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Digging Up the Future

Global Furnace: A mixed-media sculpture by Michael Sturtz

Michael Sturtz's sculptures indict rampant technology

By Ann Elliott Sherman

At first glance, it seems more than slightly ironic that a gallery dedicated to promoting technologically based art features what amounts to an indictment of technology's destructive effects upon Earth. Now at the Holmes Gallery in San Jose, Michael Sturtz's dystopic Signs of Life: Technology to Revive a Dead Planet is billed as a pseudoarcheological exhibit from the future of "rare remnants and artifacts of the third planet in a small, insignificant solar system."

The show is firmly in the science-fiction tradition in which imagined beings of greater intelligence and wisdom sift through the ruins of our pillaged planet and try to fathom what on Earth we humans did to our home. The premise, although not novel, serves to unify an installation of disparate sculpture in extremely mixed media.

With its peekaboo window on a blender-swirled tornado of fluorescent yellow fluid, the rusted metal Burial Capsule--its red radioactive sign still blinking its useless warning--is one piece whose message might be lost to our primitive delight in bright colors and moving water if it weren't for the exhibit-within-an-exhibit's curatorial commentary.

Described as one of hundreds of thousands of capsules found buried below an area covered with surface markers (recreated in clay by Sturtz), the fluid inside what is reportedly one of the few capsules left intact is amusingly hypothesized by the "future historians" to have some religious significance. A brief reference to an ongoing debate about opening the capsule to better examine the fluid provides an imaginative, if chilling, new ripple to nuclear waste's potential for destruction.

More directly horrifying is the Organic Resuscitator, a brushed-steel hydrotherapy tank converted to a planter with a cross-sectional view of Earth "strata" (topped off with a layer of asphalt), holding one sickly tree specimen by a series of sinister-looking clamps attached to dental equipment. A series of drills connected to snaking tubes spray fine jets of water at the half-dead plant.

Suspended over the center of the room, "solar panels" winging wide, Observational Satellite makes the most of the gallery's high ceilings. A motion detector causes the glass "eye in the sky" to flare when anyone stands before the unsheathed television screen at the end of the satellite's long umbilical.

Unfortunately, the screen airs a video that is wincingly predictable. It includes footage from films like Koyaanisqatsi, Star Trek II and 2001: A Space Odyssey as well as PBS fare such as Nova or National Geographic, accompanied by atmospheric noodlings by Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream or Pink Floyd. If Sturtz wants us eco-rapers to wake up and smell the ozone, he'd do better not to lull us to sleep once he grabs our attention.

Global Furnace is a bleak little joke about the probability of new technology rescuing us from the aftereffects of the old. Ostensibly a mock-up for a scheme to cool down the atmosphere, it features a marble ball nestled inside the hub of a rusted, omega-shaped pedestal. Water gently fountains out the top, flowing over the curved exterior and through two conduits to the center, where it then bathes the ball only to evaporate into steam, thanks to the wreath of gas jets torching the bottom of the globe.

This piece works on several levels, its elegant minimalism and fascinating mechanics the perfect set up for Sturtz's deadly serious punch line. On a grander scale, it could make for a public art work worthy of the inevitable debate.

The cement-cast works comprising the remainder of the show provide an interesting contrast with all the recycled industrial metals. The small but sardonically effective Track Print captures a four-wheel-drive tire track in clay and inlays it with silica fused into glass by a nuclear furnace.

Vaporized Remains does much the same with a human skeletal impression rendered into foamy glass, outlasted by charred remnants of a car chassis. Sturtz's nice touch here is breaking the whole into cracked fragments pieced together like an excavated fossil.

But the attention getter is probably Skeletal Remains With Mechanism, a kind of 3-D homage to Marvel Comics' Ghost Rider, minus the leather and chains. This cycle-straddlin' carcass slabbed in cement, nicely touched with Pompeiian tones of ochre and ruddy brick, is Sturtz's not-so-gentle reminder that all us fossil-fuel burnin' fools are on the highway to hell. Too bad the initial response to this piece is most likely, "Wow! Cool!"

Therein lies the rub. Sturtz is a serious artist with a grimly urgent message. But as another all-American idealist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, recognized, "Life is rather a subject of wonder, than of didactics."

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