Mark Pauline of Survival Research Labs was a guest of the Seattle Art Fair this year. The Fair asked me to appear with Mark, for a public session of reminiscence and speculation.
After running a few brief demos of three of his creations, Mark wowed the standing-room-only audience — “SRO for SRL” — with a flurry of his machine-art war-stories. I hope that he writes a memoir.
Mark, being a punk refusenik, always understood that his art would never receive grants and always be under threat of official repression. Therefore, to remain creative, Mark developed certain strategies of art production that have become standard practice, four decades later. This is what makes him a pioneering figure.
First: remote controlled machines as device art. Mechanical performance is not new — Alexander Calder in the 1920s used to do entertain home audiences with an ensemble of clever performing toys he made from cranks, wood and wire. However, since 1979 and the first Pauline performances, there’s been a stellar radiation of loud, public machine displays: Burning Man rituals, Robot Wars, Battle Bots as television programs, Arduino actuators in installations and device art, Makertainment, and endless YouTube channels of devices being blown up, macerated, and incinerated.
Second. Unlike land artists (who also tend to like violent explosions, mechanical rubble and lightning strikes) Mark’s work has always been relentlessly urban. SRL machines were created mostly in run-down or abandoned industrial buildings, and exhibited in urban “performance spaces” that had never once seen an artistic performance. Nowadays it’s entirely common for the culture industry to move into worthless, tumbledown structures in industrial decline. There’s scarcely a city council in Europe or America that won’t exploit artists as their remedy for urban industry in decay.
Third. “Obtainium.” Mark build devices with the size and weight of elephants, mostly from materials that starkly lack any rational pricing system. He deploys military surplus, ex-industrial debris, and, often, the obscure scrap of scientific lab research. Of course this “obtained” material is “cheap,” or at least lacks a given market price, but in talking to Mark, I’ve come to realize that he’s got huge volumes of this “obtainium” material, more then ten Mark Paulines could ever transform into art. His “art supplies” come from liminal spaces of post-industrial practice that lack any proper labels, names and prices. They’re not even “junk.”
Mark was a pioneer in understanding this outlaw cornucopia of potentially creative material. Mark is a guru of “obtainium” mostly though a network of favors — long-trusted fans and collaborators who, in some cases, quietly beg him to take things away. However: modern Maker spaces, hack labs, Fab Labs, and ateliers — all over the world, they’re full of this value-added and/or value-subtracted “repurposed” “obtainium.”
Commercial suppliers such as Harbor Freight or Parker Hannifin supply tools that are so low in price that they’re literally cheaper than junk. Junk, after all, has discovery costs and has to be transported, repair, rehabilitated, refurbished. Mankind still lacks any general economic theory of “obtainium.” It’s got the profligacy of fossil crude-oil.
Fourth. Viral publicity. SRL used to announced its performances entirely by word of mouth. If you didn’t already know why you wanted to see SRL activity, it made no sense for you to be anywhere near it. So there was no mainstream media presence, no ads, no gallery system, no artworks to purchase… maybe a videotape. This situation used to be called “being underground” or having a “cult fandom,” but nowadays, although Mark is not traditionally famous, he is “widely unknown.” He’s become about as famous as the late Jean Tinguely, another machine artist who was slowly embraced by respectability.
I don’t believe that Mark Pauline is famous for the reasons that Mark ought to be famous for — he’s famous for making giant, loud, weird machines that spit flames, while he’s probably better understood as a Yankee art-engineer in the cultural tradition of Alexander Calder and Man Ray. Mark is also a visionary for art survival in a world of harshly commoditarian philistines, of market totalitarianism. He truly was engaged in “survival research,” meaning survival for artistic impulse when nobody smiles on art, pats its shaggy head, gives it cookies or wraps it up in the flag. A lot of art exists in that condition of persecution now, and yet Mark Pauline has been there, persisting, for decades.
I’m quite the devotee of device art, kinetic art, technology art – I’m on the board of an Italian technology art fair, so it’s fair to state that I’ve become a minor art-world functionary. So I’ve seen plenty of Pauline-like actively, yet there is something deeper going on in Mark’s art practice, that has never been mainstreamed or recuperated. His art machinery is an expression of violent hatred and revulsion. It’s also, just, it’s much more expressive than most art done that involves machines. Mark has a lot of disciples, but they still miss this primal aspect. They’re not machines with a veneer of art on them; they’re a cry of rage, pain, fear and foreboding that is acted out through mechanism.
It’s not a frisson of surrealism, not even spectacular horror, more of a cognitive dissonance, a shocking discovery. It’s like some other “machinic phylum,” an alternate world where American industrialism exists, but it’s confined to the chemosynthetic pressure, heat and stygian darkness of an abyssal vent. If we understood that internal combustion is killing us, we would expect machines to look like that. Not many do.
