Arthur Ganson

Always nice to discover a new artist you haven't seen before and my partner Hazel found this chap on YouTube recently by accident. We have long been fans of the work of automata and especially people like Jean Tinguely etc. Arthur who is obviously a big fan of Tinguely too and his influence shines through in many of these quirky and inventive moving sculptures.

Wikipedia says -

"Arthur Ganson is a renowned kinetic sculptor. Ganson makes mechanical art demonstrations and Rube Goldberg machines with existential themes. Ganson has held residencies in science museums, collaborated with the Studebaker Movement Theatre, and been featured in one-man shows at MIT Museum, Harvard’s Carpenter Center, the DeCordova Museum, and the Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York. He has a permanent installation at the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He was a MIT artist-in-residence, and some of his work is on permanent display at the Gestural Engineering exhibit at MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Ganson was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1955. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of New Hampshire in 1978. Ganson appeared as a character on an episode of PBS's animated television show Arthur on December 24, 2003.

The themes of his work explore existential ideas and have been compared to the plays of Samuel Beckett. Some of his machines work to simply oil themselves, other times his extremely elaborate machines do nothing at all. Ganson is the inventor of the Toobers & Zots, a construction toyset of bendable foam pieces in abstract shapes that can be assembled into almost anything."