The In-Between World of Automata
I participated in David Lane’s week-long wood carving workshop this summer in Massachusetts, a great experience in itself, but also an occasion to meet other artists. One of those artists was working on an automaton. I was intrigued, and I’ve been researching them since coming home.
Automata aren’t puppets. They inhabit an in-between world. They are sculpted and painted like a puppet, and they move; but they don’t present the illusion of intentionality, the self-direction that is the puppet’s special gift. In a way, they’re anti-puppets: condemned to repeat exactly the same motions over and over again; and that mechanical repetition tells us that, despite their alluring shapes and brilliant colors, they are not alive, since if something is alive its movements vary slightly in tempo and direction. Thus, they remain objects that defy the most basic characteristic of an object: being inanimate. Yet their animation is a denial of animation, because they mechanically and endlessly repeat the same motion. They are, in the phrase of one of their makers, “mechanical” or “kinetic” sculptures.
Take a look at this witty piece of magic realism by Carlos Zapata, rightly named Pear Shape. A female nude with thick black hair braided behind her back sits on a ledge, a slice of pear in one hand, a knife behind her and a pear on a dish beside her. The pear in the dish perfectly reflects her own shape. When a hand turns a small crank she languidly kicks her legs and turns her head from side to side.
Or here’s an amazing, strangely moving piece on several levels by the same artist. He calls it Fatherhood, in “homage to men who are good fathers and have always been there for their children.” At the top, a pair of father and child acrobats circle through the air in harmony; below them there’s a boat rocking on waves, with a father and son fishing, and below that, a monumental long-faced dad in a conventional pale blue cardigan kneels, staring ahead, his huge hand protectively holding a child, a kind of patron saint of fathers. Far below—in the basement as it were, among the complex wooden workings of the automaton—is a tiger and cub, and at the back of the sculpture there’s a father dog and puppy. The whole intricate piece is moved by the same simple (noisy) hand crank.
For a range of automata by a series of other contemporary (British) artists, here’s an eight-minute overview from an exhibition called Mechanics Alive!!!organised by Cabaret Mechanical Theatre at the Scotland Street Museum in Glasgow.
Their beautifully crafted gears and pullies are an intrinsic part of these sculptures. That’s what makes them refreshingly contemporary—like the current trend for visible puppeteers. I think that’s a happy contrast to the macabre model city commissioned by an 18th century prince-archbishop of Salzburg, which you can see in this final video. The scene itself is intensely hierarchical and it’s wholly dependent on the physical labor of the anonymous menials who turn wheels and push unseen levers for the diversion of an aristocratic audience.