A haunched skeletal form hovers several feet above the visitor in a darkened room igniting primordial, subconscious anxieties inherited from ancestral time.
T-rex in Dinosaur Hall at Carnegie Museum of Natural History? No, it's "Too Big Dog Monkey," and he's part of "Amorphic Robot Works" at Wood Street Galleries, opening tonight during an all-ages Downtown Gallery Crawl that includes music, performance and visual-art exhibitions at a dozen venues.
It's all free, courtesy of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, and runs from 5:30 to 8 p.m.
Along with the ARW show, highlights include an Associated Artists of Pittsburgh exhibition featuring Jane Haskell and Sean Salstrom at 707 Penn Ave., and "Domestic Politics," an exploration of the relationship of family and capitalism by artists Ross Christy, Rick Gribenas, Tom Hall, Mario Marzan, Arturo Rodriguez and Kammy Roulner at SPACE. At 7:30 p.m., sound and performance artist Gribenas -- a Pittsburgh native who's in from graduate school at the University of Illinois at Chicago -- will present a tape collage piece.
Check listings (to the right) for a full schedule of events and locations.
You'll want to begin at Wood Street to watch 30-foot-long "Too Big Dog Monkey" -- a somewhat threatening, somewhat lovable open tangle of cable and surplus Korean War-era fighter jet metal -- move across the gallery
Before leaving, be sure to wander through "The Cave of the Subconscious," a complex rebar and rusting sheet metal structure that harbors 25 kinetic sculptures within its walls. And plan to spend some time with curious, captivating "L'l Drummer" and "Yo Yo Berimbau," sound-activated sculptures that will, in response to your voice, create sounds appropriate to their names.
The wizard of this fantastic realm is 44-year-old New Mexico-born Brooklyn artist Chico MacMurtrie, whose artistic production is more likely to be found in the post-global sphere of cyberculture than within the restraining confines of traditional museums. For example, the ARW moving human skeleton, "Skeletal Reflection" or "Skelli," was listed among the "world's greatest android projects" this month on www.androidworld.com.
While working on an M.F.A. in New Forms and Concepts from the University of California at Los Angeles, MacMurtrie landed a job with the film industry creating animatronics -- mechanized puppets such as those featured in "Jurassic Park."
"I was making really good money," he says, "but then I realized my energy was being sucked out of me." When an adviser asked him where he wanted to be in 10 years -- wealthy and animating gremlins or making his own work -- the choice seemed clear.
After graduation he walked away from a lucrative career and became a handyman. "I survived. You name it, I'd make it [as long as it wasn't] animatronics. One thing led to the next. I traveled the world, learned to work cheaply, to innovate."
Now, with 250 machines constructed and exhibitions on the increase, he says "It's about feeling good about it and continuing to do your work."
Working outside the pragmatic applications of scientific and medical research or profit-driven Hollywood/theme park concerns, MacMurtrie's approach constitutes an unhampered but also unchartered probe of new regions of form and concept.
As Wood Street curator Murray Horne puts it, MacMurtrie creates "the expressionistic robot that can only come from art. The envy of Carnegie Mellon."
Periodically MacMurtrie slips into talking about the robots as though they were living creatures, and it soon becomes evident that each has a persona.
Many of the sculptures come from drawings and carvings the artist made on his desk while talking on the phone, an act he likens to attaching the subconscious.
"The characters came from [my] drawings. As we built them, they developed their own character, they developed a relationship to one another, all tied together by this metal skin." It's analogous to a novelist's characters taking over the direction of the plot.
All have names, and some have nicknames. Why "Too Big Dog Monkey"?
In the dog monkey evolution, MacMurtrie answers, first there were dog monkeys 1 through 7. Then "Super Dog Monkey" who "passed away from a severed spine." Built for a human performer, "Two Big" is "too big for most spaces, too big to carry in a car, too big ..."
As an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, MacMurtrie studied painting, sculpture, martial arts, dance and electronic music. His kinetic sculpture had its origin in "duration performances where I was trying to find my animal state." From these actions would come ideas, how to make the "skins" that he'd perform in. He noticed, when he hung them up, that they were full of life, and introduced mechanisms so that the limbs could be better articulated.
"Old Man Face" is one of the kinetic sculptures in "The Cave of the Subconscious," the featured installation in the exhibition "Amorphic Robot Works," which opens tonight at Wood Street Galleries, Downtown.
Click photo for larger image.
'Amorphic Robot Works'
WHERE: Wood Street Galleries
WHEN: Opening 5:30-8 tonight, through March 19.
HOURS: Noon-8 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and noon- 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
EVENTS: Tomorrow, 1 p.m., gallery talk with Chico MacMurtrie. Feb. 4, Pittsburgh-based record label Kracfive presents "I (Heart) My Robot" ($4 admission).
INFORMATION: 412-471-5605 or www.woodstreetgalleries.org.
'Domestic Politics'
WHERE: SPACE
WHEN: Opening 5:30-8 tonight, through April 2.
HOURS: Noon-8 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, noon-10 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
EVENTS: Tomorrow, 2 p.m., gallery talk.
INFORMATION: 412-325-7723 or www.spacepittsburgh.org.
Gallery Crawl schedule of events
"Dancing Girl" is another of the kinetic sculptures in "The Cave of the Subconscious."
Click photo for larger image.
"The Cave" combines a number of these performing sculptures with an overlay of art history, psychology and metaphysics.
Because of the title, one thinks first of Plato's allegory wherein humans chained in one position from birth form their understanding of the world from the shadows of material objects -- the latter themselves, the philosopher would argue, shadowy manifestation of the essence they meagerly represent. When some are released they're drawn to -- and retreat from -- the light at the cave's entry, symbolic of an access to knowledge and experience in the manner of Adam and Pandora.
A cave walled with artworks also references the great Lascaux as well as other environments decorated by early man. Its womb-like quality raises thoughts of human gestation and birth, which parallels artists' creative processes. Art and psyche conflate as one considers the Surrealists, Freud, Jung and dream states. MacMurtrie likens the sequence of sculptures becoming lighted and activating to the firing of synapses in the brain.
This total immersion into a built realm that forces examination of perceptual perimeters brings to mind the light works of James Turrell, who recently was given a retrospective at the Mattress Factory museum, North Side.
MacMurtrie identifies with the "mind bending" that Turrell triggers, but points out that while Turrell is of the "minimalist school, I'm definitely a maximalist." He's "trying to bring order to chaos...taking that energy and focusing it for a more impactful experience in the end."
The recipient of five National Endowment for the Arts awards and featured in the Discovery Channel's "The Next Step" program, MacMurtrie is nonetheless better known in Europe where such edge-pushing, technologically-steeped expression is more well received.
He and his "crew" are still savoring the success of a four-month retrospective exhibition in Lille, France that was part of the town's Cultural Capital of Europe Festival. During the show's run, the crew staged performances featuring every one of the machines, drawing 90,000 visitors. To celebrate its inauguration as the European Cultural Capital, Lille commissioned a permanent work, and ARW delivered "Foetus to Man," a timepiece in the tradition of the region's elaborated clocks with a central figure that moves from fetal to erect to fetal positions over a 12-hour period, referencing life's cycles.
ARW has also installed a permanent kinetic work, "URGE," in the Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco, which interacts with visitors. When a visitor sits on a near bench, the bronze and stainless figure sits, rising again when the visitor stands to leave. Another interactive work, "Growing Rain Tree," was commissioned by the contemporary Arts Center Unmuseum, Cincinnati, where it will remain until 2006. (For a real-time look at the latter, go to www.amorphicrobotworks.org/index.htm, click on "about" and then "Growing Rain Tree.")
MacMurtrie founded ARW in 1992 as an "ongoing endeavor to uncover the primacy of movement and sound" and is artistic director. The organization comprises artists, engineers and technicians from several countries. Numbers and players fluxuate, and the direction of the output evolves (hence "amorphic") with the talents and interests of group members.
Those who came here to set up, besides MacMurtrie, are Frank Hausman (hardware, software), Shelly Wynecoop (project manager), Janette Wernergreen (sculpture technician), Hans Steiner (sculpture technician, hardware), Hans Arrieta (sculptural assistant) and Marc9 (software). MacMurtrie calls Carnegie Mellon University a "big hot spot in the robotics area," and a couple of CMU art students also assisted and will maintain the works in Pittsburgh.
Horne says this is ARW's first U.S. show in a number of years, but things are looking up stateside. In the spring, it plans to exhibit a new direction of work, "inflatable bodies," in this country. And next year, all of the mechanical sculptures will be brought back from Europe for the first time by UCLA Live, and it's evident that MacMurtrie relishes the notion that they're "bringing this large production back home," full cycle from where it all began.
During the fall's Pittsburgh International Festival of Firsts, the Cultural Trust sank the "Titanic" on Pittsburgh's riverfront before an enthralled crowd. A full performance of ARW's sculptures such as the one given at Lille would be a great follow-up for the coming fall season.
First Published: January 28, 2005, 5:00 a.m.
