Circus roboticus

The machines that Garvey has built on his own represent a cross-section of the urban demimonde. It's a vision with a history that stretches from the London of William Blake's "Songs of Experience," with its harlots, bloody walls, and menacing soldiers, to Charles Bukowski, bard of the down and out. In addition to Goboy the panhandler, the assembly of robots has included "Humper," a once disassembled and now effectively deceased robotic prostitute; "Preacher," a loudspeaker mounted on a metal carapace that rolls around on a four-wheeled platform; and a half-dozen others. Most of Garvey's designs combine mechanisms constructed to emphasize the crudeness of welded metal with abstract organic clay forms that bring to mind fire-blackened bone. All share what Carl Pisaturo, a member of Garvey's group and himself a designer of robotic assemblages, calls "a rusty-metal aesthetic" -- a general aura of menacing industrialism.

Garvey has teamed with collaborators to build even more complex robots. "One-Legged Men at a Butt-Kicking Contest" (the image is taken from a scene that recurs in Garvey's paintings) is a human-sized assemblage he built with fellow robotic artists Jeff Weber and Aaron Edsinger. The result is two crane-like constructs which heave at each other with amazing speed in a barrage of blinking lights; the carefully programmed and choreographed battle brings the sensitive mechanical parts this close without actually making contact.

All of this is supremely entrancing, and it is clear from the mass of digital cameras at an Omnicircus performance that it is the robots that have pulled the audience into the theater. But here is the frustrating, maddening and troubling part of Garvey's art: The audience never gets to see enough of the robots, which are often offstage. As you might have guessed when you were confronted with Goboy, Garvey's ensemble of robots are players in a larger project of social criticism, to which he expects his audience to devote its undivided attention.

This fall Garvey is leaving San Francisco for Pittsburgh, where he is about to begin a one-year fellowship in robotic art at Carnegie Mellon University. In preparation for his departure, Garvey and DeusMachina, the musical group associated with Omnicircus (Garvey composes the music), have staged a kind of farewell performance. As striking as any part of the performance proper is a pre-performance, an introductory lecture that Garvey gives to his increasingly discomfited audience.

Garvey, a short, powerfully built man in black denim with a gray goatee, strides to the stage and tells one of his favorite stories, about Nelson Rockefeller and the mural he commissioned from Mexican artist Diego Rivera to decorate the newly built Rockefeller Center. Seeing that the mural was an attack on the barbarisms of capitalism, Rockefeller immediately ordered it destroyed. In his story, Garvey visits Rockefeller Center to inquire about the mural, only to be informed, finally, that "The mural doesn't exist because Mr. Rockefeller never accepted it." (Ironically, Garvey owes his own fellowship at Carnegie Mellon to a new industrial titan: Microsoft is underwriting his grant.)

Garvey's lecture builds to a crescendo of protest against the evils of capitalism, ending finally with a proclamation: "I will not start this show until someone gives me a definition of ownership." The members of the audience, or at least those who have not seen this before, look at each other uncomfortably. To get to Garvey's theater, they have ventured into an inhospitable back alley of San Francisco's downtown, past rows of steel-grated flophouses, hoping to get a peek at the extraordinary machines designed by Garvey and his Omnicircus performance group. Yet here they are, being told that the show will not go on until they, the audience, demonstrate an ideological interest in the material -- what the Old Left would have called "engagement."

Next Page: Could Garvey believe that machines are bad?

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