Chris Bergeron's in depth article

Kinetic artist David Lang's work is always moving

Chris Bergeron/DAILY NEWS STAFF

Posted: 08/21/2011 12:00 PM

An artist with a feverish mind and patient hands, David A. Lang had been wondering what materials he needed to make a moving sculpture that would express his fascination -- maybe his obsession -- with "uncertainty, unpredictability and serendipity."

So he began bugging friends and advertising on eBay for bedpans.

In a Natick studio that resembles a cross between Geppetto's workshop and the Unabomber's cabin, Lang transformed five donated bedpans into an airborne mobile titled "Fleet" that'll float beneath a canopy of fluttering paper wings in his soon-to-open exhibit at the Boston Sculptors Gallery.

Instead of crafting a puppet named Pinocchio who thought he was a real boy, the Sherborn resident fashions machines that act like philosophers. Lang is an art teacher and flight instructor, a watercolorist and builder of high-performance sports cars who's been retooling himself as his own work-in-progress.

Starting Aug. 31, he'll be exhibiting 20 ingenious kinetic sculptures in "OK, Now What?" -- a show conceived in a place he calls the "realm of the unlikely."

Subtitled "Inventions, Contraptions and Flights of Fancy," it runs through Oct. 2. On Sept. 17 and 18, Lang will discuss his work at 3 p.m.

Lang described his sculptures as "accidentally profound."

"I try to remember to look at things the way my grandchildren do. You never know when and whether things are going to come together. Kids understand that everything connects to everything else," he said.

To visualize Lang's kinetic sculptures, think, perhaps, of motion-activated whimsy.

Trigger the light sensor of "The Day the Castinetti Sisters First Learned to Fly" and a gaggle of clam shells begin clacking away, like sets of joke shop false teeth. Peek inside the shells and you'll see miniature images of Renaissance-era nudes, weirdly reminiscent of Botticelli's "Venus."

For a new piece called "Aphrodite," Lang has embellished a vintage electrolysis jar to suggest the Greek love goddess and hooked it up to the spark coil from a 1929 Ford. His friend Greg Paul has programmed a hidden memory card so when a viewer triggers a minute motion detector, a 20,000-volt arc current lights up the jar so it blinks out Aphrodite's name in Morse code.

Don't be misled into thinking Lang is just building walking, sometimes talking, Erector Sets.

Whether you call them kinetic sculptures or just "contraptions," they're animated by some personal concept, conundrum or knotty Zen koan that Lang wants to crack open like a lobster shell.

Lang said his sculptures "come together in the strangest ways," often originating from a friend's offhand remark or, perhaps, a curious object he found in a flea market or lying around his shop.

One work, "Hey Bob, Are You There...," was born from his fascination with barnacles, those crusty arthropods that attach themselves to other marine creatures or man-made objects.

For one of his most complex pieces, Lang constructed a small colony of barnacles from copper wire wound round a banana and duct tape. Then he and several friends recorded scripts of barnacles discussing the consequences of "staging an evolution" in Ed Bundy and "Married...with Children" voices.

Several of Lang's sculptures feature an audio element, often an improvised script he's written to nudge viewers into untangling life's little knots.

A sophisticated piece called "Play by Play" incorporates three levels of randomly programmed audio recordings recorded from the Internet -- static, old radio commercials and recordings of historic baseball moments.

After a viewer triggers a tiny motion detector, they might hear a jingle for Gillette foamy shaving cream, a burst of static and then announcer Milo Hamilton's euphoric account of Henry Aaron's 715th home run.

In 2004, Lang's life -- creative and otherwise -- became as unpredictable and improbable as his art.

For 30 years, he'd taught art, chaired the art department and directed the art gallery at the Middlesex School in Concord before retiring in 2003.

He'd planned to spend part of his retirement in a cottage he bought in rural Ireland making art when he had a stroke that inhibited his movements and fogged some of his thought processes.

As therapy, Lang began constructing sculptures by fashioning scraps of wire and metal into complex works that helped him recover his manual dexterity.

Now he builds by hand immensely complex pieces that initially resemble wheeled, wire wagons generally topped by some curious arrangement of "found objects," such as radio tubes, gutter spouts or toy flying pigs.

For Lang, the evolution from somewhat traditional painter to genre-busting sculpture seems part of a master plan.

"My paintings are stories in paint. My writings are paintings in words," he said. "All of my sculptures tell ambiguous stories that are open to interpretation."

THE ESSENTIALS:

WHAT: David Lang's "OK, Now What? Inventions, Contraptions and Flights of Fancy"

WHEN: Aug. 31-Oct. 2

WHERE: Boston Sculptors Gallery, 486 Harrison Ave., Boston

HOURS: Noon to 6 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday

ADMISSION: Free

INFO: 617-482-7781,

www.bostonsculptors.com