The Boy Mechanic

March, 1999

MARK THOMPSON has been an artist's artist in the Bay Area for three decades. By that I mean someone who has been enormously influential on other artists, is greatly respected among his peers and has created an imposing body of innovative work, but through it all has received only sporadic and inadequate curatorial and journalistic attention. FLETCHER AND RUBIN are two young whipper snappers who have been knocking the socks off the region's curators since emerging in the early 90s as a team that took community-based conceptual art practice to a new level of commitment and sophistication. At the same time, they freed it from any semblance of self righteousness and dipped the whole confection into a delicious chocolate coating of humor. For Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the collaboration of Fletcher, Rubin and Thompson is like the decision of Spiderman to collaborate with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — a thrilling and daunting opportunity.

Since their graduation from California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) five years ago, Harrell Fletcher and Jon Rubin have emerged as fashioners of some of the most delightful and militantly wacky work being done today. Their first collaboration, before Fletcher had even finished school, contained many of the same elements they have elaborated and refined in subsequent projects. They borrowed a storefront just down the street from CCAC and named it Gallery Here (Fig.9). The two artists then set about using the gallery as a tool for their approach to community engagement. All the gallery's neighbors were invited (read cajoled) to consign (read relinquish) small items, either personal or store inventory, that would be sold in a hybrid garage sale and art exhibition, replete with labels (tags actually), shelves and pedestals. The labels indicated the provenance of these humble objects and were included with all purchases. Weekly the space was turned over to a new neighbor of the gallery and exhibition. While creating the most grassroots, if oblique, portrait of a community, they also succeeded in parodying the economics and materialism of the art world. More importantly, this project added a page to the increasingly important text — dating back at least to German conceptualist Joseph Beuys' "citizen artist" — about breaking down the borders between art making and social participation, between studio practice and a nonobjective concept of production. Two individuals acting as one, Fletcher and Rubin forced their viewers/customers to see everything and everyone as two sides of the same coin: artist/impresario, citizen/artist, merchant/artist, consumer/collector, et al; just as the objects on view were simultaneously art and garage sale item, and viewers were both shoppers and participants in a cultural experiment in social biography. Through Gallery Here, Fletcher and Rubin were also developing what would become their signature style of art making — a willingness to trust that their serendipitous ventures into a community would surrender raw material that would be at best profound or at worst amusing. At their most high faluttin', they might concede that what they were really looking for was a way (an epistemology) of encountering and knowing the world that was emotionally and politically charged, humanistic and fun.

In their next major piece, the artists were turned loose on the Richmond Civic Center (Fig.10) by the art center that is part of that complex. Each employee of the city (over 300) was asked to pose for a photographic portrait taken at work; most complied. These photos were then given to art classes at the art center and used as source material in beginning painting classes by all age groups. The resulting portraits were put on display in the gallery, as were objects taken from the work cubicles or offices of each subject, and tagged with provenance information just like the objects in Gallery Here. In subsequent projects, the residents of communities encountered by chance would continue as subjects and collaborators in their work — for instance, in portraits of selected mall-goers in Pleasanton (Fig.11), a young student of the San Francisco Art Institute (Fig.12), urban gardeners in the Mission District (Fig.13) or the city of Walnut Creek (Fig.14).

Since finishing school at UC Berkeley in 1973, Mark Thompson has centered his work on the observation and graceful manipulation of honeybees, flowing water and other elementary aspects of the environment. While emerging from the maelstrom of mid-70s Bay Area conceptual art, performance and ecological activism, his work is not about any of those forms so much as it is about working through them to understand the natural world and — like the work of Fletcher and Rubin — site. His earliest mature work, and perhaps most well known, Immersion (Fig.15), involved a filmed performance in which he sat on a 14-foot high tower on family property in the East Bay and allowed a hive of bees to swarm around his nude head and torso until he was completely covered in a living mantle. For the artist, the resulting film — which alternates between the speed of human activity and a slowed meditative rate — is about space and time, as well as about how the movement of the insects both exemplifies and creates an ephemeral physical place. He began to see how "the bees' flight and the life of the hive seemed to clarify fundamentally what holds everything together." It was as though his vertical body isolated against the blue sky brought out of invisibility the moving lines of life around us in the way that a magnet organizes iron filings to manifest otherwise unknowable patterns.

Thompson moved on to a series of actions at home in the San Francisco Bay Area, in Japan, and then in Austria. After returning to the Bay Area, he completed his work titled City Explorations (Fig.16), which extended and refined Immersion's notions. In Northern California and Japan, he put a hive in a wicker backpack and walked incredibly slowly (10 to 12 feet an hour) through a rural field so that the location-sensitive bees could cope with a moving home base while he steered them closer to food sources — a particularly "intimate, symbiotic balance of tending" to the environment. In City Explorations, Thompson grappled with, explored and grasped site through the interactions of bees with their environment and the chance human encounters resulting from following the hive's movements.

Most penetrating was the event in Berlin that anticipated reunification by several months when Thompson commingled beeswax from both sides of the wall, and natural bee activity ignored artificial political boundaries. A second area of inquiry for Thompson has been the manipulation of bodies of water and architecture, notably at Art Park in New York state and in Mill Valley, California. In both locations the flow of water — in one case tidal, in the other (Art Park) a downhill stream — was used to fill small houses to the rafters utilizing minimal manipulations of tidal and gravitational effects. Particularly true in the New York case, the long history of the site was honored — from early Native American use to 19th-century industrialization to contemporary teenage partying. Other works in the 90s have combined this interest in architectural space with the metaphysical beauty of the movement of honeybees in dramatic, often theatrical settings.

The title of the collaboration among Fletcher, Rubin and Thompson is THE BOY MECHANIC, taken from a series of books published by Popular Mechanic magazine that have influenced Thompson greatly since boyhood. On the surface, the installation appears to be a portrait of Mark Thompson, his life, obsessions and principles. However, it is also about the act of collaboration, the merging and submerging of individual identity. It is centered on an acre of land in Orinda, where Thompson spent several years of his childhood and currently lives. It documents the history of that site and recreates Thompson's memories of long ago flora and fauna as well as his obsessions around such themes as flight, sound-making devices and backyard garage invention.

As of this writing, the installation will consist of a functioning beehive with closed circuit video surveillance; the side of a zeppelin made of beeswax and bedsheets; photo portraits of Thompson at the site of former trees on his land; six hinged wooden recreations of those trees; a portable plywood duck pond with duck decoys from his collection and a Thompson look-alike mannequin; five videos of various duck and insect calls being demonstrated; a smaller rotating zeppelin model; a map of Mark's (Christopher Robin-like) acre drawn on the floor; drawings from Mark's adolescent science notes; several objects made from suggestions in the Boy Mechanic books, including a ten-foot sled and videotape of its use in the Sierras; most likely a boat, a glider and a bicycle built for three; and a set of three camouflaged fishing waders refashioned to fit three men into four legs. This latter piece summarizes the approach of the artists, as their three personalities are merged into one camouflaged installation.

Two artistic practices from two different generations of conceptual practice are merged in THE BOY MECHANIC, and one inevitably wonders if it is not too awkward a match. Yet, what emerges is a continuity of investigation on the subject of how artists can most elastically encounter site and other citizens, and incorporate both in a generous, rather than manipulative, way into their projects. There is an interest in artifact, whether from a garage sale or Mark's accumulated shelves of personal history. There is a respect, even an awe, in the way they seek to know the world. Finally, there is a strong understanding of the need to commit vast quantities of time to understanding a place. They develop an almost meditative discipline, severe attention to detail and look to unveil the patterns and invisible movement of living things, whether in a suburban strip mall or a rural field, whether human or animal, past or present.