Mark Pauline's 1979 show Machine Sex crystallized his place in the performance art world. During the height of the late-'70s oil crisis, Pauline plugged illicitly into a North Beach gas station's power supply to fuel a demonic evisceration apparatus. When he switched it on, dead pigeons dressed in Arab sheik costumes dropped one by one into a makeshift food processor, spewing blood and pigeon guts in the direction of the audience, all to the tune of the Cure's "Killing an Arab." No one had seen anything like it.
Bobby Neel Adams
Mark Pauline with his Groucho Marx
machine, from RE/Search's
Pranks!
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Lab, 2948 16th St. (at Capp), S.F.
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Artist, machine-shop maestro, innovator, prankster -- in his more than 25 years of making mechanized terrors, Pauline has filled every role. A youthful troublemaker who expressed his anti-consumerist leanings with billboard modifications, he pioneered the field of machine art when he founded Survival Research Laboratories in 1979 with the stated purpose of, according to SRL's Web site manifesto, "re-directing the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, science, and the military away from their typical manifestations in practicality, product or warfare."
SRL's performances are as close to chaos as an art show can get. Audiences sit aghast and amazed as the group's machines, formed from hunks of discarded and "liberated" metal and electronics, perform oddball and often quite dangerous tasks: spitting out 2-by-4s, shooting 50-foot streams of flaming diesel fuel, firing beer cans filled with dynamite detonators and concrete.
It's machinery gone mad, yes, but Pauline's creations are also critical cultural commentary embodied in skittering iron and steel. His diesel-spewing Flamethrower, for example, is an instrument of mayhem -- I fondly recall one Burning Man where the contraption torched random objects in the pre-dawn hours -- but it could also be considered a man-made predator threatening a human population that has few natural enemies, making a potent point about our place in nature and the changes that could occur as robotics lurches into the future. Like more traditional artworks, SRL's metal monsters are generally clever and sometimes beautiful, but unlike more sedate creations, they're always menacing enough to drive home the organization's pokes at cultural and political sacred cows.
Alternative publisher RE/Search honors this beloved local institution with the "25th Anniversary Survival Research Laboratories Celebration,"an evening-long retrospective held in a space filled with photographic blowups of every SRL show. The highlight of the fete is "Cutting Edge Art and Social Change," a dialogue between Matt Gonzalez and Mark Pauline, followed by a series of interviews conducted by V. Vale (founder and original publisher of RE/Search), a "best of '80s SRL" video compendium created and narrated by former SRL videographer Jon Reiss, and a "surround video" projection of the group's most recent performance at the UC Berkeley Art Museum. It's an impressive nightcap for a movement that began on an S.F. street corner and continues to inspire artists all over the world.
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