Did this tragic robot kill itself?
Sun Yuan and Peng Su are two artists more accustomed to creating controversy than outpourings of tragedy. Having used human tissue and live animals in their art pieces, it seems odd that a robot would be the thing that moved audiences most. But sure enough, their robot installation, aptly named Can’t Help Myself, became an internet phenomenon after its rumoured “death”.
Caged in a glass box, this long-suffering robot was tasked with sweeping up an endless pool of red liquid. The liquid continually spooled out, and it hurried to contain it, always one step behind – until it couldn’t take anymore.
There is an undeniable tragedy in the robot’s desperate attempts to clean up a mess that won’t go away. The custom-designed shovel moved methodically in a circle, scooping up the blood-like liquid in a never-ending dance. The robot was not dancing on its own whim; it was programmed by Yuan and Su, complete with 32 different movements, one of which was inexplicably called “ass shake”. It’s been widely received as a stand-in for everything from depression to the rat race, and you can see why.
Over time, the shaking was less enthusiastic. The arm slowed down. The white floor was tinged pink after endless clear-ups. Growing tired of never-ending manual labour, it seemed to shut down. It’s clear why this chimed with audiences, given that in 2019, the year it debuted, the entire world found itself in crisis, with not only Covid, but the Covid-induced recession. People saw their own struggles mirrored in, of all things, a (no doubt highly expensive) robot struggling to complete its set task.
Its slow degeneration prompted mass hysteria online. “It was programmed to live out this fate, and no matter what it did or how hard it tried, there was no escaping it,” wrote one viewer online. “Spectators watched as it slowly bled out until the day that it ceased to move forever. What a masterpiece. What a message.” While it was a touching interpretation, it’s worth mentioning at this point that the robot had simply run out of hydraulic fluid and not died.
Mind you, a lot of online circles would rather it did. Moving video tributes set to morose Mitski tracks made in tribute to Can’t Help Myself have views just shy of 100 million. Debates were had, and the clarification from the Guggenheim confused its intended meaning even more, calling it futile efforts an “absurd, Sisyphean view of contemporary issues surrounding migration and sovereignty”. The blood-like liquid was chosen by design to “evoke the violence that results from surveilling and guarding border zones”.
While the interpretations vary, two things are certain. One, the robot’s slow descent into stillness was engineered. The robot was not suicidal. The second certainty is that Can’t Help Myself was one of the most impactful artworks in recent memory. Curiously, the robot was ripe for human projections of hopelessness and violence, and no matter the individual understandings of its grander meanings, all were underpinned by tragedy.
