Can't Help Myself (Sun Yuan and Peng Yu)
 | This article, Can't Help Myself (Sun Yuan and Peng Yu), has recently been created via the Articles for creation process. Please check to see if the reviewer has accidentally left this template after accepting the draft and take appropriate action as necessary.
Reviewer tools: Inform author |
| 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 |
| 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.[1] 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. [2] 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."[2] 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.[2]
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 displayed 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
Kinetic art began occupying space in the art realm in the 1920s upon the publication of the "Realist Manifesto" in Moscow.[5] Kinetic art emerged as a means of defying the static nature of art and art elements by the formation of sculptures with kinetic rhythms perceivable to their audience.[5]
In order for an art piece to be characterized as kinetic it must possess one or more of the following characteristics: 1) an optical phenomena, 2) transformative, 3) movable by the observer, 4) mechanical in nature, 5) playing with light and surrounding environments, and 6) have intrinsic movement.[5]
The goal of a kinetic sculpture is to create a machine in which motion is a critical component of the piece, resulting the audience's failure to associate the sculpture with an mere object. [6] The automated nature of Can't Help Myself categorizes the sculpture as a work of kinetic art, which, in turn, generates an anthropomorphic quality to the robotic arm.[7] This anthropomorphism partially is because of the robotics performative nature and completion of the human task of cleaning up a spillage.[7] In addition, the spectators enter an emotional phase of connection with the artwork, followed by in intellectual phase where the audience works to understand the origins and significance of the motion, another quality of kinetic art.[6] Can't Help Myself was created with the intent of generating both an emotional and intellectual response from viewers and takes up the human task of representing the violence and terror at the border.[3] Furthermore, Can't Help Myself is a physical manifestation of metaphysical ideas which directly elicits a human emotional response from the audience, as kinetic art should do.[3]
Dances, Duty, and Demise
There are three integral qualities to understanding the functionality of Can't Help Myself: the dances it performs, its programmable duty and purpose, as well as its demise when it stopped operating in 2019.[1]
Dances
When Can't Help Myself was created, it was programmed to perform for its spectators.[7] The robotic arm was made to dance, and had 32 unique dance moves, such as "a** shake", "scratch an itch", and "bow and shake". [7] These dances functioned as technical representations of the artists' machine animation skills as well as the artists' desire to anthropomorphize the sculpture and parallel its existence to that of a human.[7] The dances themselves served the purpose of eliciting an emotional response from the viewer and grasping their attention. The programmed dances would have looked familiar to the audience giving Can't Help Myself a humanistic quality that is unavoidable. The robot also would have interacted with viewers through "waving" or even doing "jazz hands", committing their attention to the sculpture.[8] Furthermore, this dancing quality simultaneously shifts the audience perspective of the sculpture as an object to understanding the sculpture as an extension of humanity or something living.[6]
Duty
The functional purpose of the moving robotic arm in Can't Help Myself spans much further than its interactive dance moves and crowd engagement. The true duty of the robotic arm is to sweep up the dark-red cellulose ether fluid that seeps out from its inner core. [7] The 4 GigE Cognex industrial cameras that are placed above the sculpture alert the robotic arm to move to an area of spillage and squeegee said fluid back to its center. [4] The responsibilities of the sculptures have been equated to the participation in a Sisyphean task, a task that will never be fully completed, by the artists and curators alike. [3] The endless sweeping of the fluid to the inner core of the sculpture was artistically intended to be absurd, laborious, and eerily satisfying.[7]
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. [9] 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.[9]
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 "Sun Yuan and Peng Yu". ArtRKL. 2024-02-02. Retrieved 2024-03-28.
- ^ a b c "Sun Yuan and Peng Yu". The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. Retrieved 2024-03-28.
- ^ a b c d 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 j Zhong, Jillian. "Identity Report Computer-Based Artwork" (PDF). Computer-Based Artwork Guggenheim Conservation Department: 53 – via Guggenheim CCBA.
- ^ a b c Rickey, George W. (1963). "The Morphology of Movement: A Study of Kinetic Art". Art Journal. 22 (4): 220–231. doi:10.1080/00043249.1963.10794433. ISSN 0004-3249.
- ^ a b c Belik, Jaroslav (1988). "Creation through a Machine: Kinetic Art". Leonardo. 21 (3): 243–246. doi:10.2307/1578649. ISSN 0024-094X.
- ^ a b c d e f g "Sun Yuan and Peng Yu | Can't Help Myself". The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. Retrieved 2024-04-12.
- ^ "Watching Can't Help Myself is like looking at a caged animal". Hypercritic. Retrieved 2024-04-13.
- ^ a b "Tales of Our Time". The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. Retrieved 2024-04-11.
- Weird= Morphology of movement
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.