“Soft Machines” at The Pace Gallery

“At the end, she pulls a razor from her mouth, which she has been balancing on her tongue during her entire speech.”

“Soft Machines”, Installation view, 2011. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

“Soft Machines” at The Pace Gallery
Jessica Redmond

The Soft Machine, the 1961 novel by William S. Burroughs from which the exhibit draws its title, depicts a dark world odyssey ravaged by drugs, sex, poverty, hatred, and authoritarian mind-control. Fifty years later, the curators at the Pace Gallery are drawing on its title and themes for “Soft Machines,” a group show featuring recent sixteen works from a variety of artists.

Burroughs’s world is extreme, made all the more absurd by the cut-up technique of the novel, but here, these works present evidence that the novel’s reality is not too far a departure from our own world. In the corner of the gallery lay the remnants of Through the Claw, a piece by Kate Gilmore that was performed the opening night of the exhibition. That evening, a lump of clay weighing 7,500 pounds towered on a table, and five women, dressed in pastel 1950s style dresses and heels, spent over two hours clawing through the clay until it was diminished to chunks on the ground, against the wall and around the platform. The set remains, though the clay has dried and the performers have gone, sitting like the scene of a murder, the clay scattered like rubble. Brown spatters cover the wall where the women hurled clay against it. In the debris lay other fragments: a stained pink shoe, a discarded hair tie. In the performance, a metaphor signifying a reactive deconstruction of male domination, the women were able to tear down the object of their oppression. All that is left now is the scene of their act. The other works of art resemble the abandoned set: evidence of a reaction against the oppressive mechanisms of society.

Burroughs reveals, in an appendix to a more obscure 1968 printing of his novel, that the “soft machine” is a name for the human body. The title is not necessarily a reference to violence, then, but about human vulnerability, its control. Consider Desiderata by Paul Pfeiffer (2004), a looped video built up of clips from the television game show, The Price is Right. Each clip specifically shows a contestant, mid-show, standing around the colorful set. They patiently await their fate as wheels spin or doors wait to be opened. The contestants stand, wait, and shift their weight impatiently, excitedly, their civilian clothing standing in stark contrast to the garish sets and flashing lights of the game show, their bodies controlled by the game.

The works that featured people–the soft machines–were the most powerful. Particularly moving was Ma Qiusha’s video portrait, From No. 4 Pingyuanli to No. 4 Tianqiaobeili. In the video, Qiusha faces the camera, and elaborates on childhood in China, where her conservative parents pressured her to reach academic and artistic success, giving up everything so that she could go to an art school in America, despite her reluctance. She is obligated by their expectations and sacrifices to pursue a dream she is not sure is her own. At the end, she pulls a razor from her mouth, which she has been balancing on her tongue during her entire speech.

“I felt the crushing weight of evil insect control forcing my thoughts and feelings into prearranged molds, squeezing my spirit,” one of Burroughs’s narrators says. The control was dismantled in Gilmore’s performance, which challenged Burroughs’s reality and tore it down. The other works of art merely evoke it, or record its damages. It is up to the viewer to take the message of the works in Soft Machines, as the works are as much a part of our reality as Burroughs’s. We are the soft machines, poked and prodded by the inevitable oppression of the modern world.

“Soft Machines” at The Pace Gallery, 545 W. 22 Street, New York, NY. July 14-August 26, 2011.