Nature of Neptune: Kinetic Sculptures of Arthur Ganson

Another artist who combines sculpture with mechanical subtleties is Arthur Ganson. Ganson, who lives right here in Somerville, Massachusetts (so I've been told), creates sculptures that combine complex gear and pulley systems with mundane everyday objects, and are driven by a single motor. This great little video shows a couple of them:

There are a lot of things going on in each of Ganson's sculptures, both literally and figuratively. By using simple mechanical techniques in surprising ways, Ganson's work hides nothing from the viewer, much like the construction of Theo Jansen's Strandbeests. Ganson's sculptures compound these simple operations into a complex chain that can be followed, with some concentration, by the eye. He draws attention to the beautiful simplicity of these mechanical motions by linking the system to a simple object, such as a wishbone, artichoke leaf, or plastic cocktail sword. The system causes the object to move in an interesting and often anthropomorphic manner, forcing the viewer to compare these mechanical motions to those of a real living object.

The wry philosophical implications of several of his sculptures are amusing, but what I like best about these pieces are their exquisite use of time scale. I say "time scale" rather than simply "timing", because there is more to the rhythm of the sculptures than the fact that all the motion is coordinated. Note in the first part of the video above, Cory's Yellow Chair, how the chair pieces break away quickly, slow down at the apex of the turn, and then accelerate back into place. Also of note is the perfectly trudging pace of the wishbone in the video below. By perfectly manipulating the pace of the mechanical movements, Ganson makes the viewer look for the exact mechanical subtleties that produce these movements. He makes you especially curious about what is causing these elegant movements. Unfortunately, to get a really good sense of how these movements are being created by all the gears and pulleys, you need to see the sculptures in person and take your time with each. But by using elegant rhythms and the anthropomorphized objects, Ganson allows the viewer to understand these mechanical movements in a way that he or she can relate to on a personal level.

A number of Ganson's sculptures are on permanent exhibit in the fantastic MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In this exhibit, all sculptures are activated by a museum visitor stepping on a big button on the floor in front of each sculpture. This includes my favorite, Cocktail Swords, which consists of spinning metal arms branching off of each other at right angles and becoming consecutively smaller. The spinning motions are caused solely by friction gears of the arm segments rubbing against each other. The smallest arms each hold a red cocktail sword as they spin through the air, looking like a perplexingly logical drunken pirate.