Creative Machines, Minimalist Sculpture review by Sue Atkins
We’re standing in a machine. It was originally designed for travel, a portal transporting visitors into a new age of technology, a city built for industry, powered by steam, coal and oil; the city of a thousand trades. This machine is Curzon Street station, the first station in the second city, linking it to the capital. The building is now long derelict, abandoned in splendid isolation to a wasteland of urban gentrification and bureaucratic promises. Its original function lingers as a distant memory among cracked and discoloured corridors, yet it still displays traces of its glorious past. A discoloured wall plaque commemorates the birth of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1847, whilst below it a cabinet containing a long-dead mummified cat is buried in the wall, a throwback to medieval superstition[1]. This combination of the technological and the macabre are themes which resonate throughout the exhibition.
A miniature wunderkammer stands in the once grand entrance hall, a lilliputian tower of cabinets containing strange secrets within. Insects, an eye, a key, a mirror can be found imprisoned as mementos within this dolls-house of the weird and wonderful. Through each lens, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, a Cornell-like cornucopia of the unheimlich. Nearby a familiar childhood object, the swing, becomes an object of unease as it rocks back and forth with an unrelenting regularity, without the need of a hand to animate it. Instead the hum of a motor propels the machine to metronomically re-enact the games of youth in an endless cycle.
With the arrival of Creative Machines, Minimalist Sculptures the station-machine begins to function again. Life enters the space, and rooms long left to decay buzz with sound and movement. Light from flickering televisions and projectors illuminate dark dusty corridors, and send us messages from a distant present. This once vibrant building is now inhabited by other ‘machines’, some so site-specific it is as if they are the fabric of the building, or squatting in its decaying remains. Evoking the nostalgia of a valve-driven past, many are machines of moving parts, made up of components at the end of their mechanical life. Constructions of wood, metal and bolts display their handbuilt origins; technological wonders evoking a time before the rise of the static, sanitised electronic machines of the 21st century. This work encapsulates an age old problem - what do you do with obsolete technology? What happens when the ‘future’ ceases to be the future, and becomes the past?
The word ‘machine’ derives from the Latin ‘Machina’, meaning an ‘independently functioning structure’[2]. In many ways this description could apply to any human being as much as the things we create, and in this exhibition the presence (or or absence) of the human is implicit. A wall of aged tape recorders whirr into life as the viewer steps into their range, greeting them with the sound of tape itself unencumbered by any recording. Without an audience, the installation returns to a state of silent uselessness, a monument to the last dead century. Another construction creates a personal cosmos, projecting a gallery of stars onto the station ceiling, placing the viewer at their epicentre. In a city where light pollution drowns out all but the brightest star, this piece produces an mechanical facsimile of the natural world, allowing the urban viewer to experience the wonder of a starry sky.
In other work the presence of figures are recognisable by their absence, where famous characters from sci-fi (Bill and Ted, Marty McFly, He-Man) are embodied by the props that they are associated with. These sculptural ‘prototypes’ again appear familiar but removed, a blank version of an imagined ‘future’, now long since past. The machines themselves are absent elsewhere, as photocopies of a robot are handed out but the copied object is not displayed. The images of other absent machines appear in large 2 dimensional etchings of their surfaces. These map every texture of their construction and working life, whilst committing them to the past and creating an ghostly record of their physical form. A record of an earlier time; an archaeological trace of a redundant process.
We’re standing inside a machine. A machine within the station-machine. A machine that represents both the past and the future, a camera-obscura. Standing in a piece of ancient technological achievement and renaissance wonder, as familiar to Aristotle as to Caravaggio. The room is dark, shrouded by heavy drapes and seemingly empty, but as our eyes grow accustomed to the gloom, faint traces of the world outside reassemble before us through the tiny pinhole. Buildings begin to appear on the dark wall, and the ubiquitous cranes of progress are unmistakable in a mirage of concrete and steel. In this machine, the city skyline is transfigured in the tomb-like station into a distant intangible reminder of the utopian dreams of engineers and planners. Temporarily the image of a city is enshrined inside this remaining fragment of mechanical history - a city perpetually striving towards a future never entirely realised, nor reached, but always moving ‘forward’, leaving fragments of the past in its tracks.
[1] Cats were often sealed into the foundations of new buildings for good luck. The cat at Curzon Street is thought to have been deliberately bricked up in the walls when the building was first built in 1838, and was discovered by builders doing later renovation work.
[2] Oxford English Dictionary
A miniature wunderkammer stands in the once grand entrance hall, a lilliputian tower of cabinets containing strange secrets within. Insects, an eye, a key, a mirror can be found imprisoned as mementos within this dolls-house of the weird and wonderful. Through each lens, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, a Cornell-like cornucopia of the unheimlich. Nearby a familiar childhood object, the swing, becomes an object of unease as it rocks back and forth with an unrelenting regularity, without the need of a hand to animate it. Instead the hum of a motor propels the machine to metronomically re-enact the games of youth in an endless cycle.
With the arrival of Creative Machines, Minimalist Sculptures the station-machine begins to function again. Life enters the space, and rooms long left to decay buzz with sound and movement. Light from flickering televisions and projectors illuminate dark dusty corridors, and send us messages from a distant present. This once vibrant building is now inhabited by other ‘machines’, some so site-specific it is as if they are the fabric of the building, or squatting in its decaying remains. Evoking the nostalgia of a valve-driven past, many are machines of moving parts, made up of components at the end of their mechanical life. Constructions of wood, metal and bolts display their handbuilt origins; technological wonders evoking a time before the rise of the static, sanitised electronic machines of the 21st century. This work encapsulates an age old problem - what do you do with obsolete technology? What happens when the ‘future’ ceases to be the future, and becomes the past?
The word ‘machine’ derives from the Latin ‘Machina’, meaning an ‘independently functioning structure’[2]. In many ways this description could apply to any human being as much as the things we create, and in this exhibition the presence (or or absence) of the human is implicit. A wall of aged tape recorders whirr into life as the viewer steps into their range, greeting them with the sound of tape itself unencumbered by any recording. Without an audience, the installation returns to a state of silent uselessness, a monument to the last dead century. Another construction creates a personal cosmos, projecting a gallery of stars onto the station ceiling, placing the viewer at their epicentre. In a city where light pollution drowns out all but the brightest star, this piece produces an mechanical facsimile of the natural world, allowing the urban viewer to experience the wonder of a starry sky.
In other work the presence of figures are recognisable by their absence, where famous characters from sci-fi (Bill and Ted, Marty McFly, He-Man) are embodied by the props that they are associated with. These sculptural ‘prototypes’ again appear familiar but removed, a blank version of an imagined ‘future’, now long since past. The machines themselves are absent elsewhere, as photocopies of a robot are handed out but the copied object is not displayed. The images of other absent machines appear in large 2 dimensional etchings of their surfaces. These map every texture of their construction and working life, whilst committing them to the past and creating an ghostly record of their physical form. A record of an earlier time; an archaeological trace of a redundant process.
We’re standing inside a machine. A machine within the station-machine. A machine that represents both the past and the future, a camera-obscura. Standing in a piece of ancient technological achievement and renaissance wonder, as familiar to Aristotle as to Caravaggio. The room is dark, shrouded by heavy drapes and seemingly empty, but as our eyes grow accustomed to the gloom, faint traces of the world outside reassemble before us through the tiny pinhole. Buildings begin to appear on the dark wall, and the ubiquitous cranes of progress are unmistakable in a mirage of concrete and steel. In this machine, the city skyline is transfigured in the tomb-like station into a distant intangible reminder of the utopian dreams of engineers and planners. Temporarily the image of a city is enshrined inside this remaining fragment of mechanical history - a city perpetually striving towards a future never entirely realised, nor reached, but always moving ‘forward’, leaving fragments of the past in its tracks.
[1] Cats were often sealed into the foundations of new buildings for good luck. The cat at Curzon Street is thought to have been deliberately bricked up in the walls when the building was first built in 1838, and was discovered by builders doing later renovation work.
[2] Oxford English Dictionary