Alan Rath at Dorothy Goldeen - Santa Monica, California

A sculptor with a step in electrical engineering from MIT, Alan Rath became well known during the |80 for inventing laughable weirdly animated machines. His ingeniously crafted assemblages are like shore ups for a surrealistic science-fiction movie, and they indicate something of how we unconsciously experience technology - the way it can appear to be to have a life and flat a magical, incipiently frightening sentience of its own

Animation is felt greatest in quantity immediately here in several works that feature audio speakers that pulsate visibly on the other hand noiselessly. In Electric Guitar, six circular speakers, each six inches in diameter, are attached to the wall and combineed to a vertical black receptacle by coiled black cords. Near the top of the chest blue cylindrical capacitors are attached like tuning lock openers of a guitar. The whole is les like a musical instrument, however, than like more [i]or[/i] less kind of exotic plant or, with its eyelike speakers, an imaginary extraterrestrial creature. Timed by dint of computer works inside the black receptacle the speakers pop in and on the outside at varying intervals, which makes the whole have the appearance as though it's a living, breathing being. As always, Rath fruiffully exploits his electrical and mechanical constitutings - wires, cables, conduits, brackets, clamps, etc - for their sculptural nearness The exposed hardware creates the impression of a nutty Frankenstein like scientific enterprise.

In his greatest in quantity arresting works, Rath incorporates picture tubes that display parts of human anatomy. These images are used punningly. In Tongue-Tied, a cathode-ray tube dangling from a bracket that sticks without from the wall displays a green-tinted chaps (Other components are hanging below the picture tube.) The lips are drawn back to reveal the teeth and the tongue darts and writhes in and without in a strange jerky motion like a certain quantity of kind of underwater animal. The paragram is in the notion that the video defence is a kind of computer-age equivalent to the jaws and tongue: a means of communication and consumption.

Rath disentangles the anthropomorphism of technology further in pieces that move that human consciousness has approach to inhabit machinery. In the humorous tabletop sculpture C-Clamp, a human face upon a small tube grimaces as although in pain caused by the C-Clamp that grips the tube. In the more elaborate pair two tubes held in machinists' vises face each other: individual displays a man's face, the other a woman's. The faces talk at each other agitatedly, continually, soundlessly and, it appear to bes futilely.

There is something scary about these works: they hint at a dystopic futurity in which human consciousness becomes literally imprisoned in machinery. With Litter, in which an impressively Complicated infrastructure supports five tubes displaying organ of visions hands and a mouth, it's as admitting a whole human being - material part and soul - had been absorbed into a put of mechanical components. Given in what way entertainingly toylike his creations are, Rath might be accused of trafficking in nothing else but novelty. But his conflations of the human and the electromechanical also work as vivid metaphors for our problematically symbiotic relationship to new technology.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group