The artist with the remote-controlled robotic body: ‘Ive made a career out of being a failure’ – The Guardian

What was it about the 1970s that promoted suffering for ones art? In Rhythm 0 (1974), Marina Abramovi stood next to a table loaded with items ranging from a rose to a gun, and let the audience desecrate her with them. Tehching Hsieh took a two-storey leap for Jump Piece (1973) and broke his ankles. Chris Burden somehow lived to the age of 69, despite in the same curious decade getting a friend to shoot him, cramming himself into a locker for five days and nailing himself onto a Volkswagen Beetle. For Eleanor Antins 1972 work Carving a Traditional Sculpture, the artist crash-dieted for 45 days and documented her decline.

Stelarcs series of 25 Body Suspensions also began in that decade, when the singularly named performance artist lived in Japan. Before one such flesh-hook suspension, at Tokyos Komai Gallery, he additionally stitched his lips and eyelids shut for a week. Since then, he has continued to use his body he calls it the body as a medium, subjecting it to surgical construction, liposuction, implanting, sensory deprivation and internal probing with recording devices.

Yet when we meet for coffee in Melbourne, Stelarc says, I am the least tormented person youll probably ever meet. His practice is not about exploring what the body is capable of, but rather about understanding its limitations. Stelarc sees the body as an object among other objects, to be assembled as part of a greater structure. And, he adds, he doesnt get a kick out of pain. I would scream and shout in the dentists chair as much as anyone would, he says.

Stelarc was born Stelios Arcadiou in 1946 in Cyprus and raised in Sunshine, Melbourne. Initially, he was going to study architecture at Melbourne University, before realising he was more interested in the architecture of the body and switching to art school.

Now in his 70s, Stelarc has engineered a new work for the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art with its theme of Monster Theatres. Reclining Stickman taps into his interest in prosthetics, robotics, cybernetics biotechnology and virtual reality, which began when he moved to Japan as a young man and became fascinated by its hi-tech culture.

The 9m robot has rubber muscles and can be operated by Stelarc, using pneumatic joysticks, when he sits in it. It can also be choreographed remotely by the public, at any time of day, from anywhere in the world, by using the interface on his website. The Art Gallery of South Australia is working to move the exhibition online during the gallerys Covid-19 closure, but this is one work that was ahead of the curve. Like curator Leigh Robb says: At a time when we are physically distanced, Stelarcs robot offers moments of intimacy with art and technology.

Back in the mid-70s, Stelarc had intended his very first flesh-hook suspension to be in Adelaide, at the Experimental Art Foundation, but it turned into a melodrama that shaped his way of working from that moment onwards.

The media found out what was going to happen and there was an outcry, he says. There were comments from doctors saying that this was self-harm, that it might cause a fatality. Thirty minutes before the performance, the foundation withdrew their support, and then the accusation in the media was that the whole thing had been a stunt and hadnt really been going to happen.

Ever since, his more controversial performances have been unadvertised and are usually only performed in front of those who helped build the installation.

As the director of the Alternate Anatomies Lab at Perths Curtin University, Stelarc has overseen many research projects that tie in to his interests, including Ambidextrous Arm a prototype arm with a manipulator that is double-jointed, allowing it to be both a left hand and a right hand that could benefit amputees.

His friend, Neuromancer author William Gibson, wrote of Stelarcs work: I associate it with da Vincis ornithopter, eccentric 19th-century velocipedes, and Victorian schemes for electroplating the dead though not retrograde in any way. Instead, it seems timeless moments of the purest technologically induced cognitive disjunction.

I ask Stelarc if he thinks hes doing a service to science by demonstrating what can be done without the constraints of ethics boards, risk assessment and other red tape.

I dont think realistically that artists meaningfully contribute to science, he says. Im very sceptical of this kind of mashing together which is now becoming more and more a genre of artistic practice because the methodologies of scientific research and artistic actions are totally different ... You dont want a situation where artists do bad research and scientists make bad art.

Another of his ongoing projects is Ear on Arm, and he sportingly rolls up his sleeve in the cafe to show me. It took Stelarc 10 years to find three surgeons willing to form the ear on his left forearm. Its made out of cartilage grown from his tissue and stem cells, shaped into a scaffold, then implanted. He had originally wanted to put the ear on his head, next to his actual ear. But, you know, no surgeon would do it.

Originally, the ear was to have a microphone embedded in it that would transmit the noises around Stelarc to an internet portal, allowing others to eavesdrop. He might even whisper things into his own forearm for them to hear. But the site became infected when wires were introduced, and, as he says, I almost lost an arm for an ear. He was hospitalised for a week and put on industrial-strength antibiotics for six months.

Whats interesting about any art project is the slippage that occurs between intention and actual outcome, he says cheerfully. Ive always admitted that Ive made a career out of being a failure nothing I imagine turns out the way I expected it to.

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The artist with the remote-controlled robotic body: 'Ive made a career out of being a failure' - The Guardian