Defecating Suitcases, Perpetual Motion Machines, and Ruminations on Being Useless

Eastern philosopher Lao Tzu coined the famous phrase “A bowl is most useful when it is empty.” As a frequent enjoyer of cereal, clam chowder, and chili, I take issue with this. The bowl is one of our oldest and most versatile inventions ever created. In the plethora of ways that the average person can use a bowl, the bowl being empty throughout the activity is a rare occurrence. However, from one bowl-lover to another, I am willing to meet Lao Tzu halfway. An empty bowl has the capacity to do anything while a bowl of chili can’t even hold chowder, to my dismay. But what happens when the bowl makes the transition from useful to useless? Do we simply eat the chili, clean the bowl, and let it sit there until it is used again? In this sense, a bowl’s life is just the cyclical repetition of being capable of anything, then being delegated to a mundane task. Now, imagine what would happen if one day, the bowl decided to abandon the circular train-track that is its existence and shun every possibility it could be used for in order to exist for its own sake, to become permanently “useless.” What would that look like?

The Bronx Museum’s multi-artist and multi-medium exhibit “Useless Machines For Dreaming, Thinking, and Seeing” explores this concept of what it means to be useless. The exhibit proudly displays machines that are, essentially, failures. Machines are tools designed to do a specific and necessary task for a person in the most efficient manner possible. In essence, machines are the antithesis of art. Machines are inextricably linked with human function and value functionality over style, as opposed to art which exists as an individual and serves no practical purpose. The two could be no further apart. Or so I thought. In the process of becoming art, machines have to achieve something crucial. The machine must become useless.

Wim Delvoye’s “Cloaca Travel Kit” is a machine that performs a task that is completely unnecessary to us. Its purpose is to simply defecate in the museum, something that both toddlers and tourists who did not visit the bathroom before the Bronx Museum have no issue doing on their own. Other machines in the exhibit seem to do nothing in the most literal sense, such as Shyu Ruey-Shiann’s “Dreambox.” Previously a motorcycle used to travel across Taiwan, it was deconstructed, with it’s moving pieces gently humming as they were hung on the four lateral sides of a black cube, presumably the aforementioned box part. The whirring contraption looked, in my opinion, akin to a perpetual motion machine. This comparison was rather ironic due to the machine being a perpetual motion machine, a purely theoretical concept, while acting as a box for the artist’s memories of travelling through Taiwan, something which exists only in the confines of the artist’s mind.

Some machines do what every 65 year-old who successfully saved a 401(k) does: retire and take up a hobby. This is the case for the bomb-defusing robots who, with the help of artist Fernando Sánchez Castillo, moved on to painting. While I, for one, am glad that at least some veterans in this country are readjusting to civilian life, a “useful” machine would be disgusted not only by the bomb-defusing robots, but by the lackadaisical nature of all the machines featured in the exhibit. However, these “useless” machines have exposed a fundamental truth that a useful machine could never do; to be human, is to be useless. We, as a species, could be seen as flesh machines, with our brains being the most powerful motherboard the world has ever seen. Yet, the number of us that drift through life without any calling or purpose is higher than any of us would like to believe. Even those of us that are not drifters, those that have a hobby, career, or life path, are more capable of leaving it all than we are willing to confess, something completely foreign to the useful machines. A finance manager, burdened by first world problems, is more capable of waking up one day, quitting her job, and using her life savings to buy a cabin in the woods than her mind, concerned with how much of her life she spent in business school, would ever admit. We exist before we find any form of purpose in life and, unlike our metal brethren, cannot reside in the comfort of knowing what that purpose is.

However, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I discovered something in the exhibit while staring at the machines doing nothing beautifully. Whenever addressing the machines, the museum-goers treated the machines as individuals. “The ‘Dreambox’ is making so much noise,” “Look at the ‘Tentaculosa’ dance,” and “Is the travel kit really pooping?” were all overheard. Though using the machines as nouns may not seem special, it is in every regard. If I were to fill my bowl with some cereal and give it to another person, one would say that I fed that person, not the bowl. The bowl was simply a tool used to do so. Therefore, it would be expected that we would say that the artist made so much noise, or that the engineer designed the machine to move in a dancing fashion, or even that the madman was using a machine to make poo in the exhibit. But we didn’t. We personified the machines, treating them as though they are acting by their own accord. I even caught myself referring to the machines with gendered pronouns instead of the alienating “it,” used to describe inhuman things. By existing for their own sake, by ignoring what they are supposed to be to become what they could be, by being useless, the machines achieved a form of agency, a central tenet of humanity.

Though their mechanical brothers would be disappointed in them, I’d like to believe that the machines in “Useless Machines For Dreaming, Thinking, and Seeing” are proud. Guest creator Gerardo Mosquera said the exhibit is “a reflection on how being useless could be a human achievement.” I hope the machines understand that the title they are under, despite the connotation of the word “useless,” is something to be proud of. For it is because they are useless, not despite it, that they are profound. In a very real sense, even we can walk down the street, bowl of clam chowder in hand, and be grateful that we are all, amazingly, useless.