Floats — Robert Breer's slow-moving sculptures

1965

Artists: Robert Breer · Year: 1965 · Medium: Kinetic sculptural objects — slow-moving floor sculptures with internal motors · Substrate: Foam, hardshell, motors running at very slow speeds (inches per minute); the objects appear stationary to casual observation but move continuously · Place: Palisades, New York, USA · Institution: Independent; E.A.T. Pepsi Pavilion (covered separately) Robert Breer's Floats, first exhibited in 1965, were small, low, white or colored polystyrene domes and slabs that crept across the gallery floor at roughly the speed a plant grows — about four inches a minute. Each Float concealed a battery, a motor, and a rubber drive wheel; the drive was soft and slow enough that the motion was invisible until you looked away and back. They were sculpture that failed, on purpose, the basic sculptural contract of standing still. Breer came to the Floats from animation. He had been making hand-drawn films since the early 1950s in Paris, where he was associated with the last wave of the American expatriate avant-garde. His early films — Recreation (1956), Blazes (1961), Fist Fight (1964) — are built on a technique of maximum frame-by-frame rupture: each frame of the film is a different, unrelated drawing, so the eye is asked to assemble motion from absolute non-continuity. The Floats are the same technique in space: objects arranged in a gallery where, between two glances, the composition has shifted without the viewer ever seeing it move. What makes the Floats matter to this archive is that they smuggle time into sculpture through a rule a computer could easily be programmed to follow. Each Float travels in a straight line, turns when it hits a wall, and continues. The room is the program; the sculpture is the process of the program running. Breer had built a simple autonomous system — he called them "creepers" — that behaved like small kinetic agents and produced, together, an emergent composition that no arrangement could specify in advance. Breer continued to exhibit the Floats for forty years, restaging them in Kassel (documenta 1977), Paris (Beaubourg 1982), and New York (Whitney 2008). They remain one of the clearest early arguments that the interesting thing is not the form but the rule that produces the form — and that a rule can be delegated to a motor, a wheel, and a wall. Lore Breer built the first Floats at his workshop in Palisades, New York, with components scavenged from toy-store windups and dime-store motors. He priced them to sell — the 1965 gallery list had them at under $500 each — and when he heard that MoMA wanted one but the curator was hesitant, he offered to deliver it by hand and let them watch it walk into the room. Later in life he was fond of saying that he had always been trying to make sculpture behave like an animation frame: invisible when you were looking at it, completely different the instant you looked away. His widow, the painter Hisako Ogura, keeps the surviving Floats in working order; a few live in museum storage and are reanimated for exhibitions, their sixty-year-old motors still turning. Sources • Sitney, P. Adams — Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde (Oxford, 3rd ed. 2002). • Whitney Museum of American Art — Robert Breer (exh. cat. 2008). • Anthology Film Archives — Robert Breer collection.