’t know anything about engineering,” says MacMurtrie, “but as soon as I began working with more pistons, the learning process evolved naturally. In building the Tumbling Man, I learned a tremendous amount about pneumatics and how to overcome weight and inertia. When I got through, it wasn’t a somersaulting robot; it was a struggling, tumbling, acrobatic, empathic creature that had taken on a life of its own.”
The Tumbling Man was eventually adapted to respond to a man-machine interface designed by MacMurtrie in collaboration with Dave Fleming, an electrical engineer at San Francisco’s Exploratorium, a science museum. The interface-a suit whose joints are studded with triggering switches that relay radio signals to the robot-transforms the artist into a cross between a Tai Chi instructor and a puppet master; each of MacMurtrie’s graceful, martial steps is mimicked by his chuffing, clicking doppelgänger.
MacMurtrie has added an aleatory element: pouches sewn into the joints of the suit are inflated with air, at intervals, by a computer program whose behavior has been randomized. Without warning, an arm or a leg will balloon, jouncing the artist about like a marionette. “I become a human narrator,” he observes, “interacting with this robot, creating the interesting juxtaposition of a human struggling to make a machine struggle.” MacMurtrie’s use of a radio-transmitting suit to direct the movements of his jerry-built androids mirrors corporate and military experiments with tele-operation. But whereas conventional teleoperation leaves no doubt as to the absolute authority of the human operator over the remote-controlled robot, MacMurtrie uses the technology to muddle the distinction between controller and controlled.
The interwoven themes of power relations in a high-tech society and the use of homebuilt technology to redress social inequities recur throughout the artist’s work. His Rock Thrower, a metal-and-wire sculpture that can heft and hurl fist-sized rocks with surprising accuracy, constitutes a minimanifesto on the political use of industrial detritus. “The Rock-Thrower was triggered by a picture I saw of a Palestinian woman launching this piece of stone at soldiers with shields,” says MacMurtrie. “I thought, ‘Here are these totally repressed people throwing rocks at this militia-they’ve got no chance in the world!’ I decided to make an opposition machine, a humanoid device that represented the repressed masses. He can only throw about eight to ten feet, and he can’t lift anything very heavy, but the quality of the gesture is really dynamic. The two universal joints on his upper hips give him a Tina Turner pelvis, which is funny as hell.”
Over the years, the actuating systems employed by MacMurtrie have become increasingly sophisticated, incorporating ever greater degrees of computer control. Nearly all of MacMurtrie’s current computer systems are designed by Rick Sayre, a computer programmer and electrical engineer who works as an animation scientist for Pixar, a leading-edge computer graphics production company based in Point Richmond, California. The self-described “technology wrangler” offered his services to MacMurtrie during the artist’s residency at the Exploratorium; their first collaboration, a gallery performance called The Trees Are Walking, involved the animation of rusted metal trees asphyxiated by pollution. Sayre designed a motion-detecting system that allowed the audience to activate preprogrammed sequences of events; moreover, the animation was more subtly nuanced than the herky-jerky movements of MacMurtrie’s earlier creations. “It was quite a breakthrough for my work,” recalls MacMurtrie. “I was a mechanical sculptor before I met Rick; he gave my work the brain.”
MacMurtrie and Sayre have developed a new, improved telemetry suit that enables two participants to activate the Tumbling Man, whose computer program then stores the motion sequence and plays it back–“as if to mimic [the humans],” notes MacMurtrie. The device was featured in Trigram, where it was used by the dancers Hannah Sim and Mark Steger to control the movements of the Subhuman, the String Body, and the Transparent Walking Body, a vacuformed plastic torso that skates along on feet equipped with
casters. Performed at San Francisco’s Theater Artaud in December, 1992, the multimedia spectacle derives its apt title, according to the composer Bruce Darby, from the I Ching, where it signifies “a myriad of all things.” The event lived up to its name: A barking, hooting Robotic Dog-Monkey tried to decide if it was canine or simian; human percussionists assembled and played a Xylophone House made of tuned planks; and a twenty-foot-tall “metal mother” (MacMurtrie’s phrase) batted her metallic eyelashes and gnashed her fearsome chompers in time with the music. At one point, the musicians clambered into her hollow chest to drum on her ribs-skinny, cylindrical drums made from curved PVC pipes with cowhide stretched over one end.
Trigram is informed by kinetic sculpture, performance art, music, robotics, and, as always, puppetry. “The machines are less like industrial robots and more like puppets,” says Sayre. “Our robots are very under-constrained, which means that they flop around a lot but [if] you actuate them at the right moment, you can get behavior out of them that will really surprise you: Some of these machines that were never designed to be able to walk can actually walk. Their puppetlike quality makes them harder to control, but it also makes you empathize with them because they appear to be struggling.”
MacMurtrie’s discombobulated robots address the issue of life out of balance. In their computer brains, wire nerves, piston muscles, and scrap metal skeletons, we see ourselves–“thinking reeds,” to borrow Pascal’s phrase, rooted in a biosphere dominated and, finally, denatured by technology. “My sculptures suffer this world,” writes the artist, in an unpublished statement. “They do not dominate or control. My use of compressed air to breathe life into them has much to do with the ecological [disasters] that threaten our existence. The sound and motions that are a byproduct of this [pneumatic] process echo the anguish we all feel in a world where we are deprived of the Pure by our dependence upon machines that we once controlled and that now control us.”
MacMurtrie (whose surname, he claims, means “man of trees”) grew up in an Irish-Mexican family in the scarred, scorched mining town of Bisbee, Arizona, where a mile-deep pit mine gutted the nearby countryside. Memories of busted lives and rusting machinery haunt his art. His is a green robotics, a mythopoeic struggle to establish an equilibrium between the ecosphere and the technosphere.
The Trees Are Walking, enacted in 1991 at San Francisco’s New Langton Arts gallery, featured gnarled, metal Walking Trees that scrabbled across the exhibition space with painful slowness. Their rusty blotches alluded to acid rain, the labored panting of their pneumatic systems to air fouled by fossil fuels. Overconsumption Man, a grotesque blob swaddled in layers of foam-rubber blubber, stood in for Western consumer culture, whose appetite for burgers is implicated in the bulldozing and burning of tropical forests to provide pasture for cattle, destroying ancient ecosystems in the process. “The spirit of the Earth is frustrated by what’s going on,” MacMurtrie observes. “Even the trees are walking away. They’re getting wiped out.”35
Brett Goldstone: Trash Can Alchemy
Brett Goldstone, likewise, has stories to tell about the disposable society. The New Zealand native, who lives in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, is a streetcomber. “I’ve always used junk because it’s free and readily available,” he explains, “and there’s more junk here than anywhere else in the world.”
Goldstone is a self-taught mechanic who acquired an art education while traveling the world, “visiting cultural sites in Europe as well as North and South America.” Shortly after moving to Los Angeles, he was briefly involved in the UCLA art scene. “I soon saw the art world for the rotten thing it was,” he says. “I decided to establish myself as a self-reliant artist who had nothing to do with the gallery system.” He began experimenting with kinetic sculpture and completed a two-year tour of duty with SRL, helping out with three shows.
Goldstone’s work has much in common with the scavenger culture of Repo Man and the “outsider” art of Howard Finster, the Alabaman minister who built an environmental installation called Paradise Garden out of bicycle parts, hubcaps, and other oddments. The robots in Bird Land, a 1990 sculpture performance in three tableaux, were constructed from materials found in a Dumpster.
In Bird Land, Goldstone used reanimated rubbish to spin a yarn about the dying biosphere. The performance, which took place in a Los Angeles parking lot, began in a long-lost Arcadia where “life was sustained without suffering” and ended in a postapocalyptic wasteland whose only inhabitants were mutant birds “able to breathe deadly gases and drink rancid water.” The opening scene featured the tin-winged Water Bird with the vacuum-cleaner-tube gullet; a mural depicting a bucolic landscape provided a backdrop for a shallow, man-made lake bounded by old tires. At the edge of the lake stood a Sound Tree in full bloom, its tangled metal limbs festooned with speakers rescued from old-fashioned record players. The second, climactic scene starred Beach Chair Bird, a pair of disembodied bird legs contrived from the remains of an aluminum beach chair and a pair of lampshades. Animated by compressed air, the legs picked their way across the lake with storklike poise, transferring water from one lampshade foot to the other for ballast. “The Beach Chair Bird was able to step off-balance, giving it an uncanny, lifelike quality,” says Goldstone. “Midway through its walk, oil was pumped into the water, turning the lake into a gooey morass. It eventually flipped over and lay there, twitching.”
Goldstone’s ecofable ended in ecocide. The last scene was dominated by Big Bicycle Bird, a gargantuan mechanimal that stood twenty or more feet tall when fully erect. Looking like Rube Goldberg’s idea of an ostrich, it perched on a nest of urban waste, flanked by a mural depicting a dead world whose craggy, buttelike formations were actually petrified people. The Bird’s drooping neck was cobbled together from ski poles, aluminum plates, and frying pans; an intricate system of bicycle wheels, chains, and cables, together with curtain pulleys and a servo from a hospital bed, enabled the derricklike beast to lower its head and munch on a mound of aluminum cans.
The Steam-Powered Flapping Wings, a hybrid of aeronautic technology and avian anatomy, stood nearby. The robot’s tall, skinny body was a music stand; its outspread wings began life as a desk lamp. Steam from a pressure cooker set its fan turbine in motion, turning bicycle gears and causing its wings to flap.
Goldstone is a trash can alchemist who uses fire, water, and wind to transmute refuse into bird-machines that flap their wings, walk, or feast on garbage heaps. His creations have a droll, ad hoc air that makes them wholly unlike the hulking, machine-tooled devices turned out by Pauline. “I strive for that spindly, stalklike quality to counter the General Motors aesthetic of my compadres” says Goldstone. “It’s organic, in a way, which might come from Victorian architecture. New Zealand, because of its English colonial past, has masses of. . . filigree everywhere, carved and fretted boards almost like Maori tattoos, which are in turn based on these baby ferns that have spirals.”
And whereas MacMurtrie’s robots, for all their ricketiness, possess hidden strength, Goldstone’s always seem as if they are about to collapse in a pile of nuts and bolts. “The fact that I don’t have access to sophisticated machinery is a key aspect of my work,” says the artist. “I do everything in my garage workshop, using nothing more complicated than a drill press. My pieces are built completely from scratch. I do a sketch on a napkin and then stick to it rigorously. My friend, who’s an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, will say, ‘Look, Brett, if you’d just put this piece here, the whole thing would work fine,’ but nooooo, it must look exactly like the drawing!
“It’s a tremendous technical challenge to build something using an unconventional technique. In traditional engineering, you design the machine, buy the parts, and assemble it. I fish everything I use out of Dumpsters. At one point in the building of the Big Bird, I had half the neck constructed and then no one seemed to be throwing away the particular supplies I needed until a week or so before the show. I thought I was ne
ver going to get it finished.”
These days, Goldstone is busy reliving the industrial revolution, building steam-powered cars. His first, built in 1987, skimmed along on cunningly wrought wheels, its axle turned by a piston-driven transmission belt. The Steam-Powered Tricycle (1988) sports as its front wheel a tire from a construction-site crane, with two handmade metal wheels in back and a giant stovepipe of a boiler; the turbine is a bicycle wheel studded with metal paddles. The combined effect suggests a collaboration between Georges Melies, the father of science fiction cinema, and Nicolas Joseph Cugnot, the eighteenth-century engineer whose tricycle-mounted, steam-driven carriage was the first self-propelled vehicle. The 1990 Steam Car Mark III consisted of a rickety, grasshopperish body plunked on tiny wheels and propelled by a gigantic wooden wheel. And in 1991, Goldstone built a low-slung, water-powered vehicle; the water was pressurized by steam, then squeezed through a series of pipes and into a turbine, driving the machine forward.
Goldstone’s interest in steam springs from power politics in the literal sense. During the early eighties, when he was staging hit-and-run robot shows, Goldstone made liberal use of outdoor outlets near gallery entrances. On one occasion, he installed a mechanized caricature of “consumer angst” in front of a particularly snooty gallery. The robot, a “3-D political cartoon” in chicken wire, lay sprawled on a TV effigy whose screen displayed metal cutouts of houses, cars, stereos, and other consumer icons. Driven by a small motor, the robot flailed in the death throes of conspicuous consumption until the peeved gallery owner pulled its plug and buried its remains in the nearest Dumpster. Unpluggable art, concluded Goldstone, was the best art.
