Bernie Lubell: Conservation of Intimacy

An interactive installation presented in partnership with the 01SJ Art Biennial. In true Silicon Valley fashion, Lubell has created his low-tech machines in his San Francisco garage for over twenty years. However, instead of working with computers, software, and electronics, the artist collaborates with pine wood and ancient technologies—cranks, pulleys, and springs, for instance—to build the immersive and interactive works. The deliberate handmade aesthetic, along with the ingenuity of the complex designs, give Lubell’s works the appearance of a different era—a time of the master craftsmen and old technology. The creations are in fact

deeply rooted in the artist’s research and explorations of historic scientific instruments and obsolete machinery. Lubell’s Conservation of Intimacy serves as a stage where people are invited to touch and play with the work—an unlikely, but thrilling, proposition in the context of the “do not touch” policy in the gallery and museum environment. As participants crank, rock, and create sounds with the work, they tap into what the artist describes as the “vast reservoir of knowledge stored in each of our bodies,” and become important collaborators in the realization and understanding of this massive installation.

With a background in engineering and psychology, Lubell designs his interactive wood machines through experience. He begins with a question—about intimacy, the nature of being human, the theory of entanglement—and looks to archaic technology to manifest these complicated concepts into a mechanical device. His trial-and-error process results in creations that are fragile-looking yet sturdy, poetic and surreal. Not until the works come in contact with us, the visitors of the exhibition, do they truly come to life. In Lubell’s world of art making, every person’s participation is significant.

The works entice the senses—they look and feel like elaborate playground diversions and are incredibly pleasurable to explore. In Conservation of Intimacy, two people rock on a suspended bench while their motions are recorded as a graph by a pen marking a roll of paper (which is moved by the third participant pedaling on a stationary wooden bicycle). With minimal instruction, visitors intuitively discover and activate the mechanics of the multifaceted machines. As participants are absorbed in the rattle and hum of the work, they delight in being alive and engaged in the wonder of life.

Much of Lubell’s work is inspired by the early medical devices of French physiologist Etienne Jules Marey (1830–1904). A mechanical genius, Marey developed myriad sophisticated pneumatic contraptions in the late nineteenth century to precisely measure movement and make visible what is otherwise invisible, including a machine that simulated a heart

beat and a pulse-reading device that was a precursor for medical imaging. The artist writes, “What I like about Marey's early medical apparatus is that while they reflect a naive faith in mechanical models for biology they also embody the evolutionary design necessary to get realistic results. They were designed by experience just as we ourselves are.

Born in Baltimore, MD Lubell is based in San Francisco, CA. His interactive installations have exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at FACT, Liverpool and V2 in Rotterdam. Lubell has received numerous awards including and Award of Distinctio n from Ars Electronica, an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant in 2009 and Pollack Kranser Foundation Grants in 2002 and 1991.

July 3 - September 19, 2010
Opening: Friday, July 16, 6-8pm
San Jose ICA
560 South First Street
San Jose, CA 95113 USA
www.sjica.org