Simon Tait’s Mews No.12

The girls are here

As an aficionado of this column you could be excused for thinking that automaton model-makers are a pretty exclusive coterie of ancient boffins shut away in workshops with their tools, bits of wire and perspex and their over active imaginations. Well, I’m sorry if I’ve encouraged that perception because it’s quite wrong.

For instance, there’s Pascale Michalski known as Zuzi – and you’ll have to wait until we meet to hear about why she’s called Zuzi, much too funny a story for this serious stick. Zuzi was born in Luxembourg 26 years ago, studied fine art and went into film production.

She’d been told that she could do art or science, not both, but she was never told why not and secretly she was making models, and she was still making them when the film jobs brought her to London… well, Dartford. The first one I saw was that amazing Gothick house, ‘Fort Libellula’ (or Castle Dragonfly) which she turned into a music box by getting a composer friend to come up with some music which she then pricked onto a pianola disc. Ingenuity, see? Then there were Spook Monkeys, smaller pieces, and the latest is Piano with a pianist whose arms are horns and who plays the keyboard with his feet, which are horses’ hooves. Surreal, geddit? ‘I like ugly things” she explains. ‘I think there’s something really beautiful about ugly’.

And then there’s Fi Henshall, another free spirit in the realm of mechanical sculpture. Brought up in Pembrokeshire and three years older than Zuzi, Fi went to Falmouth School of Art to study fine art, but it didn’t offer what she wanted. ‘I didn’t much like it. I was hoping to learn about carving in wood, but they were teaching “concepts”. I’m not a concept person’ she explains.

After college she left concepts behind and went to work on an organic farm in Cornwall, but didn’t much like being an employee either. ‘I just wanted to find a way to make stuff, like wood-carving’, and she began making puppets with a measure of success. She was working for theatre companies and was in some demand, but ‘it’s difficult working for theatre people, fitting in with their visions rather than my own to deadlines.

As a child her mother had taken her to, you guessed it, the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre in Covent Garden. ‘I thought it was wonderful, but some kind of magic – completely impossible to make. So there was no sense of “That’s what I want to do when I grow up. It never occurred to me that it was possible”. Through an old family friend, Kate Brakspeare, who tinkered with automata, she discovered that it was and found that the mechanics could be quite simple, and what’s more within her capabilities.

But by now married to a sound artist, Dominic, she found herself not without a studio but without a home, but using her share of small inheritance they joined the boat people of Penryn, living on the waterside and each morning walking a few yards to a former grist mill – where brewing malt was crushed – which they share with a painter and a someone who does industrial sewing (‘industrial sewer’ could be misleading). And within a year of embarking on the 30-foot East Wind as their home along came Ella, now three, a constant inspiration.

Another inspiration has been the next boat neighbour, Rob Higgs, creator of large contraptions who, as I may have remarked before, makes the kind of machines Heath Robison could only draw. ‘Rob is much more of an engineer, but he’s been enormously helpful in showing me what is possible, and that’s half the trick’ says Fi.

And so she continues to make her exquisitely carved and contrived small jokes, getting bigger with each new idea. The newest is called No 12 West Street, Fi’s childhood address in Fishguard though the piece, she says firmly, bears no resemblance to that happy family home. This long tin dwelling one has a range of harpies – something of a Henshall emblem – along its roof, sex going on inside and a beery old gentleman reading a book. It may have a sound input from Dominic, too. ‘I make what seems interesting at the time, and I’m never sure quite how a piece will turnout. This one’s nearly finished. I think.’

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Dumfries and Galloway Festival goes robot – well, more gigantic puppet, really, driven by 12 puppeteers rather than machinery – this weekend (May 29) with Big Man. This is an eight metre high blue fellow, created by the Puppet Lab and Puppet Animation Scotland created a giant 8 metre. He will walk through the centre of Dumfries, filming its adoring fans, shaking their hands, wave, and then… walking back again.

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Here’s something you ought to know about that I might have to follow up for a future Mews. Martin ‘Taxi Driver’ Scorsese is directing a film about an automaton. The Invention of Hugo Cabret is about a homeless orphan boy who creates a clockwork pal. It stars Sacha Baron Cohen and Ben Kingsley and is due to be released in December 2011.

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And finally, a glimpse into the home life of our own dear Paul Spooner. ‘Made this for Sue’s (Mrs Spooner’s) birthday. It’s a bit elaborate (the swanee whistle mechanism is a sound effect representing the girl’s screams. My dad thought we’d got a puppy when I played it over to him over the phone) but I mean to continue the robots being horrible to innocent humans theme. Culminating in the Reformed Robot with dough hook accessory…’

Simon Tait’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 they’ve got automata at home. But why? I thought I’d better ask a couple of individuals who would know.

For the last few months of 2009 CMT was in Dortmund at DASA – if you really want to know it stands for Deutsche Arbeitsschutzausstellung, or German Safety at Work Exhibition, but don’t be deflected – 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 ‘and, having a special sense of humour, she told me most urgently to visit them’.You see, it’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.

‘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. We’ve never ever had such a good feedback in the press, and never that many visitors at comparable exhibitions. I’m sure we could easily repeat the show with even greater success. Indeed, we’re thinking about this…’

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 ‘automates’ 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? ‘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 life’.

The Science Museum of Minnesota is a different sort of client. More of an old mate, really – they’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 – and not only that, he lines up other venues across the States.

‘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 exhibition’ Bill says. ‘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.’

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 ‘is right up there with the dinosaurs’, and it’s growing. ‘In some senses the automata genre has been a beloved partner in the Make Movement’… the what? ‘The Make Movement, it’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.’

I can see that, though I never thought of the work of Spooner, Hunkin, Newstead et al of being worthy. Ah but that’s not all, Bill says. ‘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. It’s like being in the company of a clever, funny friend.’

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

The Germans, of course, take their humor much more seriously, but they take it nevertheless. ‘The figures are like a psychological mirror showing the absurdness of life’ Hans-Gerd says, ‘but they are unbelievably funny’.

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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/

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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. It’s all there – 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)

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

It’s Keith’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 me… the things you have to do which you like doing but don’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. ‘My palette is simple: brass beads, brass sheets, wood, plastic. Keep it as uncomplicated as you can is my motto’.

So Keith is a serious little industry, in his workshop in Automatonville, otherwise called Penryn, Cornwall, and right now he’s in overdrive for the cruise liner industry. ‘They’ve got a lot of money for painting, sculpture and so on, and now automata’ he says, ‘so I’ve been making them for the ships for about seven years’. Each time there’s a theme, so this time he’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 can’t resist busting lovely things. The automata can’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 -‘ I found the mixture of arts, craft, graphics and movement very exciting’ – and made his first piece, which he took along to Cabaret in Covent Garden, where Sue adopted him. When he wasn’t working with CMT he was riding despatch bikes; that was 20 years ago, and he’s given up the bikes now.

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

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 …

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Have you seen Jean-Pierre Jeunet’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 you’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? It’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 I’ve just seen the video. I’ve seen the violinist Enrique Lanz play a duet with a miniature version of himself, I’ve seen the earth go round the moon.,. and I’ve seen an elephant fly. Goes to show, if it’s crazy enough genius can be catching.