Maker

www.makezine.com/07/interview

and the military” could be redirected to point out what he saw as the “irony and hypocrisy in the world.” So he borrowed the name Survival Research Laboratories from an advertisement in an old Soldier of Fortune magazine and produced the first show, a commentary on the oil crisis of the day, in a gas station parking lot. Titled Machine Sex, it involved a conveyor belt, a spinning blade, and quite a few (already) dead pigeons.

“The vision for SRL was always about creepy, scary, violent, and extreme performances that really captured the feeling of machines as living things,” he says.

Only Marginally Acceptable

The small audience of local punks was impressed and delighted. But most importantly, Pauline had found his fresh idea. He wouldn’t learn until years later about kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely, who constructed an elaborate machine that destroyed itself in the garden outside New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1960.

Three decades later, SRL would stage its own performance at the groundbreaking ceremony for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Following the show, one citizen wrote in a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, “In Florida, we call it fraud, not art, and we put them in jail.” Good thing that Pauline had moved out of Florida long before.

Of course, Pauline knew even before he first put drill to steel for Machine Sex that SRL’s activities “would only be marginally acceptable to people who wanted to live in peace in urban settings.” Indeed, some of what he planned might even be downright illegal. That’s why SRL is a legit, tax-paying company.

“I understood that companies could get away with things that individuals can’t,” he says.

Pathological Amusement Still, SRL has earned its reputation as a band of troublemakers. In 1989, the group made news after taking credit for a number of mysterious TNT charges that had been found throughout San Francisco. The explosives were fake, grabbed by audience members as unusual souvenirs after a performance and then littered around the city.

In 1995, after SRL’s Crimewave show at the foot of the Bay Bridge, Pauline was interviewed in connection with the Unabomber case. Although that matter was cleared up quickly, Pauline and a colleague were arrested and charged with using explosives and starting a fire unlawfully.

It’s these and a host of other run-ins with fire departments that have made it nearly impossible for Pauline to stage a performance in San Francisco. In recent years, though, the group has packed up flatbed trucks with dozens of tons of equipment and performed in Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and other cities in the United States and abroad. In the 1980s, SRL toured Europe several times with the support of politically well-connected art promoters. These promoters arranged for SRL to have almost unlimited access to scrap yards, and they squelched any potentially threatening controversies immediately.

“They’re kind of like the art mafia,” he says. In 1999, Pauline and several dozen SRL crew members packed boat-bound shipping containers for the group’s first large performance in Tokyo. The show, titled Thoughtfully Regards: The Arbitrary Calculation of Pathological Amusement, was sponsored by Japanese telecom behemoth NTT and held in a public park.

“I’m a Vulture Capitalist”

This kind of support is essentially unheard of in the United States, Pauline says. Usually, the show time and location must be a closely guarded secret until the very last minute to prevent the authorities from shutting down the event. Unable to sell advance tickets, Pauline must now bankroll the shows himself at costs of tens of thousands of dollars.

“I’m an artist, but I have to live on an executive salary to do what I do,” he says.

For most of his adult life, Pauline barely paid rent at the shop, supporting his tool habit by doing welding and specialized fabrication for high-tech firms in the Bay Area.

“Normally, the research labs contract out their freelance work to shops that have all the right paperwork for things like worker’s comp,”_>he_>