MacMurtrie Robots Embraced in Lille 2004: The Artist Home Again
By Helen Levin
Picture this: You are in a huge, gutted and Spartan church in Brooklyn NY, the workshop of Chico MacMurtrie and the Amorphic Robot Works. Machines, robotoids, drawings all surround the handsome forty-ish, smiling artist as he recounts his residency in Lille, France, where he just completed a three month exhibition retrospective, and the permanent installation of his robotic clock ‘Fetus to Man.’ MacMurtrie was one of the featured artists in Season One of the year long European Cultural Capital 2004 Festival.
HL: What are the Amorphic Robot Works?
CMM: We are a group of artists, engineers and technicians who collaborate as a team both technically and aesthetically, without which we could never achieve the sheer dimensionality
of the work. I love building the anthropomorphic machine…seeing the blob take form, something coming from scrap metal; that’s what A.R.W. is about." MacMurtrie is the Artistic Director of Amorphic Robot Works. Two features of his work are an intense interest in drawing as a preferred mode of ideation, and the concept of birthing; the latter takes place in a number of his works. What really kicks ass is that the MacMurtrie stuff is not about wizardry, pop cult, or entertainment. Instead, his figures are somehow reflective of the lonely and fragmented age in which we live…
HL: What did your exhibition consist of?
CMM: It was comprised of 250 works completed over the past fifteen years. The retrospective was mounted in a large postal storage facility that the city converted into a gallery space. On display was the sixty foot long piece, The Amorphic Landscape, comprised of mound-like formations from which an array of performing robots. My ‘tribe’ are ‘birthed’ and do things like play drums and other instruments, dance, climb, etc. It shows a sped up depiction of the human species’ life cycle, with forms emerging from the landscape. But it’s a noisy, raucous, and idiosyncratic life which ends in a self-destructive ‘bringing down of the house."
HL: Clearly, this is an ecological commentary… but it’s also related to your own roots in Native American culture, as you are of Mexican American descent.
CMM:The second major installation of the Lille show was the 30-foot long Cave of the Subconscious, a walk-through piece in which you encounter an array of characters that interact with you. They’re developed out of ordinary materials like rubber, nylon, wood, and metal. The cave sculptures come from the drawings and carvings I make on my desk as I unconsciously doodle while I talk on the phone. My carvings are a source of my inspiration; characters are creatures from my past, both real and imagined! Interactive yet carefully orchestrated events occur as you pass through the dramatically lit cave.
My human sized interactive robot, ‘Skeletal Reflections, was another piece in the show. It mimics the bodily gestures and facial expressions of the viewers and at the same time strikes a related pose taken from classical poses from art history. Examples are the famous Arnolfini couple, Gruenwald’s ‘Crucifixion,’ and Michelangelo’s ‘David.’ It’s substructure is a handcrafted aluminum support with a spinal column made of plastic disks with vertebrae to provide flexibility similar to the human spine. Ten motors operate in the face alone, and a closed loop serves as the control system for the remainder.
When asked if there are expectations of a show in the U.S. on the scale of Lille 2004, the reply is a little dour. 87,000 people are reported to have seen that exhibition. It seems that new media artists have more support for their events abroad. He has already had major shows in England, Germany, Spain, Japan, and now France, for example. At home, the artist has a permanent commission of a public sculpture in the Yerba Buena Gardens of San Francisco, and his Growing, Raining Tree is a three year installation at the Contemporary Art Center’s Unmuseum of Cincinnati, Ohio. But things have been slow enough here for MacMurtrie to find it more profitable to store his work in Europe. Catch a glimpse of the future in the upcoming show, "Personal Space" in Tribeca’s Gigantic Art Space from June 16 through July 31,2004. Or check out: amorphicrobotworks.org web page events to see what the peripatetic robots and their owner are up to…remembering, of course, that these guys don’t do windows.
