Jet engines, flame throwers and destruction: The bizarre performances of Survival Research Laboratories
The biggest stars of the industrial performance art group Survival Research Laboratories come in many strange forms. There’s the ‘Shockwave Canon’, a giant, high-speed shooter of air ring vortexes; ‘Hand O God’, a mammoth spring-loaded hand fueled by eight tons of hydraulic pressure—recently modified for greater “bone-crushing powers”—and the ‘Flame Whistle’, a 200 lb turbo-jet attached with fuel injectors and a police whistle creating what could be the world’s loudest flamethrower. Let’s not forget ‘Mr Satan’, a demonic mask of solid stainless steel attached to a furnace spitting flames out of its eyes and mouth.
These are just a sample of the terror machines that have constituted SRL’s long-running show since its 1978 inception. Formed by ironworks welder turned art student, Mark Pauline, for over 45 years, SRL has hosted mechanised spectacles of robot carnage and engineered anarchy, delivering a show that gleefully and viscerally taps into the collective fascination with unfolding destruction.
“Producing the most dangerous shows on Earth” has seen SRL’s large-scale carnage bash heads with authorities, particularly the San Francisco Fire Department, banning any further shows in the city. Surprisingly, nobody has been hurt except the SRL crew, Pauline losing two fingers while making rocket fuel in 1982, and Todd Blair suffering a serious head injury during an Amsterdam show’s robot disassembling.
Shaped by punk and Weather Underground‘s radical militancy that struck the 1970s, Pauline always ensured a political dimension to his scrapyard theatre. Springing to life from the detritus of corporate industry and the military complex, the corrugated alien forms hammered and twisted into implements of destruction illustrate the team’s outlier contempt for the imperial and capitalist machine—slithering chunks of tech which, with sentient agency, flock to a realm where they’re of better use to humanity than as cogs in America’s ruthless economic and foreign policy.
“SRL was born out of this idea that you could take these commercial or military technologies and re-engineer them so that they became completely impractical entertainment vehicles that would retain the power that made them useful in the first place, but without any of the baggage,” Pauline revealed to Artspace in 2018. “That’s when I came up with this system for our shows and formed it as a company”.
Growing from a cult 1980s industrial hazard to a fire-breathing presence of the 1990s art world, shows such as Survival Research Laboratories Contemplates a Million Inconsiderate Experiments and The Unexpected Destruction of Elaborately Engineered Artefacts found SRL both scraping into the mainstream while also succumbing to San Francisco‘s escalating real estate rates. This forced the SRL compound to move almost 49 kilometres to Petaluma in the hollowed-out commercial properties left vacant since the dot-com bust, looming over Silicon Valley’s pristine uniformity like a rusty shadow,
Still operating and hosting shows, so long as the excreta of insatiable capital lays waste to the West Coast’s landfills and warehouses, Pauline and his crew will be there to pilfer and hijack the latest metal limbs and appendages like an industrial Burke and Hare. While some daydream about the tools of conflict and plunder turning on their string-pullers with violent frenzy, SLR can offer some chaotic catharsis with their ripping those tools away from the political war mongering they were originally built for.
