Can't Help Myself (Sun Yuan and Peng Yu)
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| Can't Help Myself | |
|---|---|
| Artist | Sun Yuan and Peng Yu |
| Year | 2016-2019 |
| Medium | Kuka industrial robot, stainless steel and rubber, cellulose ether in colored water, lighting grid with Cognex visual-recognition sensors, and polycarbonate wall with aluminum frame[1] |
| Dimensions | Variable overall |
| Location | Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York |
| Accession | 2016.40 |
| Website | https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/34812 |
Can't Help Myself is a kinetic sculpture created by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu in 2016. The sculpture consists of a robotic arm that can move and dance, but has the primary purpose of sweeping up any of the red, cellulose ether fluid that escapes from its inner core. Can't Help Myself was commissioned by the Guggenheim museum and was created with the intent of cultivating several dialogues about the advancement of technology and industrialization, violent border control, and allusions to the nature of life.
Unlike other sculptures, Can't Help Myself is unique in the sense that it died in 2019, two years after its creation in 2016. The kinetic sculpture functioned under the presumption that it needed the red, bloodlike fluid in order to survive and support itself. For these years, the sculpture spent most of its time sweeping up its fluid in hopes of lasting another day. The sculpture ended up "dying" and loosing functionality in 2019, but due to an artist programmed power outage for its expiration. This indicates that Can't Help Myself did not need to sweep up the hydraulic fluid to survive and worked daily for its "survival" that was inherently out of its hand, which has fostered many conversations between critics, the audience, and the artists alike.
While the sculpture was functional, it was displayed at the Guggenheim Museum in the Tales of Our Times exhibition as well as the Venice Biennale in 2019 for the May You Live in Interesting Times exhibition. Each of the displays of Can't Help Myself has not only given it popularity, but has constructed the various audience interpretations of the kinetic sculpture's purpose, meaning, and social criticism.
Background
Modern artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu are an artistic duo that began making non-normative and unconventional art in the 2000s. Sun Yuan was born in Beijing, China in 1972 and Peng Yu was born in Heilongjiang, China in 1974. The pair first met each other while attending at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing where they both studied oil painting. After completing their studies at the Central Academy of Fine arts in the 1990s, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu had short solo careers that set an artistic foundation for their partnership in the early 2000s. The collaboration between Sun Yuan and Peng Yu in 2001 was subsequent to their marriage in 2000 when the two quickly became known as the husband and wife duo that received the Chinese Contemporary Art Award for their provocative art.[2] Currently, the pair creates kinetic and installation art pieces that work to incorporate unconventional and organic materials into artworks and create statement pieces about the current systems of political and social authority. [1] Yuan and Yu utilize technology and multi media art to "comment critically on the modern understanding and exercise of political constructs like the nation-state, sovereign territory, freedom, and democracy."[1] The ultimate goal of Yuan and Yu's art is to evoke powerful physical, emotional, and psychological responses from their audience and prompt them to scrutinize the socio-political systems that plague todays society.
Can't Help Myself is one of the many pieces of kinetic art that Sun Yuan and Peng Yu created throughout their career, yet one with increasing popularity and media attention. The artwork was commissioned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and was installed there in 2016 as a part of the Guggenheim's Tales of Our Times exhibition. The idea of using a robot as the main object of focus in Can't Help Myself stemmed from the artists' desires to relinquish their "artistic will" or "artistic genius" and replace it with something mechanical or programed, alluding to the meaning of the artwork.[1]
Creation and Display
Can't Help Myself was created with a great deal of planning as well as consideration of the audience shock factor, a signature characteristic of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's collaborative projects.[3]The kinetic sculpture was created using a Kuka (KUKA model Kr180 R3100 K) industrial robot arm that was composed of stainless steal and an exterior black coating.[4] The robotic arm operated at a full 360 degree range and was modified by Yuan and Yu through the addition of a shovel attachment with a rubber squeegee at the end of the arm. [4]The Kuka arm was fully programmable and worked with the use of a Kuka controller and electricity.[4] With that said, the robotic arm is surrounded by polyurethane foam elements to provide protection of the engine from exposure to liquids, as it did not run off of hydraulics.[4] The robot was installed in a white, waterproofed wooden platform surrounded by a floor-to-ceiling protective barrier of clear polycarbonate panels mounted to aluminum beams.[4] The platform was 7m x 7m and was covered with an estimated 48 gallons off a cellulose ether and dark-red colored water. [4] Aside from the sculpture itself there are 18 LED lights and 4 GigE Cognex industrial cameras placed in a ceiling mounted grid above the robotic arm. The cameras have a visual recognition system software which utilizes feed from the cameras to detect the movement of the red, bloodlike liquid.[4] The visual recognition of the fluid's location is integrated into the Kuka robotic arm's programming language, which results in the arms recognition of an area of spillage, motion towards it, and consequential squeegeeing of the liquid toward the robots base. The Kuka robot was also programed to perform 32 distinct dances when not sent to squeegee different areas of the raised platform. [4] Can't Help Myself was powered by a high voltage power cable which connected to the base of the robot from the control unit and was powered down and restarted daily by museum employees.[4]
Kinetic Sculpture
This section will provide readers with information about the history of kinetic sculptures and their evolution over time. It will define what a kinetic sculpture is according to art historical literature while also giving laying out the six qualities of kinetic sculpture in one place, such as optical phenomena, motion, etc. I intend on briefly speaking about the pioneers of kinetic sculpture; however, the ultimate goal of this section is to tie the definition and qualities of kinetic sculpture back to Can't Help Myself to defend its classification as a kinetic sculpture and justify some of the emotions the sculpture elicits.
Main sources: Rickey, George W. “The Morphology of Movement: A Study of Kinetic Art.” Art Journal 22, no. 4 (1963): 220–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/774539.
Celms, Valdis. “The Dialectic of Motion and Stasis in Kinetic Art.” Leonardo 27, no. 5 (1994): 387–90. https://doi.org/10.2307/1576092.
Dances, Duty, and Demise
In this section I intend on describing the kinetic nature of Can't Help Myself. The goal of this section is to describe the sculptures functionality from its creation to its "death", essentially creating a timeline of the sculptures activity and mapping out its "life" through using three stages, dances, duties, and demise. There will also be an overarching view of the time line divisions and an explanation as to why it was divided this way.
Dances
This subheading will be about the kinetics of the sculpture and its ability to dance. Different dance moves, such as "scratch an itch" will be spoken about. This will serve as a summary of the mechanical nature of the dances and touch upon how the sculpture danced constantly at the beginning of its life. This will likely be the shorter of the three subcategories
Duty
This section will speak about the duty of the sculpture to sweep up the red-dyed hydraulic fluid in order to keep itself functioning and alive. Duty will serve as the transition point from the sculpture constantly dancing shifting toward the sculpture spending the entirety of its day sweeping up its own spillage and parts of itself to maintain its proper function.
Demise
Demise will speak on the "death" of Can't Help Myself. Here, I will better inform the audience on the demise of the sculpture in 2019 and, most importantly, tell the readers how and why the sculpture died. The importance of Can't Help Myself losing functionality due to a programmed loss of power causes the analysis and comprehension of the sculpture to be interpreted differently (possible parallel to human mortality).
Main Sources: The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. “Sun Yuan and Peng Yu | Can’t Help Myself.” Accessed March 6, 2024. https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/34812.
Weng, Xiaoyu, and Hanru Hou. 故事新編 = Tales of our time / [organized by] Xiaoyu Weng, Hou Hanru. New York, New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2016.
“Sun Yuan and Peng Yu: Audience, Agency, and Complicity | Spiegel-Wilks Seminar: Venice Biennale.” Accessed March 6, 2024. https://web.sas.upenn.edu/venicebiennale/sun-yuan-and-peng-yu/.
Solomon R. Guggenheim: Tales of Our Time
Can't Help Myself was created in 2016 and commissioned by the Robert H.N. Ho family collection as a part of an exhibition that called attention to Chinese Artists with an emphasis on displaying their cultural and historical hidden narratives. [5] With its purpose of eliciting unknown cultural and historical narratives as well as challenging the "conventional understanding of place", Can't Help Myself was created as Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's representation of geography and the nation state.[6]
The first display of Can't Help Myself was at the Guggenheim in their Tales of Our Times exhibition. This exhibition was curated by Xiaoyu Weng with the intention of being politically polarized in nature through creating a dialogue about migration and borders in China. The presence of Can't Help Myself as a kinetic sculpture in this exhibit causes one to draw several conclusions about its role to promote awareness to industrialized brutality on the Asian borders as well as the migration crisis in China. This section will talk about the Tales of Our Times and its collected effort to combat nationalism and intersect art and storytelling, with mentions of how Can't Help Myself plays a role in advocating for awareness.
Main Sources: Weng, Xiaoyu, and Hanru Hou. 故事新編 = Tales of our time / [organized by] Xiaoyu Weng, Hou Hanru. New York, New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2016.
Carrol, Noël. “Art and Globalization: Then and Now.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 1 (September 22, 2007): 131–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-594X.2007.00244.x.
Shan, Lo Yin, Janet Fong, and Isaac Leung. “Digitisation with (in/out) Borders.” In Boredom, Shanzhai, and Digitisation in the Time of Creative China, edited by Jeroen de Kloet, Chow Yiu Fai, and Lena Scheen, 307–14. Amsterdam University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvqr1bnw.26.
2019 Venice Biennale: May You Live in Interesting Times
Prior to the death of the sculpture, it was featured in the 2019 Venice Biennale titled May You Live in Interesting Times. This subsection about the second instillation of Can't Help Myself will primarily discuss the concept of “interesting times” and the connotations that come with said expression. "Interesting times" was used as a term to describe the contemporary age as a "menacing time" and better explain the complexity of said times through using art as a form of educating others on human events. In relation to Can't Help Myself, I will use May You Live in Interesting Times to emphasize how Can't Help Myself tells the story of the political "other" through using industrialization to emphasize this narrative.
Carrol, Noël. “Art and Globalization: Then and Now.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 1 (September 22, 2007): 131–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-594X.2007.00244.x.
Shan, Lo Yin, Janet Fong, and Isaac Leung. “Digitisation with (in/out) Borders.” In Boredom, Shanzhai, and Digitisation in the Time of Creative China, edited by Jeroen de Kloet, Chow Yiu Fai, and Lena Scheen, 307–14. Amsterdam University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvqr1bnw.26.
Interpretations of Can't Help Myself
In this section I will write about the different interpretations of Can't Help Myself and how these interpretations have been modified by its instillation at both the May You Live in Interesting Times and Tales of Our Times. These interpretations will be divided into three subsections: Perspective on industrialization, perspective on politically polarized borders, and the allegory between kinetic sculptures to the nature of life.
THIS MAY BE UNDER THIS ONE SUBJECTS OR IN THREE SUBHEADINGS
Weng, Xiaoyu, and Hanru Hou. 故事新編 = Tales of our time / [organized by] Xiaoyu Weng, Hou Hanru. New York, New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2016.
Carrol, Noël. “Art and Globalization: Then and Now.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 1 (September 22, 2007): 131–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-594X.2007.00244.x.
Shan, Lo Yin, Janet Fong, and Isaac Leung. “Digitisation with (in/out) Borders.” In Boredom, Shanzhai, and Digitisation in the Time of Creative China, edited by Jeroen de Kloet, Chow Yiu Fai, and Lena Scheen, 307–14. Amsterdam University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvqr1bnw.26.
Social Media and Popularity
In this section I intend on BRIEFLY writing about the increased social media presence of Can't Help Myself from the tail end of 2023 to the present time in 2024. I will briefly mention the new TikToks, and Instagram reels that feature the sculpture as well as talk about the influx of magazine articles that cover the sculpture. The goal here is to not only mention popularity, but to also mention how this popularity stems from the sculpture's ability to elicit emotions from the audience that tie back to the sculpture interpretations mentioned in the section above.
References
- ^ a b c d "Sun Yuan and Peng Yu". The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. Retrieved 2024-03-28.
- ^ "Sun Yuan and Peng Yu". ArtRKL. 2024-02-02. Retrieved 2024-03-28.
- ^ Hou, Hanru; Weng, Xiaoyu (2017). Tales of our time: = Gu shi xin bian. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, U.S. ISBN 978-0-89207-529-4.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Zhong, Jillian. "Identity Report Computer-Based Artwork" (PDF). Computer-Based Artwork Guggenheim Conservation Department: 53 – via Guggenheim CCBA.
- ^ "Tales of Our Time". The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. Retrieved 2024-04-11.
- ^ "Tales of Our Time". The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. Retrieved 2024-04-11.
- FIX CITATION IN SOURCE EDITING
Carrol, Noël. “Art and Globalization: Then and Now.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 1 (September 22, 2007): 131–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-594X.2007.00244.x.
Celms, Valdis. “The Dialectic of Motion and Stasis in Kinetic Art.” Leonardo 27, no. 5 (1994): 387–90. https://doi.org/10.2307/1576092.
Rickey, George W. “The Morphology of Movement: A Study of Kinetic Art.” Art Journal 22, no. 4 (1963): 220–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/774539.
The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. “Sun Yuan and Peng Yu | Can’t Help Myself.” Accessed March 6, 2024. https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/34812.
Shan, Lo Yin, Janet Fong, and Isaac Leung. “Digitisation with (in/out) Borders.” In Boredom, Shanzhai, and Digitisation in the Time of Creative China, edited by Jeroen de Kloet, Chow Yiu Fai, and Lena Scheen, 307–14. Amsterdam University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvqr1bnw.26.
“Sun Yuan and Peng Yu: Audience, Agency, and Complicity | Spiegel-Wilks Seminar: Venice Biennale.” Accessed March 6, 2024. https://web.sas.upenn.edu/venicebiennale/sun-yuan-and-peng-yu/.
Weng, Xiaoyu, and Hanru Hou. 故事新編 = Tales of our time / [organized by] Xiaoyu Weng, Hou Hanru. New York, New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2016.