Escape Velocity (21 page)

"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 never going to get it finished."

These days, Goldstone is busy reliving the industrial revolution, building steam-powered cars. His first, buflt 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.

"I got interested in steam in the mid-eighties, after working with pneumatics," he notes. "I was living in a studio that was formerly the Los Angeles boilerworks when I began conducting experiments where I would raise boilers to a fever pitch and then hide behind plate steel. Everyone told me that it was incredibly dangerous, that it couldn't be done. There are very few people who make boilers anymore; steam power is almost a lost art.

"Ironically, we still generate most of our energy with steam, with the exception of hydroelectric and solar power. It's a beautiful paradox that we use nuclear technology to generate steam in order to make electricity; it's like putting a fiberglass handle on a stone adze!"

There is glorious irony, as well, in the fact that his Victorian vehicles exist in Los Angeles, whose futuristic freeway grid, omnipresent smog, near-permanent gridlock, and toxically beautiful sunsets testify to modernity's all-consuming obsession with the automobile. Phantasmagoric con-

traptions, gliding elegantly on outsized wheels, Goldstone's steam cars seem to have taken a wrong turn down a cobbled street in gaslit London and emerged, somehow, at the end of the twentieth century. "L.A. has made me the artist I am," the artist nods. "Underlying all my work is the issue of mobility; everything stems from that, the conversion of energy into motion."

For Goldstone, steam power is a potent symbol of self-determination in an overdetermined technoculture. "When I build a steam engine, I'm not discussing steam, I'm discussing computers," he says. "Steam power, which introduced industrialization, is the last technology we had our hands on. I assembled my steam car with nuts and bolts and bits of steel that I found. To operate it, I light a fire beneath a closed vessel of water, open a plumbing valve, and it starts, producing ten horsepower as regularly as the sun comes up in the morning. Once, I was driving it in a performance and one of the pistons popped out of the cylinder and the push rod bent like a noodle. Now, if a chip melts in your computer, the show is over."

A triumphant gleam lights his eye. "I disconnected the rod, bent it over my knee to straighten it, put it back in, and the car ran again," says Goldstone, with unalloyed satisfaction. ''That's the power you have to keep things moving, when you've built them yourself"

The Magic Kingdom and the Pyrotechnic Insanitarium^^

Performing robots and articulate idols, as I noted in the introduction to this chapter, have traditionally been footmen of power and mouthpieces for authority. In ancient Egypt, the holy statue in Ammon had the power to make kings: At the appointed hour, the males in the royal family lined up before it, and the effigy tapped the next pharaoh with an outstretched arm. Of course, such statues were not robots in the contemporary sense; they were probably jointed dolls, brought to life by steam, fire, or concealed operators-priests, perhaps-who pulled strings, worked levers, and spoke through hidden tubes that made mortal voices sound like divine thunder (Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!). Even so, they served the same societal purpose more discreetly fulfilled by their wheelwork-driven and computer-animated descendants: the affirmation of the status quo.

Eighteenth-century automata curried favor with the crowned heads of their day: Jaquet-Droz's Draftsman was programmed to sketch France's King Louis XV and his ill-fated heirs, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Moreover, as Michel Foucault points out, they taught lessons about the management of subjects. "The celebrated automata [of the eighteenth century] were not only a way of illustrating an organism," writes Foucault, "they were also political puppets, small-scale models of power: Frederick [the Great], the meticulous king of small machines, well-trained regiments and long exercises, was obsessed with them."^^

Vaucanson's automata had a profound influence on the French mechanist Julien Offray de la Mettrie, who ventured beyond Cartesian dualism to argue in UHomme Machine ("Man a Machine," 1748) that all life could be explained in purely materialistic terms. In conceiving of humans as clockwork contrivances whose inner workings-including their so-called spiritual and psychological dimensions-could be made to reveal themselves through a rigorous application of the scientific method, de la Mettrie paved the way for a philosophy of governance that assumed the citizenry to be utterly knowable, in an absolute sense.

To Foucault, this mechanism of social control-which he calls panopticism -is "constituted by a whole set of regulations and by empirical and calculated methods relating to the army, the school and the hospital, for controlling or correcting the operations of the body."^^ It is at work in the technique of "scientific management" known as Taylorism, after Frederick W. Taylor, whose time-motion studies in the early part of this century had as their goal "the radical separation of thinking from doing" in the American worker-turning the laborer, in effect, into a robot.^^ An article in a 1932 issue of the Tri-City Labor Review offers a glimpse inside one of Flenry Ford's assembling plants:

Every employee seemed to be restricted to a well-defined jerk, twist, spasm or quiver resulting in a flivver. I never thought it possible that human beings could be reduced to such automats.''^

It is worth noting, at this juncture, that robota and robotnik, the Czech roots of Capek's coinage "robot," mean "forced labor" and "serf," respectively.

Industrialists came gradually to realize, however, that "human engineering" in the workplace was not enough, that their purview must be extended beyond the factory, into the cultural arena. Only a value system consonant with a consumer economy-one in which goods were not merely used, but used up, rendered obsolete by stylistic change-would ensure the smooth functioning of a heterogeneous workforce geared toward mass production. Corporate capitalists used advertising, its impact heightened by newly arrived technologies of reproduction and replication such as photography and chromolithography, to promote an ideology of consumption. In what advertising executive Ernest Elmo Calkins called "consumer engineering," mass-marketed images of the good life, endlessly repeated in mail-order catalogs, magazine advertisements, department store displays, billboards, and Hollywood melodramas were proffered as a seductive substitute for meaningful social change.'*' Dedicated to the proposition that all consumers are created identical, advertising, according to Stuart Ewen, developed "as a tool of social order whose self-espoused purpose was the 'nullification' of the 'customs of ages; [to] . . . break down the barriers of individual habits.' '"'^ The social critic Walter Benjamin put it poetically in his aphorism, "mass reproduction is aided especially by the

REPRODUCTION OF MASSES."

That process is ongoing: even as their bolt-tightening, spot-welding counterparts have toiled on assembly lines, mass-producing consumables, entertainment robots have been employed as tin pitchmen, reproducing consumers. Visitors to Las Vegas's Forum Shops, a theme park mall in gladiatorial drag, see the faux Roman statues around the central fountain stir and speak every hour on the hour: "Come one, come all, come forth from the mall," enjoins a beefy Bacchus, lifting a monstrous goblet of wine, at which point his fellow cloud-dwellers-Plutus, Apollo, and Venus-come to life and join in the revelry. With any luck, more than a few of the tourists who come to videotape the robots' antics will end up at the blackjack tables in nearby Caesars Palace. The robots installed by Advanced Animation in saloons at the Detroit Metro and Minneapolis-St. Paul International airports serve a similar purpose. Modeled after Cliff and Norm, the barflies in the sitcom Cheers, the caricatured pairs sit side by side on barstools, trading wisecracks, pretending to swill their beer, and attracting customers.

Some robots literally sing the praises of commodity futures. In Michael Moore's bitterly funny documentary, Roger and Me, Flint, Michigan-a company town devastated by the closing of the General Motors plant that was its economic lifeblood-squanders its dwindling financial resources on a monumentally wrongheaded tourist attraction. Auto World. In a crowning irony, the GM exhibit starred one of the unemployed undead (an auto worker who is, ironically, a robot beneath the synthetic skin) singing "Me and My Buddy," an ode to the industrial robot that rendered him obsolete.

Other robots appear in mechanical dramas that provide officially sanctioned outlets for antisocial or anticorporate sentiment, diverting such feelings away from any possible political expression, into coliseum carnage. Robosaurus, a forty-foot-tall, fire-breathing Mechagodzilla, is a hit at monster truck rallies: unfolding from its tractor-trailer traveling position, it grabs junk cars in its claws, barbecues them with its fiery breath, then chomps them flat and tosses them aside. In the eyes of Mark Hays, one of the machine's owners, Robosaurus is "the first real superhero"; it presents "the boring technology that is used in everyday devices in a creative way that stimulates interest in science and technology. . . . This is the first time children have had this level of validation of what they see on TV."

Robosaurus is an extreme variation on a theme developed more conventionally in "big-wheeler" shows and "rocket-car" races, where, according to artist/essayist Mike Kelley, "pickup trucks fitted with massive . . . tires run over and crush rows of cars. ... In an event called a 'meltdown,' a junked car or bus is placed in the exhaust flames [of the rocket car].'"*^ In an essay on SRL, Kelley draws comparisons between avant-garde machine theater and "lower-class spectacles" centered around the theatrical destruction of that totemic American technology, the automobile. "In contrast to culture-affirming, nationalistic, middle-class spectacles like holiday parades [and] football half time shows . . . there are those other events that mirror the joys of conspicuous accumulation with those of mass destruction," observes Kelley.'*'*

Pauline adds, "The notion that the American public needs its pablum is really the basis of entertainment in this country. Robosaurus is Tyrannosaurus rex on wheels that picks up cars and eats them. Very lame. Monster truck shows are just a waste of time because all that intensity is separated from a much more interesting destiny. Everything's straight and

narrow, there's no weird connotations, they don't challenge any assumptions about the culture.

"The interesting thing about demo derbies and drag races, at least in the beginning, in the fifties, was that you had people who worked in the industry-mechanics or factory workers-and after five o'clock they tried to turn their skills in a more rebellious direction. Those events represented, arguably, a healthy rebellion against what society had taught these people to be; in the fifties, the car was a subversive tool if it was turned in the right direction. But the monster truck thing, these days, has been stripped of all those associations. In fact, it's connected with far right philosophies, especially the new monster truck stuff, where they play The Star-Spangled Banner' and they have these big robots that they characterize as protectors of justice: Vorian, a dragster that turns into a robot that spews flame, is a cop, out there to kill bad people; it's real propaganda."

No discussion of the intertwined nature of capital, consumption, and performing machines would be complete without a visit to the Magic Kingdom. Drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors annually, Disneyland puts a grinning, mouse-eared face on a mythic America that is equal parts Goldwater conservatism, Norman Rockwellian nostalgia for turn-of-the-century idylls, and Ray Bradburyesque faith in technological progress. What is most significant about Disneyland, for our purposes, is that it revolves around robot dramas, many of which are thinly veiled corporate image advertisements: "Star Tours, Presented by M&M's Chocolate Candies," "It's a Small World, Presented by Mattel Toys"-the drumbeat of name recognition is relentless. Moreover, both of these rides are cleverly designed so that the only exit is through souvenir emporia-the "Star Trader" shop, selling Lucasfilm merchandise, and the " 'It's a Small World' Toy Shop, Presented by Mattel Toys," respectively.