A Conversation with Robert Chambers

by Jan Garden Castro


Robert Chambers is blazing a sensory trail with installations that talk back, move, smell good, make their own music, and change colors. A postmodern paragon, he selfconsciously plays with Rothko-esque glowing biomorphic pools and a Duchampian helicopter with mesmerizing rotors. Ballship, a talking globe, takes on a translucent Robert lrwin-esque glow at night and plays back distorted versions of what it "hears." For his solo exhibition at Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, on view through May 30, 2004, he will debut Sucrose, a bronze work from his living cell series. Chambers has won kudos both as a curator and as an artist. His most recent public sculpture is an 85-by-35-foot moving color field panel commissioned by Art in Public Places for the new South Miami-Dade Cultural Center designed by Arquitectonica. In 2002, he received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in recognition of MerkheLand Zen Ray (2001), a two-part installation concerning light and time. In winter 2001-02, Chambers curated "Globec-Miarni-clsland" for the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach. The show received
high praise for its striking mix of works in all media from over 70 artists. In December 2003, Chambers exhibited at six venues during the second Art Basel Miami Beach. He has shown work around the U.S. and the world and has taught art at the University of Miami and at New York University. Chambers's scientific bent comes, in part, from playing with real materials in his mother's art studio and in his father's biology lab when he was a child. In 1999, Chambers married Mette Tommerup, a digital artist. Together and individually, they draw on their art and science backgrounds to create socially conscious, futuristic metaphors for the 21st century.

Jan Garden Castro; What is your concept for the South Miami-Dade Cultural Center Project?
Robert Chambers: The piece is activated by people looking up as they walk below or behind it. When you look up, over 200 12-inch-sguare LED panels project auras of light from 24 inches away. Each pod is mounted on a microprocessor, and aU of them link to a hard drive programmed with software to create eight programs. Each pod creates many spheres of light; for example, one program will create an undulating blue to calm the viewer. The computer program keeps changing the auras of light, creating a moving color field painting. I'm using an existing 85-foot-long and 35-foot-tall translucent panel designed by the Arguitectonica team as my screen, so the panel is part of the building.
JGC; You planned two sculpture installations for the second annual Art Basel exhibition in Miami.
RC; One was at MAC-Miami An Central, a building complex founded by Ella Cisneros. MAC's creative director Manuel Gonzalez invited nine international curators to participate. They, in turn, picked 10 artists with roots in Florida to participate in "Ten Floridians." I had a large corridor with sounds and LED lights at the end opposite the entry, creating a kinesthetic experience that produced various levels of emotional response. An astrophysicist in Miami helped me work out this project. My second Art Basel project was for the Fredric Snitzer Gallery Project Room, a hydraulic piece that unfolds off the wall and folds back.
JGC: Does your exhibition at Laumeier Sculpture Park feature any new work?
RC: It includes Rotorelief and Sucrose, a new bronze work for the park. The bronze is like two rearing dragon forms or mythological creatures that mimic the molecular structure for table sugar-C12 H22 011. It will be a molecular garden, near the Niki de St. Phalle sculpture.
JGC: Have you shown in alternative venues recently?
RC: Last August, I was part of an exhibition at the Moore Building in the Design District, curated by Aja Albertson, a young Miami curator/artist. I showed V-Pick and Plymo, V-Pick is a site-specific installation, consisting of a vertical stainless steel
pole, a couple of sprinkler heads, a fluorescent light fixture, two doors, an exit sign leading nowhere, and 20 black spotlights plugged into 20 dummy outlets, It's a staging room; the viewer has to pick the art elements. Plymo is a hovercraft-a high-tech English lawnmower with modifications attached to a Turkish carpet-it lifts off the ground and flaps the floor.
It's an Arabian Nights escapist piece that sounds like a soothing vacuum cleaner.
JGC: Was DRIX (1997) inspired by the Jimi Hendrix music that was part of the installation?
RC: The impetus for DRIX was actually the glowing edges of Rorhko's paintings. I was trying to translate them dimensionally in as many ways as I couldsounds, smells, vibrations, and sights. In a 5,000 square-foot area, I filled two 20,000-gallon pools
with blue and green fluorescent water. I then used extremely powerful UVB-Iights, which would normally be bolted onto a helicopter and used to track pollutants, to make all the dyes that were running out onto the floors from the sprinklers glow in the dark. Dyes similar to those in DRIX are used to stain and isolate certain cells in molecular research. Sometimes everything was shut off-studio monitors, sound, air conditioners-leaving a huge darkness, with only the two rectangular pools of water glowing in the dark. Then the frenetic, hallucinogenic happenings and effects would return. It was sensory overload mixed with a color field effect in three dimensions. The installation also had the feeling of the early Electric Light Company displays on St. Mark's Place in New York City, in the '60s.
JGC: What about ZON (1997)?
RC: ZON consists of nine modified bumper cars resting on several tons of rope under large inflating balloon-capes. Bonnie Clearwater, 'the Director of MoCA (Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami), had invited me to create an installation for
the Project Room. I found nine Coney Island bumper cars, and the owner of Miami Cordage donated leftover nylon and satin rope. I carted it all to MoCA in a convoy of pickup trucks. The installation was about 30 feet long and 24 feet wide and included timers, rheostats, and computer parts from earlier sculptures. The bumper cars got bright new red, yellow, blue, and pink coats of paint, electric motors, and vibrating elements. Above each of the nine cars, circles of silk were programmed
to inflate and deflate. They conveyed a feeling of weightlessness and had a calming effect. The whole room was synchronized so that the lights would slowly go out and the vents would slowly open, cooling the space; a theatrical ground fog would be
pumped in, along with a relaxing herbal aroma, and silk curtains would inflate and surround you in your own private space in the car. The bumper cars would start to rock and vibrate, lulling you into a very relaxed state. Then the ride would slowly go into reverse and the lights wouJd come back on. Sometimes the guard came in to ask participants if they were done yet-some of them were almost asleep. Actually, the piece was about your internal self. What you carried out of there was more important than the actual piece.
JGC: How did you conceive Gretzel-The Empress's Castle (1998) at Shelburne Farms in Vermont?
RC: Shelburne Farms has an ongoing visiting artist program-Vito Acconci was the first participant-in which artists explore hay as a medium. Gretzel was an environmental happening that took several months to make. I was reading a book about a hidden 16th century empress's castle when I was asked to come up with an idea. I talked to agronomists about the area, its soil depletion, and how nutrients could be recycled with hay. 1sited the piece at the edge of a small forest, above a field depleted of nutrients. It was made of 18 tons of hay shaped into giant nests in a maze-like grid running through the landscape
and including a hidden tunnel so that one could emerge in the center of the fortress. It was designed to become earth. At first, the nutrients would trickle back into the field, and then when the hay finally decomposed, it could be bulldozed over the fields to replenish the soil. The title refers to Hansel and Gretel, and the piece incorporated a half-mile trail of organic breads, muffins, and cookies leading to the secret location of the site.
JGC: Would you discuss the helicopter that you rebuilt for Art Basel Miami in 2002?
RC: I was trying to create a machine that the Surrealists would have used if it had existed then. My initial idea came from Leonardo's visionary drawings of flying machines, and I replaced the top and rear rotors with Ducharnp-inspired Rotorelief discs. I also studied the "Time Tunnel" image of black and white rings from the '60s television series and various cartoon effects. The final form is mildly hypnotic. The rear disc, seen from the side, spirals either inward or outward, moving three times faster than the larger disc on top, which spirals in. People said that it looked as though it was either boring into the ground or spiraling upward. The helicopter body was smoothed out and painted with white pearl custom paint that catches the light and gives off a glow. The landing gear was extended to 12 feet long, and the engine was modified. The crair can be run by electricity, gas, or be a static unit. The front is a Plexiglas bubble. Two generator lights lit the piece at night. Another
artist, Miguel Ovalle, operated it. He wore a baggy black pilot's suit and climbed up a ladder to start the engine and activate the discs.
JGC: Where did you find a helicopter?
RC: I bought a functioning helicopter in Alabama, towed it back to Florida, and my studio became a chop shop. I only had three weeks to build the sculpture, and several friends and artists helped me complete the project. I had a big support team, and Miami is in many ways an ideal place to produce artwork. After several all-nighters, the piece was finished at five in the morning on the day the fair opened.
JGC: Zen Ray and Merkhet were parts of an installation at the Miami Art Museum curated by Lorie Mertes and Peter Boswell. Is it one piece or two?
RC: Merkhet and Zen Ray were two pieces acting as one. You came down a pitch black corridor to enter what appeared to be a dark, 30-foot-square room. On the ceiling, an elongated, diamond-shaped, neon light would turn the room a dark indigo blue. Then a computer would sequentially turn on the nine other diamonds inside the larger one, and these would flash
various hues to create alternating color fields on the walls and floor. The effect was like the diamonds used in Shiraz rugs to imply infinity or Likelooking up into the underside of carved images at the Alhambra in Spain. Two curtains drew back to reveal a second 30-foot-square room and a shining white egg or hemisphere. The diamond shape would flicker like an eye onto the hemisphere; then the curtain to that room would close. The hemisphere was divided into six segments or slits. From each slit, lights were projected onto the walls and the ceiling. You would see how light itself is layered. Then you'd hear the sound of an exhalation as the lights became brighter, and you'd see a planetary or lunar form on the ceiling. Then another shape would be projected from the next slit. This was a takeoff on a merkhet, the earliest known timepiece referenced in Egyptian hieroglyphs (c. 500-1000 BCE). The merkhet tracked time by aligning to the shadows projected by starlight, which would show the movement of the constellations. Merkhet is the reverse: light and lenses within the merkhet focus slivers of light onto the wall in six sequences, then each in turn fades away, illustrating a law in physics about how light is layered. For the next stage, the curtain re-opens and the colored light from the neon diamonds projects onto the dome. Finally, the curtain
closes and the whole room goes pitch black. In all, there are nine sequences of light.
JGC: How did you develop the idea for Ballship?
RC: I was fascinated with the devices used in science, physics, and aeronautics displays during the 1939 World's Fair. Wallace Harrison designed the Perisphere and the Trylon-a huge white ball, 17 floors tall with a truncated base, and a giant white tower taller than the Washington Monument that stuck up like Cleopatra's Needle-these two works symbolizing
the future were among the first widely viewed pieces of abstract architecture. Harrison also designed the United Nations building and Lincoln Center. I wanted to create a form like the Perisphere- Ballsbip is a huge white ball with a truncated base;
it is 12 feet in diameter and has a four-foot recessed door. It also resembles the space craft in the' 50s movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. Another facet is aural: in The Wizard of Oz, there is a booming voice in the land of Oz that will answer anything. When you entered the Perisphere, you'd hear disembodied voices floating back and forth. Ballship has two ultra-sensitive microphones-one on each sidethat record sounds from its environment-jets, car horns, people talking. The sounds are played back Sculpture March 2004 Ballship, 2001. Fiberglass, electical and light components, microphone, and cement path and pad, " ft. diameter. instantly, altered so that they feel disembodied. The voice of someone screaming into the mike becomes melodious and calming, and other ambient sounds can become musical. Or a little girl's faint voice can become booming and commanding. Ballship also refers to candling, the way farmers and scientists hold an egg up to light to see if it's fertilized. At night, the ball, which seems to be a solid substance, becomes transparent and the surface starts breaking up and changing due to the halogen lights inside that go from one to 8,000 watts then back to darkness every five minutes. The surface keeps changing until it looks like an enormous light bulb.
JGC: Any projects in the works?
RC: I am in the planning stages of a collaboration with Alex James, from the band Blur-who recently completed an experimental sound/art project. Our idea is to collect meteorites from around the world, scan them, interpret their makeup in relation to sound waves and spectral patterns, and create sculpture based on all of that.
JGC: Many of your pieces are interactive.
RC: In my first solo show at the SculptureCenter, New York, in 1991, I exhibited a 14-foot-tall tower tbat revolved and inhaled a 100-cubic-foot breath of air every 20 revolutions. The participant had to play the role of the oxen pushing a yoke or large handle around in a circle to activate the vacuum pump of the machine. I was trying to create human responses: My work is always about interactions, multi-layered responses between the participants and rhe sculpture.


Jan Garden Castro is the author/editor of five books and a contributing editor for Sculpture.