Sometimes, there’s great delight to be found in the tedious. Arthur Ganson’s remarkable kinetic sculpture Machine with Concrete demonstrates that with playful aplomb.
Like all kinetic sculptures, Ganson’s work moves. It’s powered by a motor that spins at 200RPM. And yet, as much as it whirs away, it is also trapped in a moment of stillness, even literally. Machine with Concrete is actually a fairly simple mechanism, formed of 12 pairs of gears connected in a linear chain. One gear spins the next, which spins the next, and on it goes. So far, so uninspiring.
The thing is, thanks to some elegant gearing, while the motor inputs a 200RPM spin into the contraption, the final gear in the chain turns at (1/50)12. In other words, it will make one rotation every 2.3 trillion years. Often playful and even mischievous in his artworks, Ganson has set that final gear in a block of concrete, just in case anyone missed the fact that it spins very, very slowly.
And that is the glint in the eye of Machine with Concrete. It is an active machine in motion, entirely uninterrupted. Simultaneously, it is trapped in a moment by concrete. Setting aside the engineering concept of ‘backlash’, where tiny gaps in mechanisms add a delay between moving parts, all of Machine with Concrete is moving. It’s simply that the final gear moves slowly enough not to trouble hardened concrete.
Machine with Concrete – Arthur Ganson Watch on YouTube
In fact, Ganson’s contraption is unlikely to get through much of its immense journey. If the parts don’t erode and decay first, our Sun’s death will scorch everything from Earth in a mere 7.6 billion years, kinetic artworks included.
Machine for Concrete is an idea so big – so silly and so smart – that the fullest life of the planet we inhabit doesn’t offer enough capacity to see its final gear – well… turn around a bit. Ganson has built a demonstration of utter irrelevance, and imprisoned it in a fleeting moment that lasts trillions of years.