Circus roboticus

When I heard Garvey's speech, I believed that I understood the kind of engagement that Garvey was looking for -- understood, so to speak, where the battle lines were drawn. On one side was Rivera, the painter, and Garvey himself, a committed Marxist. On the other was 20th century industrial capitalism, represented by Rockefeller, one of its iconic figures. There was no doubt in my mind that Garvey placed the machine on the wrong side of the equation, together with Rockefeller.

Several days after the performance, I presented this idea to Garvey himself, and he neither confirmed nor denied it. He listened carefully, almost clinically, clearly interested in the reaction his work elicited, but he gave the altogether reasonable response that he did not believe that artists should answer such questions about the meaning of their work.

You can call the interpretation that I presented to Garvey the "machines are bad" view of his art. It is likely that this is the theory that most of Garvey's audience members take home with them. It certainly appears to fit nicely with Garvey's politics: Machines are bad because they represent the dehumanizing influence of industrial capitalism -- with Goboy, the very picture of resentful, machine-bound poverty, as the prime example.

In 1998, I saw another production of his work, a play called "Sermon on the Mound." "Sermon" was a play that used a large number of robots and one human actor. It took place, apparently, in a post-apocalyptic netherworld. The actor strutted up and down the stage, dressed in a long, dirty canvas robe, his arms tied at his sides. Preacher, the robot with the megaphone, came out to give orders and spin around in a lunatic fury at the front of the stage. The human character was in some way indebted to Preacher, with whom he would plead and remonstrate. This by no means sums up the technical accomplishments of the play -- it is really little better than describing a painting -- but it suffices to give you a sense of the plot. At the end of the play the actor collapsed, leaving nothing on stage but the One-Legged Men in a Butt-Kicking Contest, who came to life and proceeded to kick each others' butts into kingdom come. Bad machines, outlasting the poor saps who'd built them. It all comes together with the pleasant patness of an undergraduate thesis on Bertolt Brecht.

There is, however, one big problem with this "machines are bad" interpretation. If you happen to speak directly with Garvey about his view of the future of machines, you will find that at times his view is actually blithely utopian. In good Marxist terminology, Garvey will argue that industrial society must either exploit labor (as he believes it is doing now) or -- and this is a crucial "or" -- exploit technology. "The alternative to slavery" -- Garvey's catch-all term for industrial capitalism -- "is robotic civilization," he argues. He then describes a possible future in which, put simply, robots do all the work. When he says things like this, Garvey sounds as optimistic about technology as the most starry-eyed George Gilder-quoting futurist.

When I heard this coming from Garvey, I could not make anything of it, so contrary did it seem to the tenor of his art. I simply could not understand what would make his annihilating criticism of industrial society fade into techno-utopianism when the subject turned to the future of machines. Garvey's optimism was a nut I couldn't crack.

That's when I spoke with Carl Pisaturo.

Pisaturo is one of Garvey's closest collaborators. Like Garvey, he lives in a tiny loft in the Omnicircus theater. Pisaturo built the mechanisms at the heart of two of Omnicircus' smallest and most complicated robots, "Slave Zero" and "Slave One." When you first see them, Slave Zero and Slave One are almost disappointing. Their design recalls a human torso mounted on a triangular base. Like all the Omnicircus robots, their mechanism is intertwined with black clay. Only their arms and upper torsos move, and they look relatively unimpressive until you look at them closely, and realize with a shock that not only their arms but each individual finger is fully articulated. Pisaturo's technical drawings for the two robots, accompanied by carefully pasted photographs of every part, take up a notebook as thick as an encyclopedia volume. Each of the robots boasts some 45 movable joints, controlled by 21 separate engines. It is when you realize this that you sense that they are unlike anything you have ever seen.

I asked Pisaturo what the machines represented. Pisaturo had already told me about his admiration for great feats of engineering. Among his influences he had named the Hoover Dam, the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride at Disneyland and the fully automated cigarette factory he had toured at the age of eight. Still, I expected Pisaturo to tell me that Slave Zero and Slave One represented a kind of fall from the perfection of the human condition.

"It's a beautiful machine," Pisaturo said instead, "overlaid by a distorted skeleton."

It was then that I realized that, like me, Pisaturo -- and quite certainly Garvey too -- was entranced by the machines, only many times more so. It is this fascination that makes the messages of Garvey's work intuitively cryptic, equivocal and disturbing. An artist who works with machines can be a Marxist, but he cannot be a Luddite. The allure of the beautiful machine is far too great to be easily shaken -- especially by its builder.

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