Exploring The Fascinating Machines of Bernie Lubell

Soft wood. Latex. A few nuts and bolts. It sounds like a shopping list for something far simpler than the complex and highly interactive works that San Francisco, California based artist Bernie Lubell ends up creating. For the past 28 years, Lubell’s wooden machines have been installed in gallery spaces both in the U.S. and abroad, and have fostered connections between good friends, complete strangers, and the odd gallery security guard. His installations somehow manage to to bring up issues as heavy as the origins of life, yet still create an atmosphere filled with smiles, surprises, and wonderment.

10ten Magazine: I’m going to start off by taking it back. You helped set up a rather quirky San Francisco tour in the early 90′s called You are Here (You Think) which took people to out of the way neighborhoods not usually frequented by tourists. What was the idea behind this?

Bernie Lubell: I was an artist in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and Lydia Matthew was in charge of putting together the cultural programming. There were also a couple of cultural critical theorists, Dean MacCannell and Juliet MacCannell, kind of Marxist tourism experts, (laughs). We’d gotten somewhat friendly and this idea was proposed to run a tour of the city.

At that moment, on a map of San Francisco that you would get from AAA (tourist map), the Mission District had no streets. You know a “you don’t want to go there” kind of thing, and Hunter’s Point, are you kidding? There were vast areas that were just not on the map, the places that were too dangerous for tourists. Although the Tenderloin, because it’s so close to the hotels, that was still mapped out, and that was probably even more dangerous!

So for the tour, we avoided all the places you would normally go, we put in mostly things that were kind of odd and offbeat, and out of the way. We wanted to kind of tell the understory.

Now as luck would have it, they were earthquake-proofing the Palace of the Legion of Honor at the time, and they happened to discover all these dead bodies underneath because when the Palace had originally been built, there was a graveyard there and the contractor just kicked over the headstones and built on it. So on the tour, we talked about the question of development taking precedence over everything else.

A good conversation piece for the tour…

Yeah, but shortly thereafter the city covered up the site and the evidence. In fact, today if you go to the Palace of Legion of Honor and you eat in the café, there is a big retaining wall that is still backfilled with bones— human bones. They just took a bulldozer and dumped them.

Have you always created your artwork in this way, huge installations and all?

Well I was a psychology major in college and then a graduate student in the 70s. I was actually doing sculpture, but by the early 80s I had moved on to making room-sized constructions.

You tend to use very simple materials in your constructions, wood, bolts, and good amount of latex, but you end up making some very complex machines.

All of the materials have a similar organic quality. With the latex, I make pneumatic systems and I suppose I could use something like urethane, but nothing stretches like latex…. and nothing feels as much like flesh as latex. I like that. Latex, however, has a fairly limited lifespan, although I’ve managed to keep some of the parts going for many years. And then I have to replace the latex on them. So it’s not permanent, but I like the fact that it’s not permanent because one of my points is that nothing is permanent. You may think artwork is forever, but it’s not, so I like to make things out of something that isn’t going to last.

Like those grave sites…

Yeah, even there. You think your burial is sacred in some way (laughs) but not if you’re in the path of development.

There’s the teamwork thing going on in some of your recent works, and then there’s also an exploration of relationships between people.

Cooperation is a fundamental aspect of innovation. Big surprise, right? But it is a big surprise in a way because you know, for a decade scientists had been ignoring this possibility.

I also like hiding the effects of cooperation. So it’s sort of an ‘I’ll do it for you if you’ll do it for me’ situation, which is cooperative but only at the most minimal of levels. In fact, the first piece that did this was actually a big discovery. I wanted to do a piece about the origins of life and the idea was, if everything has a cause then how can you ever have anything new. You know? This is the question.

With this piece The Second Story: a Twice Failed Tale I actually kind of discovered the answer.

The way the piece was done, all of the causes were on one side and all the effects were on the other side of the wall. I figured people would have to deconstruct and reconstruct the thing and figure out how it worked. But that isn’t what people did at all. People would find another person, or they would go into the gallery office and say, ‘Hey I need some help here. I can’t see what this is doing when it’s working. Could you work it for me so I could see what it’s doing?’

So, this is my answer to the origins of life mystery. If you have a closed system where really everything does have a cause, then you can’t really have anything new; but there are no closed systems, only occasionally we can maybe, almost, get a fully closed system in a laboratory but in the universe there are no closed systems. So what you have is multiple factors feeding into everything and when you have multiple things going on — more than one person in the case of interactive artwork — you’ve got all sorts of possibilities.

And lots of opportunity for things to go right and wrong?

Well, I also discovered that if your piece is broken and people say ‘well what does it do?’ And I say ‘well it’s broken right now’ They say ‘uh huh’ and they just walk away. They could examine the whole thing, but if it’s supposed to do something and it’s not doing it then they’re not interested.

I found if you put an out of order sign on (your broken artwork) then you get them interested again. It becomes a commentary on things breaking (laughs).

Teamwork is important in your works, but you approach the aspect in a kind of unique way.

Even before I had things that were getting people to work with each other, I was making things people had to touch or I wanted them to touch. I wanted people to play with things and make things happen, make things work. But I hope I never get to the point where I’m getting people focusing on how they’re playing with each other. I want them to just be playing with each other and let that unfold as it will.

Can you call that a central theme of most of your work?

Yeah, I’d say that’s one of the central themes. But it came about kind of by accident.

The piece Twice Failed Tales is the first piece where I discovered that people had to cooperate to get the construction to work. They wanted it to work so they created their own little system to get it moving. I thought, ‘Wow, this is really cool.’

So when I did the heart piece (Etiology of Innocence) which is pretty much the same idea, one person works the construction and the other people can see the product of the work.

The guards at the museum there also happened to love it because instead of having to say, ‘Don’t’ touch that! Stand back!’ all day, they got to say ‘Not only can you play with it, let me show you some of the things it does.’

Unfortunately, at some point, the museum decided that the guards were usurping their territory and they prohibited the guards from touching the pieces. The public could touch them, but the guards weren’t permitted to. It’s kind of an interesting story about power. Here I am trying to create this piece that’s ostensibly democratic, and Yerba Buena Gardens is a relatively democratic institution, but it’s like the Greeks and the slaves I guess… The slaves were important to keep the economy running so the Greeks could spend their time voting.

We have a slightly different system here, but it has a lot of similarities.

So in the end, do you really just want people to interact and have fun?

I do want people to have fun. I want people to touch things. I like people playing, I like people having fun, but I also like the sense of discovery. It’s not as if I’m trying to manifest this particular thing in my work, it is mostly me stumbling around and making discoveries myself, and if I’m lucky the discoveries are really good (laughs).

The people who interact with the artworks are creating a little temporary relationship with the pieces while they do this, and they have this discovery. But there’s a great irony in that because I build everything by myself, and yet it’s all about people cooperating.

There is importance in having a personal vision and seeing it through.

I don’t know if I have so much in the way of a personal vision, for me I have to be stupid to make the discovery, I really have to beat my head against the wrong wall first; until I turn around and then walk into the right wall and that bruise becomes the good one.

Sometimes the answer runs into you without you looking for it.

Well, I’m fairly good at creating a theatre for accidents (laughs), someplace where things can go wrong in the right way. I often end up fighting with the thing that eventually becomes the whole point of the piece. I’m fighting against it usually for a significant period of time before I recognize that this was the whole point of it all along.

But I think that struggle adds something to the pieces that wouldn’t be there otherwise, they pretty much are the record of everything that’s happened to them. I don’t start over again. I kind of cut that piece off, drill new holes, patch this thing up. There’s a full record of all the vestigial organs left hanging there, or little parts of them.

You’ve lived and worked in San Francisco, what are some of your favorite spots in the Bay Area?

Oh, well, underneath the old Palace Legion (laughs)

I often go up to the Marin Headlands. I like how you’ve got the old forts crumbling and you’ve got nature encroaching upon all of that. Most of the gun emplacements have fallen off the cliff or been hauled away now, and you don’t get that juxtaposition anymore. I like that whole question of permanence, and I like the fact that in a ruin you’ll have people using the site and the materials sometimes for something completely different because they have a new use; but somehow the old ruin is still partially there.

I used to enjoy Mission Rock, but the ramp has gotten kind of slicked up a bit. You’re walled off now from the boatyard. You used to be in the boatyard, having your drink, while guys are scraping their hulls down and stuff. Everything has shifted towards this kind of cleaned up, homogenized thing. Now, of course, I wouldn’t want to live in a ruin. I like having a nice house with a roof that doesn’t leak, and all this sort of stuff.

My girlfriend lives out on in Sunset in Chinatown #2, and they’re not far from Chinatown #3, which is not far from Chinatown #4. They’re also mixed in with old Russian immigrant pockets, so there’s some interesting diversity there, great restaurants—Sunrise Deli is a pretty good falafel place, there are about a million Chinese restaurants, and ten thousand Chinese dessert places, all these little stores that are selling weird plastic stuff for your kitchen for a dollar, cheap toilet paper, and rice cookers.

One place that’s a good story is the DNA Lounge. I met this young guy at a party a while back and we were talking. I said, ‘So what do you do?”

He said, “Well, I just started a nightclub.’

I said, ‘What is it?’ and he replied, ‘DNA Lounge.’

I said, ‘Oh, like nucleic acid? You mean like, genetics and inheritance, sex and things like that?’

And he said, ‘No, man. It’s D.N.A.—dance not art.” (laughs).

They wouldn’t let me in one time I tried to go. I didn’t look cool enough I think.

Do you ever visit museums when you’re traveling?

When we travel, my girlfriend always says ‘I’m with an artist, we’ll go to Paris, we’ll look at the Dorset and the Louvre.’ But no, I don’t want to go to any of those places; I want to go to things like the medical museum and the social work museum.

The interesting museums…

Yeah, I’m always looking for this slightly odd kind of thing, especially science oriented. In Europe, you’ve got all this science from the 15th century and earlier.

The only thing you can get here (in the U.S.) that has anything close to the same sensibility is the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, which is a great place, but of course David Wilson the founder gets many of his ideas from going to these other places where the truth is stranger than fiction. He creates these things that are sort of on the borderline between truth and fiction, so they have this slight fictional quality. It’s great ambiguity.

Any other spots in Los Angeles?

I don’t know. I don’t physically like LA that much. The distances are just too immense. You want to look at art in Pasadena but you’ll never make it to say, Santa Monica on the same day. I mean it’s just like two ends of the universe with 10 billion cars in between, trying to kill you along the way.

Do you like observing people when they are interacting with your work?

When people start playing with them at the opening it’s like a revelation to me. I’m actually seeing the piece for the first time. And it’s great. I’m always a little anxious because I’m worried they’re going to break it before it’s had a chance to really do much, and that does happen.

In many ways, whenever you finish making a work of art, it isn’t yours anymore. People are playing with my piece, they’re taking it over, they’re making something happen, sometimes something I never even imagined. People frequently discover flaws, things I hadn’t counted on.

Some of your pieces create what would be sort of an awkward situation between two people…

Yeah, the Point of Inflection, especially I think does that, and I don’t know that I was intending it to be awkward, but of course as soon as I was making it I was thinking that well, you know, it is kind of sexy, the piece. You’re kind of touching another person through latex, what could be more like sex than touching other people through latex—safe sex.

But I decided I kind of liked that, but it wasn’t an intention. It was just another little discovery that it wound up having that kind of quality. But not everyone feels that way.

Surely some people embrace it…

Yeah, some people just go for it. There was a huge lipstick smack on it. Someone had left their bright red lipstick on it at some point. I liked it because it created a situation where you have to communicate with your partner in some way, either verbally or not. I like that little tension that’s there.

Interview and Photography: Patrick Lydon
English Editing:Cylinda Marquart
Japanese Editing & Translation: Kyoko Koda & Natsuki Yamada

=======

Bernie Lubell is showing his latest interactive sculpture Conservation of Intimacy at venues in the U.S. and Europe. For more information on Bernie’s work, visit his website at http://bernielubell.com/