Circus roboticus

A troupe of robots forces audiences to confront the terrors of late 20th century life.

By Mark Gimein

Sep 27, 1999 | "Gimme 50 cents! Gimme 50 cents!" Goboy says. "I say gimme 50 cents because God says gimme 50 cents!"

If you ever have the chance to get to one of Frank Garvey's performances, it is likely that the first thing you will see, even before you get through the door, is Goboy. Depending on your convictions about panhandling in general and panhandling by machines in particular, how early or late you are to the performance, and -- in Garvey's own view -- your class and degree of class consciousness, you might try to ignore Goboy or to interact with him, and either way you are likely to come out frustrated.

Being a machine, or more precisely an anthropomorphic sculpture of menacing and derelict clay mounted on the chassis of a motorized wheelchair, Goboy can beat you in both speed and patience. As a remote-controlled machine managed by an experienced handler, he can generally outwit you. If you try to brush past him, you might find him rushing toward you at unnerving speed. If, on the other hand, you gamely try to drop some coins into his hand, he will simply continue haranguing you for more.

There is no easy solution to the problem of Goboy, except finally to rush past and move on into the theater, carrying with you a vague and unresolved feeling of discomfort. Like all the robots designed by Garvey and his robotic theater troupe, Goboy is extraordinarily discomforting. The same goes more generally for every aspect of Garvey's work. It is confrontational, it is political; it is, as Garvey's own manifesto points out, fiercely Marxist in spirit, and yet the strangeness and intricacy of the machines at its heart make it irresistibly seductive.

Schooled in painting and electronics, Frank Garvey is an artist who has chosen as his form the production of robots and their deployment in increasingly complex multimedia performances. "Multimedia performance" does not really do justice to Garvey's theatrical and musical productions, but it is probably the best word in the contemporary vocabulary for what Garvey creates.

Since 1995, Garvey and the San Francisco theater group he directs, Omnicircus, have staged a series of plays and less elaborate musical showcases that do not resemble anything else in contemporary art or performance. They can, depending on one's mood and the background one brings to them, recall the abstract pessimism of Beckett's "Endgame" or the gothic overripeness of Siouxsie and the Banshees. What distinguishes them from everything else, however, is the machinery on which Garvey and his associates have expended years of labor.

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