Machine Project

Machine Project is a mysterious storefront in Echo Park where one might find a robotic kitten napping on a windowsill, a pack of carnivorous pitcher plants bunkered in an underground hideout complete with bookshelf stalactites, or a machine that will suck a dollar right out of your hand and feed it to Mark Allen, Machine Project’s Executive Director and Founder. They will be commandeering the entire LACMA facility for one day only on November 15 to present Machine Project’s Field Guide To LACMA. This interview by Drew Denny.Mark Allen (executive director): Machine Project’s Field Guide to LACMA is another way to interpret the museum. I discovered while walking around LACMA that there were parts of it I’d never seen before. I’ve been living in L.A. for ten years, and I’m an artist! I want to lead people to these hidden corners. On my eighth curatorial visit to the museum, I discovered a whole building I hadn’t entered! It took the artists and me three to four hours every time we walked through the museum, and the show will be structured in such a way that it will be impossible for anyone to see everything we’re doing.How did you pick which projects and artists to include?Machine Project has been open for five years now, and I invited everyone who I thought would work well in the context. I walked through the museum with the artists, and we generated hundreds of ideas—some just funny to us, some impractical. The process of deciding who and what would be involved was really a group effort. About twenty percent of the projects will be installed. The rest are either performances or workshops. There are lots of cross-disciplinary projects. For example, Corey Fogel’s sculptural sound performance piece—he’ll improvise dance and noise while wearing a suit he constructed out of 300 pepper shakers. There will be musicians in the elevators, a murder-mystery museum visitors can solve, a tour of the ambient sounds of LACMA. There were several ideas that we knew wouldn’t pass. Joshua Beckman came up with the idea of a driving-school valet—people who had just gotten their driver’s licenses would be parking all those BMWs! Then there was the plan to make the museum entrance look like airport security—you have to take your shoes off and put them on a belt, but instead of getting your shoes back at the end, the belt takes them to a big cardboard box and you have to dig yours out before you leave.Have you met with any resistance? Confusion?One core aspect of this process has been [LACMA photo curator] Charlotte Cotton’s involvement. She’s such a strong advocate. We developed the ideas with her, and she brought them to the people inside the museum. This really has been an educational experience to work with such a large institution. A much higher percent of our ideas passed than what I was expecting.What has been the hardest part?LACMA gave us a budget, and it’s been a challenge to work within that. I invited all the people first, then started working with the budget. I think most people do it the other way around! I’m trying to create a visual picture of how pieces relate to one another. There are various relations—formal, acoustic, conceptual—that weave in and out of each other. Every artist works differently. Liz Glynn has been crucial in this respect. I couldn’t have done this without her. I just had this feeling the other day—imagine you’re standing on a tall building, leaning over the edge, and your cell phone falls out. That vertigo… like, if I hadn’t hired Liz, this show would be a total disaster!Sounds like you’ve got a good team!My team consists of Liz and myself on the Machine end of production, with Michelle Yu helping us and also running the gallery. Charlotte and Eve Schillo produce from the LACMA side. The curatorial team consists of the more than forty artists who walked the museum with me and spoke with me about ideas. Then there are about fifty artists. Most of them are people I’ve worked with before, but there are a few new people. There’s a gallery of glass—Greek and Roman glass through the Middle Ages. I really wanted someone to play the glass harmonica, but I didn’t know anyone. Laura Steenberge gave me a name of a man she’d seen play but didn’t know—Douglas Lee. He’s this really theatrical guy who’s played on Japanese game shows and everything! At Machine, I like to bring artists in who can can create something specifically for the space. Joshua Beckman is a poet. He came up with this method of poetry-making in which an audience member suggests a topic, then Josh would say the first word of the poem, his collaborator Matthew Rohr would say the second, and they’d create the poem back and forth. The audience is always thinking about what the next word should be, so it’s a really interesting way to lead people through the process of making poetry. At Machine, we employed that concept a bit differently. We drilled a hole in the floor with a lens then another hole with a pipe and a funnel and a slot in the floor. Participants put their suggestion—along with a tip—into the slot and the size of the poem reflected the size of the tip. At the opening, people were just standing around the gallery talking while one person was pressed up against the floor listening to his or her poem. This is what we’re doing at LACMA: combining my experience of reacting to and working with a particular space and the artists’ willingness to step outside their experience and create something new. One gallery, for example, has a beautiful gothic arch. It was removed from a cathedral and now stands in the gallery. I wanted to fill it up with amps and have a man playing heavy metal guitar for one minute every hour—Heavy metal church bells?Yeah! But the curator of that gallery was just not into it. So Sarah Newey and Christy McCaffery—they build sets for commercials and the like—they’re building a replica of it. We’re going to put it on this outdoors porch area that’s behind a locked door. The guitarist will be out there playing one minute of speed metal every hour and people can watch through a telescope that we’re placing at a bank of windows. [Mark shows me an old black rotary phone, with the letter ‘M’ taped to the center of the dialing ring.] This is a rotary phone that I’ve fashioned into a fully functioning cell phone. Every hour, this phone will ring, so you can hear the music through the telephone and see the artist perform through the telescope. This is a good example of how this show has evolved—I have an idea of what’s gonna happen, but it’s probably going to be something really different. The plan is constantly changing.Do you consider yourself the producer of this event? The roles are fluid. Concepts emerge out of conversations. I operate on them, but the process is collective. My primary role is just the facilitator-catalyst-e-mailer.So what’s next for you and Machine Project?Here’s a picture of my mental space: there’s the election, which takes up about six hours each day. I’m checking blogs and reading reports and polls. Then there’s the event, which I’m working for every day. Two days after the event, my girlfriend Emily Joyce and I are going to Bali and Singapore. Emily’s dad works in Singapore, and her parents travel back and forth so much they gave us frequent flyer miles! Then the future ends. I guess there’s the book…LACMA’s publishing a book about the event? The book will be a guide to thinking about the museum. The projects that happened and the projects that didn’t happen will be treated the same way. The next thing will be our 4th annual Fry-B-Que. Five dollars—all you can fry. We rent the apartment upstairs for visiting artists—Josh Beckman will be staying up there to write the main essay for the book. He’s looking at 19th century naturalism, a period when people were interested in everything—natural phenomena, art, music, science… That’s the ethos that exists here at Machine Project. Josh’s girlfriend Jen Bervin is an artist, a poet, and a pie consultant. She’s an expert in pie and works with restaurants. So we’ll be having lots of pie-related activities. A pie-off/fry-off, if you will.The Machine Project history is rich with tradition. How did this all start?I moved here to go to CalArts, graduated and joined a collective called C-Level that had a basement space in Chinatown. It still exists there under the name Beta Level. I was living in Culver City but wanted to move here (Echo Park) because all my friends lived here. I saw this store front for rent, and I moved in. I used it as a studio and hosted a few events. The events built up, so i turned it into a 501c3 non-profit. I got a grant, hired Michelle, and she wrote more grants. You know, if you just keep doing something, it builds momentum. I’m interested in different kinds of things—poetry, music, science. I wanted this space to be public. We host participation-based events and the events are free. Plus I get to see all the things I’m interested in without having to leave. It’s like having a party at your house so you don’t have to drive home. This year’s interesting because we’ve been invited to all these different events—GLOW in Santa Monica, the L.A. Art Fair… LACMA is the biggest. It’s not about Machine as a venue but Machine Project as a collective activity. I love this location. It’s mission control hub, and the building is a family base. Everything you need is in walking distance—groceries, the cafe, Taco Zone.Best taco truck in L.A.! This is building is a good spot. Were you affected by the recent fire?The fire affected the apartments upstairs. The cafe had lots of water damage, and we had a little bit, too. I almost had a heart attack, though, because my landlord called and told me, ‘The building’s on fire!’ We had an electronics workshop, and we had a robotic-blimp-making workshop that day. I envisioned a mini-Hindenburg!