For the first few cranks, you absorb how the machine works. You
watch the exposed gears turning beneath the little stage, puppeteering
the papier-mâché figures. You take in the actions that
repeat as you turn the crank: An Iraqi woman is raped, a hooded Iraqi
prisoner is strung up by his arms, a college student is pushed down and
Tasered. On one level, you know these are news events that you had
nothing to do with. On another level, you’re the one standing there,
turning the crank.
The toy torture machines are by Jon Haddock, an artist based in
Tempe, Arizona. As a group, he calls them Automata, after the
handcrafted mechanical toys children entertained themselves with in
“simpler” times. But the title of his show, at Howard House through
July 19, also invokes the way rote behavior can lead to amoral
mindlessness. Haddock’s uncomplicated mechanisms are ungodly, implying
a world in which fixed systems produce expected results—except
insofar as you, yourself, are the one who sets it all in motion. The
critique inherent in these sculptures is sweeping: Every person is at
once alone with the structure and complicit with it, hands on the
wheel. In the most upsetting of Haddock’s sculptures, you turn the
crank and a prone U.S. soldier with his pants down fucks the empty
air—you get to imagine the woman, her position, her words, her
face—next to a tall, menacing-looking closed door, while another
soldier plays voyeur-slash-lookout.
Nothing remotely like rape or torture happened at the Central
Library on June 28, but the art event Task was an equally
in-depth experiment in giving orders, giving permission, and seeing
what a group can accomplish—and get away with—in contrast
to what an individual can and will do.
Task is a weird sort of artwork, the kind that looks like nothing more than a game, and the kind whose failure
or success is particularly hard to determine. As a critic, I am always
asking myself about a piece of art or an exhibition, did it
work? But Task was not made for me, or any single audience
member. It is an artwork that only its participants, only collectively,
know fully.
In Seattle, it involved 35 volunteers selected from a pool of more
than 100 applicants by the Brooklyn-based artist Oliver Herring. (His
criterion was diversity; the applicants were asked their age, their
occupation, and why they wanted to participate.) At 10:00 a.m. on June
28, they met at the downtown library, where two main stages were set up
for them, with a path marked out on the floor between the stages. To
start, Herring handed out 35 tasks he’d written—a task can range
from “start a revolution” to “build a fort,” one for each participant.
At that point, Herring sat back and watched. When a task was finished,
the participant wrote a new one, put it in a box, and took another task
from the box. This continued for seven and a half hours: a full working
day. Seven hundred and nine tasks were done while the business of the
library continued. (See the full list of tasks.)
Some of the tasks were barely adult versions of the occupations of
children. “Throw a beach party”? No, thanks. “Take a nap.” The turn
toward childlike behavior (which I found oppressive) has been the most
common feature of Task in all four of its incarnations before
this since 2002, in London, Paris, Florida, and Washington, D.C.,
Herring said.
But beyond that universal, each installment of Task reflects
the character of the city it’s made in, since the participants write
the tasks. So what do three-dozen Seattleites do when they can do
anything? Herring, who has followed every performance of Task closely, is the only person who can answer this question in a
comparative way. Paris was poetic, he said; the D.C. version was full
of war, religion, and destruction (it had such an edge that Herring and
an organizing curator both reported relief that no one died); Lake
Worth, Florida (about an hour north of Miami), was political and, for
whatever reason, preoccupied with clothing. Herring described Seattle’s
Task as sophisticated. No permanent structures or objects were
created, or if they were, they were shortly destroyed (maybe
participants already had their architecture jones satisfied by
occupying Rem Koolhaas’s overwhelming, steel-and-glass library design).
There was a carnival and a birthday party, but generally, the flow of
events didn’t move toward recognizable climactic moments. Religion was
pretty much invisible; so were overt
politics. The number of tasks
was unprecedented—Seattleites are workhorses when it comes to
being creative.
But the real work of Task is not in describing a city. It’s
in determining what people are capable of when they are set in a group
and given creative license. The answer is almost everything: being
mundane, poignant, kind, cruel, dismissive, submissive. A wide range of
human behavior was apparent, in the way the Task performers
related to each other and the walk-by audience they by turns cajoled
and excluded. But at the question-and-answer period afterward, the
subject came up—as Herring said it always does—of why there
wasn’t more confrontation, more negativity, more anarchy. This question
visibly irritated Herring, but it had occurred to me, too.
One participant, a young guy, argued that, bored with the
nicey-niceness of it all, he started writing edgy tasks, trying to “get
people to do things they didn’t want to do.” One was “make out with
another participant.” He seemed insufficiently undone when it was
revealed that when another participant picked that task out of the box
and coincidentally invited him to make out, he refused, citing loyalty
to his partner at home. Intriguingly, his original question was
answered in part when another participant revealed that a team of de
facto regulators formed around the box, throwing out tasks they came
across that they deemed inappropriate.
But basically, nothing shocking happened during Task, which
is not to say there were not tears in the fabric of the temporary
society. I saw the most pernicious one when it began: Someone put in a
chain-letter task. It spread like an illness, and I couldn’t believe it
when I saw participants going along with it. They were supposed to
follow the tasks, sure, but there was nothing saying they had to
do one that was both dumb and endless. Finally, it was phased out with
a combination of outright defiance and creative rule-bending. It seemed
a good lesson in how to reach in and rearrange the figures rather than
just continuing to turn the crank.
I don’t know exactly how they rid their system of its virus, and I’m
not sure any of them individually knows, either. Incomplete
information: There’s another reason that your hand stays where it’s
put. 
