“Can’t Help Myself”

In 2016, the Guggenheim Museum displayed a work commissioned by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu called “Can’t Help Myself.”

The art installation utilizes an industrial robot with visual recognition sensors and software that controls its movements. It is a statement by the artists meant to draw attention to the automated reality the world now employs.

The robot is encased in a square acrylic walled space where it is doomed to continue the one job it has been assigned. All around it, there is a bloodlike liquid that it must continue to sweep back into its well. The sensors detect when the oil has escaped a certain distance from the robot, triggering its robotic arm to reach out with its shoveled appendage and pull it back into place. The process results in trails on the floor and splashes on the wall that make it look more like a crime scene than a work of art.

The artists formed the idea based on their initial concept of how a machine could replicate an artist’s will to create a masterpiece. They modified a robotic arm such as the ones typically seen on assembly lines for large part manufacturing, adding a custom shovel designed by two robotics engineers they employed for assistance in realizing their vision.

With the help of these engineers, they gave the machine thirty-two movements it could employ in its efforts to retrieve the cellulose-infused liquid around it. They gave these movements fun names like “scratch and itch,” “bow and shake,” and “ass shake.”

To the observer, the machine seems to take on a life of its own, dancing and shaking as the robotic arm moves all around to retrieve the escaping liquid. It seems almost happy, like any human who would go about his or her mundane chores while whistling contently. Also, like humans, there are signs of distress when the machine can no longer capture the escaping liquid and is forced to skip its playful little movements in favor of getting straight to the next overspill.

It is just one more example of Sun Yuan & Peng Yu’s macabre sense of humor employed to address provocative topics. The robot’s constant dancing about to achieve its task represents the futility of modern attempts to maintain sovereignty by preventing free migration.

Still, there is a deeper meaning in the fluid-streaked and splattered room around the machine. It is not accidental that the color and consistency of the fluid is very blood-like in appearance. It represents the violence involved in the surveying and protection of borders. It is meant to evoke the same instinctive reaction humans have to the often inhumane mechanisms utilized by governments to police borders between separate places and cultures and the increased use of modern tech to monitor the movements of migrants across sovereign lines.

There is a very human-like, relatable aspect to the robot as its endless chore. People feel the sadness and hopelessness it projects as it moves about, at first seeming happy enough to do its job but over time growing slower as if the work has become tedious and exhausting. Visitors to the installation and viewers who have seen it on the internet express feeling a certain sadness as they watched the robot’s endless efforts to control its environment with no ability to just cast it aside.

In 2019, the robot arm began to grow too rusty to continue and it finally stopped working, which only makes it seem all the more human to many. There was much sympathy expressed among observers for the machine who had spent its entire life fighting a losing battle and must feel only relief that it can finally put its shoveled arm to rest.