Simon Taitâ??s Mews No.11

Why are you so good?

So what is the secret, then, of this success? Exhibitions all over the world, rich people falling over themselves to buy, interviewed celebs casually dropping that theyâ??ve got automata at home. But why? I thought Iâ??d better ask a couple of individuals who would know.

For the last few months of 2009 CMT was in Dortmund at DASA â?? if you really want to know it stands for Deutsche Arbeitsschutzausstellung, or German Safety at Work Exhibition, but donâ??t be deflected â?? at the invitation of the curator, Hans-Gerd Kaspars. He heard about Cabaret from his sister-in-law who had seen the travelling show at the Phaeno in Wolfsburg, about 150 miles away â??and, having a special sense of humour, she told me most urgently to visit themâ??.You see, itâ??s a personal thing.

He did not make it but checked out this fabulous website which, along with the recommendation of a colleague who had seen the Granada exhibition, made him decide to invite Sarah and the team.

â??I don’t think they are popular in a sense of well known, not in Germany, but once shown in Dortmund they got popular at once. Weâ??ve never ever had such a good feedback in the press, and never that many visitors at comparable exhibitions. Iâ??m sure we could easily repeat the show with even greater success. Indeed, weâ??re thinking about thisâ?¦â??

Hard to imagine what exhibition a health and safety museum could show that would be more appealing, but why choose it? There was some fierce chat about why Hans-Gerd wanted to put such a lightweight subject in a space reserved for serious matters; in the nature of the kind of benevolent despot that runs the best of museums, he simply declared â??automatesâ?? as he charmingly calls then, to be art and ended the discussion. Art is serious in Germany

OK, but what is the connection with H&S? â??Well, the “useless” automates were the door opener for using automated machines like in the weaving industry in the 18th century, but the real reason is, that they are fascinating and teach a lot about human communication -which is, of course, an important factor in work lifeâ??.

The Science Museum of Minnesota is a different sort of client. More of an old mate, really â?? theyâ??ve been taking the CMT touring show for four years now, where visitors, delighted by the whimsy and inventiveness they have encountered with the pieces in the past, ask specifically for CMT when they come. Bill Maloney is the SMM director of travelling exhibitions â?? and not only that, he lines up other venues across the States.

â??One way to measure their appeal as distributor of the CMT exhibitions here in North America is simply by the number of requests we get for the exhibitionâ?? Bill says. â??The show has appeared in ten venues since beginning its tour in North America in 2006. It’s been seen by over 1.5 million visitors in the US alone. It has appeared in museums in San Francisco, Chicago and Miami just to name a few cities.â??

Bill likes it, he says, because the collection is flexible enough to trundle out to entertain queues but also to fill a 3,000 square foot gallery.

For public appeal, though, the subject matter â??is right up there with the dinosaursâ??, and itâ??s growing. â??In some senses the automata genre has been a beloved partner in the Make Movementâ??â?¦ the what? â??The Make Movement, itâ??s a snowballing effort by museums, particularly science museums, to provide visitors the resources to discover and learn principles of science through direct experience and creative manipulation.â??

I can see that, though I never thought of the work of Spooner, Hunkin, Newstead et al of being worthy. Ah but thatâ??s not all, Bill says. â??There is really nothing quite like CMT’s automata. To folks in the States they are distinctly British in their approach to humor. That is compelling to generations now intimately familiar with GB’s funny bone through television, movies and stage. For me, weaned on Monty Python, interacting with CMT automata always puts me in a lighthearted, familiar mood. Itâ??s like being in the company of a clever, funny friend.â??

So there you are, boys and girls. What makes you great is that youâ??re the Silly Walks of the exhibition circuit.

The Germans, of course, take their humor much more seriously, but they take it nevertheless. â??The figures are like a psychological mirror showing the absurdness of lifeâ?? Hans-Gerd says, â??but they are unbelievably funnyâ??.

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Nice little show at the Flowers Gallery in Cork Street by a non-CMT artist, Tim Lewis. He makes cute little animal robots, three dimensional zoetropes, and bronze prosthetic arms that write romantic graffiti on the gallery wall. Worth a visit, until May 8. http://www.flowersgalleries.com/exhibitions/3885-a-retrospective/

Mewsette 2
If you want to know how most of our makers get their mechanical know-how from, step into the newish clocks and watches gallery at the British Museum. Itâ??s all there â?? energy, wheels, escapement (conserving the energy) , controller (the movement of the engine), and the end result, which for watch is time indication. Five basic elements. And you can add drama if you see one of the highlights of the gallery, the galleon which in it’s former days sailed across a table firing cannons as it went. But CMT artists have another element too, of course: not much of a sense of humour in most watch movements. http://www.britishmuseum.org/

The Harpy of West Street

A new one-off piece from Fi Henshall, the green spikey haired Harpy hovers over the tin town below. Fi is creating these new pieces as she works on designs for a large exhibition piece with urban tin landscape, (we can’t wait!).

The Harpy of West Street

£695 (excl. VAT)

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The Tax Man – An Unbuilt Machine

In 1984 Paul Spooner designed an elaborate machine which was to have been on display in a shopping centre in York. (This was four years before the Ride of Life). The machine, called the Tax Inspector, was to be ‘an automatic window display to cheer up the passers-by’. It was to have six scenes dealing with a day in the life of the Taxman, and the finale, as the machine opened up was a dream sequence.

You can download copies of Paul’s original drawings and ideas for these scenes here:

The Tax Man: An Unbuilt Machine – £1.40
11 page PDF Download (5.2MB)

Simon Tait’s Mews No.10

Keith incorporated

Itâ??s Keithâ??s birthday so he goes to the computer centre to sort out a programme, pops in to the overall shop for a new pair, answers the phone to meâ?¦ the things you have to do which you like doing but donâ??t usually have to time for. Thing about Keith Newstead is that even his most complex pieces, the £1,750 Catcopter for instance, take no more than a week to finish. The little astronaut he made as a Christmas present for the real astronaut, Richard Garriott, took him an hour. â??My palette is simple: brass beads, brass sheets, wood, plastic. Keep it as uncomplicated as you can is my mottoâ??.

So Keith is a serious little industry, in his workshop in Automatonville, otherwise called Penryn, Cornwall, and right now heâ??s in overdrive for the cruise liner industry. â??Theyâ??ve got a lot of money for painting, sculpture and so on, and now automataâ?? he says, â??so Iâ??ve been making them for the ships for about seven yearsâ??. Each time thereâ??s a theme, so this time heâ??s working on New York, the Empire State Building for one, and for the other a building site with construction workers perched on girders hundreds of storeys high. And he has to make them as vandal-proof as he can, because for all the thousands of dollars passengers spend on their cruises, for some reason they canâ??t resist busting lovely things. The automata canâ??t be power driven on board ship so that have to have handles, and that is the only part that is not behind glass in the niches made for his creations; so with each voyage there goes a batch of spare brass handles to replace the ones that are nicked.

Keith Newstead was a graphic deign student who went to Newcastle to be an artist, where he felt death by boredom creeping up on him. He went to Finland to deliver newspapers, but was in danger of freezing to death there, so came back to the UK to make jewellery. Then he saw a TV programme about automata -â?? I found the mixture of arts, craft, graphics and movement very excitingâ?? â?? and made his first piece, which he took along to Cabaret in Covent Garden, where Sue adopted him. When he wasnâ??t working with CMT he was riding despatch bikes; that was 20 years ago, and heâ??s given up the bikes now.

Occasionally he still makes jewellery. For Valentineâ??s Day he gave his partner, Concha, a bracelet, made from galvanised fence wire. â??You can get a really nice finish on it if you polish it rightâ??.

About ten years ago he did some work with the cartoonist Ralph Steadman for a Terry Gilliam film, a piece called Mad God Universe which was a crazily surreal blur of revolving sails, waving hands and bubbles. The piece is missing, but a film of its still exists, and Keith and Steadman are working together again on a new piece for the Frome Festival. It opens on July 9, so he should be starting on it about the end of June â?¦

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Have you seen Jean-Pierre Jeunetâ??s chaotic new romp, Micmacs à Tire-Larigot, yet? It occurs to me that Keith could probably make the entire thing as an automaton sequence, have a look and youâ??ll see what I mean. But the truth, is the movie is already studded with ingenious mechanical devices, the inventions of another CMT favourite, Gilbert Peyrie. Laugh? Itâ??s a wind-up.

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Steve Guy and the Rose Bruford College took their ingenuity to the last knockings of the Granada show, Automotas: Teatro Mecanico to work with Spanish secondary school children, and Iâ??ve just seen the video. Iâ??ve seen the violinist Enrique Lanz play a duet with a miniature version of himself, Iâ??ve seen the earth go round the moon.,. and Iâ??ve seen an elephant fly. Goes to show, if itâ??s crazy enough genius can be catching.

‘Sad Frog’ by Keith Newstead

Keith Newstead has started making wonderful automata from the flotsam which arrives regularly at his local beach in Cornwall. The contents of containers lost at sea sometimes contain large amounts of the same, often colourful cargo, (lighters or legos).

This piece is called ‘Sad Frog’ and is a one-off design.

Height 24cm

£295

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