essay

Broken Tombs, Leaning Brooms,

Severed Hands, Enchanted Lands:

On Kitty Clark

First published in A-Or-Ist, 2015

I.

As an impatient six year old, I would furiously fast-forward my way through all 114 minutes of Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940), a studio showcase of magisterial animations synchronised to classical music. Intentional degradation to the magnetised tape stock aside (...everybody knew Fantasia wasn’t for boys, duh, and I coldly resented well-intentioned relatives at the time for burdening me with such a humiliating gift...), the target of my frantic spooling was a ‘hidden segment’ at the end of the video, a short theme park infomercial for Disney’s California resort featuring magical promenades, illuminated Main Street processions, the runaway trains of Big Thunder Mountain, piratical adventures and steamboat cruises through offensively revisionist frontiers. It was, in the most bewitching and transportive sense, a saturated VCR daydream. An incandescent portal to ‘the happiest place on earth’.

I hadn’t thought of this maniacal behaviour for years until a couple of days ago when, signing off in a recent email to me, the artist Kitty Clark appended a message with a brief note of apology: ‘As usual, everything I ever talk about seems to come back to Disney in some way’ she explained. The comment was followed by the almost cartoon-like typographical exclamation ‘OOOOOPS!’, a statement that could have easily been hand lettered, cast buoyantly into the air, lassoed by an oversized speech bubble and burst theatrically by the sharp tip of an animator’s pen.

Clark’s work is a flawlessly executed aggregate of fragments: broken tombs and leaning brooms, possessed candelabra, fake leaves, head-height tombstones, plastic sandwiches and spooky F/X. It’s as evocative of the cool solemnity of high-minimalism as it is the joyously tragicomic world of children’s animation; think the sculptures of Robert Morris besmirched by Tex Avery in one of those fourth-wall-breaking scenes where the artist’s pencil lets loose a series of live corrections mid-action. Her architecturally-oriented pieces are comic book approximations of doric columns and vacant sepulchres rendered in broad planes of smartly finished MDF. These frail monuments are, in her own words, ‘as hollow as the headstones in a ghost train’s graveyard’.

Our recent conversations have trudged through such diverse terrains as home robotics, plumbed the disquieting depths of the uncanny valley, and kicked through the remnant dusts of numerous utopian building projects, but she always seemed to find her way back to Disneyland. Disneyland as a potent ur-site, as some kind of psychical blueprint or generational ground plan. It prompted dormant memories in my own mind, a three day online digression into the dream world of ‘Corn Dog Castle’ (...‘choose from original chicken-beef, hot-link or ooey-gooey cheddar’...), and plans for late summer breaks at Davey Crockett Ranch.

During a studio visit I made on a day stricken by dark clouds and downpours, Kitty showed me the initial stages of a new work, the still-animate severed hand of an animatronic love doll. Cast in pink silicon with the sumptuous appearance of a set milk pudding, the detached limb was a trembling, boneless rendition of the artist’s own hand. Intended to be programmed using an Arduino micro processor and a couple of servo motors, it would sit with an indifferent presence, tapping its index finger impatiently. We spoke about the autonomy of severed limbs and their omniscience in the popular cultures of horror cinema and supernatural fiction, where the disembodied claw is usually made to perform the role of fiendish revenant. Guy de Maupassant’s tale of The Flayed Hand (1883) for instance, with its vengeful atrophied paw, or Amicus Studio’s remarkable work of intergenerational haunting And Now the Screaming Starts (1973), in which an impossibly buxom Stephanie Beecham is menaced by the lopped fist of a long-dead groundsman maimed some years previously by her husband’s aristocratic ancestor.

Kitty posed the question of whether or not the severed hand had ever taken the part of a seductive agent, an autonomous part-object concerned with sensual coercion and gratification as opposed to violent retribution. I couldn’t think of any. As she talked me through the workings of this erotically charged automaton, plying its jellied digits with her own precise articulations, it became clear that the hand’s relationship with any hypothetical human companion were to be a complex and nuanced one.

II.

Whilst charting the evolutions of the ‘Uncanny Valley’ as an affective phenomena - from the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori’s original coining of the ‘Valley of Eeriness’ in 1970, to an occidental awareness forged by Karl McDorman’s translation some thirty five years later (!) - Fortean Times researcher Ian Simmons recently posited a case for a potential definition of that peculiarly eerie feeling based on a conflict of perceptual cues. Hyper-realistic humanoids are usually caught between a simultaneous suggestion of their life-likeness and their gross artificiality, thus confusing our perceptual parameters; we feel uneasy because we’re not certain what the entity actually is. ‘When something like a robot elicits an Uncanny Valley response, it is no longer being judged by the standards of a robot doing a passable job at pretending to be human,’ he writes, ‘but is instead being judged by the standards of a human doing a terrible job at acting like a normal human.’

Simmons pays special attention to former Bell Labs A.I. researcher Douglas Hines, whose ‘fully functional’ sex doll Roxxxy has come to occupy a high-end niche of the adult toy market. Posing for a snapshot with his android paramour, Hines looks smugly contented. Roxxxy it appears, does not. Her scant underwear pulled brusquely across her lower body, unkempt hair and a countenanced exasperation belying a profound malaise, an android body stricken by multifarious dissatisfactions.

What’s startlingly timely about Clark’s hand it appears, is not so much the dark gully of uncanniness it may lead us through in questioning its remarkable ‘not quite’ similitude to human vitality, but the sheer indifference it enacts towards the very concept of a proximate, finite human vitality stricken by petty sexual mores and penchants for companionship. That sustained, impatient finger tapping. It’s so creepy in its allusion to the incomprehensible circuitries of desire with which we’re beginning to share our world. I ask if the hand is dissatisfied with a prematurely-expiring human lover. It isn’t. Eager to be re-attached to its parent body maybe? Nope. Rather, the hand seems to enact an impatience with the limitations of its own thingliness, a frustration borne of the ontological enclosures erected by human expectation.

III.

Kitty tells me about an important Youtube video. It’s a funny one. She found it while researching audio-animatronic developments at DisneyWorld. In the short clip, originally captured on VHS, April 18th 1992, a robotic Abraham Lincoln recites a medley of speeches as part of Disney’s Hall of Presidents attraction in California. Mid-sentence, Lincoln’s body arches back in a yogic contortion before settling in a funereal repose, the lights dimming respectfully as Abe bows out of his ‘eternal scenario’. I don’t notice until Kitty points it out, but the whole thing is scored by an aggressive canned laughter, which, when twinned with the physical distress of the mechanical torso creates a very disquieting scene. Clark’s particular interest in this footage seemed to arise at a moment when, despite the best intentions of the park’s technicians, the ‘magic was killed’.

It’s a trope of enquiry that seems to have permeated Kitty’s work for some time, a fascination with spatial and cognitive interstices that lay somewhere between a supposed reality and a cosy, dream-like and perhaps more compelling ‘unreality’. I write that in shuddering quotes, because there’s no Baudrillardian cynicism directed toward the locales of the hyperreal here. No soberly European unmasking or zealous disassembly of artifice. If anything, the work frequently gravitates toward its own artificial kingdom, eulogising any moments of cessation, empathising all the while with any stunted Artificial Intelligences that might hope to assert their own place in the world along the way (...see specifically Clark’s work Astrologer, a re-purposed Boglin hand puppet that goggles enchantedly at the celestial wonders of the night sky...). I’m led to think of Steven Shaviro’s wonderful articulation of Disneyland, not as a decoy posed to mask the unreality of All-America, but as a wilful, diffuse condition of which America is fully cognisant. It doesn’t ‘serve the purposes of deterrence and dissuasion,’ but acts as a necessarily didactic provocation, a teaching tool for the ‘robot ridden service economy’. Clark seems to be asking a nuanced question, not simply ‘what happens if we close our eyes and dream along?’ But something like, ‘wouldn’t it be really good if we could just close our eyes and dream along? If the dream really were as good as it’s made out to be... as good as it can sometimes feel?’

IV.

I’m shown a photograph taken some years ago, a seemingly ancient archaeological site parading its ruinous wares. A fragment of column, some scattered rubble, suitably exotic foliage. I look at the photograph for a moment before Kitty points out a thin area behind the pillar; somewhere in the hazed, mid-toned distance, the upper section of a steel building, a service hut or outhouse for amusement park maintenance. The environment betrays its fraudulent status through the subtlest detail. And some years ago, again, a similarly understated approach at a solo exhibition hosted by the Institute of Jamias Vu; a synthetic fern masking its artifice with ‘real fern scent’. I remember sympathising with those plastic leaves myself. I thought, ‘Oh, you really want to be real!’

In the same show stood a huge yellow empty tomb. Kitty says she’s drawn to the tomb as a motif because it’s quite literally an intermediary point between architecture and the body, a ‘living place for the dead’ as she puts it. I was drawn hungrily to this particular tomb by the perfectly rendered lettuce sandwich she’d placed casually atop it. When I suggest that Philip K. Dick had found some solace in a concept he’d come to call ‘the ham sandwich of reality’, Kitty mentions that her sandwich was originally intended to contain some ham-looking plastic substance too! Dick’s sandwich posited man as one slice of bread, ‘god’ as the other, and the lump of processed ham sitting between them as the yucky stuff of reality we’d have to thoroughly masticate in order to achieve enlightenment, …whatever that could be. Dick, with all of his crazed interrogations of reality and questionings of what constituted the authentic human being, would have made the perfect interlocutor for Clark’s work. No matter he’s dead, there’s now a fully-functioning automaton we could appropriately repurpose for the task.

V.

At a recent exhibition at À CÔTÉ DU 69 in Nantes, France, Clark exhibited the formative garments and soft furnishings of her own esoteric clothing label emblazoned with the gothic capitals I.D.S.T. (If Destroyed Still True), which, she was quick to point out, meant something very specific to her although the acronym might mean something very different to me, or indeed anyone else who’d like to adopt and evolve the brand in their own direction. Whilst the primarily beige garments took on the appearance of track suits designed for the express purpose of relaxation, a series of large throw cushions and a human-sized dog basket seemed to smear the concept beyond the immediacy of the body into a doughy brand-scape, a plush habitat for lifestyle loungers. Set into one of the cushions, an animatronic silicon tongue - again, modelled on the artist’s own - gyrated with awkward sensuality, like the distended mouth-organ of a rabid Looney Tune, a commodity that’s practically salivating to perform, to deliver on every promise.

I’m intrigued by this mode of self-production, of this articulation of brand as something that can be inhabited in the manner of a fantasy kingdom, a utopian suburb, even a spacious tomb. I ask if it’s important for Kitty to position herself on the inside of these cultural machinations as both purveyor and consumer, if there’s a relationship between earlier interests in the total environments of theme-park artifice and the brand as a kind of habitat? ‘They are totally linked in a very base human desire for community and power,’ she says, ‘desperately searching for a sense of belonging and control.’ Clark finds herself quite naturally wanting to be on the inside of this kind of phenomena because she too desires those things. Her interest however piques at the point ‘where that desire fails somehow, or reveals itself and ruins the illusion that it's working.’ The work becomes, in effect, the waking lamentation for some lost-dream.

VI.

In the window of the Nantes show, Kitty reproduced a short story on a panel smeared with adhesive and bracketed by fluorescent purple bug zappers. While the eventual accumulation of dead flies would mark ‘a very obvious indication of a laborious passage of time,’ the text was a charming near-future narrative situated in ‘that messy space between now and the future, that space that’s not really documented in slick sci-fi visions’. It was an imaginal space that seemed perfectly contemporaneous with Kitty’s practice, with its modest robotic experiments and tentative exercises in world building. It read:

‘the rain today is really getting to me i thought that documents couldnt spoil since the e-paper revolution but guess again i guess, i discovered a bag of soggy suds a minute ago. apparently there is a gluey substance that can react to water in the coating formula and the mixture attracts pests to the office. what a distraction ,when u got a broken boss breathing down ur back for the next pile of numbers like a fan thats on turbo , the last thing you need is a bunch of rodents sniffing around the candy bars i got stashed in my cabinet. i would bring my dog in to serve look out but i dont liek the way people behave when you bring some thing from the "outside" “in”.’