Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Installation
Website: bernielubell.com
Bernie Lubell was born in 1947 and originally trained in engineering at Carnegie Tech before earning a master’s degree in social psychology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Disillusioned with academia, he turned to art-making around 1970 and has been based in San Francisco since the 1970s, using art, in his words, as “a tool to answer questions.”
Since the early 1980s, Lubell has built a career around large, room-sized wooden machines that require the cooperation of visitors to operate, drawing on his dual background in psychology and engineering and on the chronophotographic experiments of the nineteenth-century physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey. His installations have been exhibited across the San Francisco Bay Area as well as in Los Angeles, Florida, China, and Europe, including a major solo presentation at FACT in Liverpool, a residency and exhibition at V2_ in Rotterdam, and inclusion in the 6th Guangzhou Triennial in China.
His work has been recognized with a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2011), an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant (2009), an Award of Distinction in Interactive Art from Ars Electronica (2007), a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2002), and an Artadia Award (2000). He has held residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Exploratorium in San Francisco, Autodesk, and Technorama in Switzerland.
Lubell builds his sculptures almost entirely from unpainted, lightweight pine, in a tradition that recalls Rube Goldberg’s contraptions but is pitched toward philosophical rather than comedic ends. His machines are deliberately “low-tech” and, as one exhibiting institution put it, “hover between functioning and not” — elegant, fragile, and largely without practical output, demanding real physical effort from participants for minimal mechanical result.
That friction is the point: visitors must work together to animate the pieces, becoming actors in a small theater of their own making. Recurring themes include intimacy, cooperation, entanglement, and the limits of technological utopianism, often staged through absurdist pneumatic and mechanical systems — a rocking bench that transmits a couple’s motion to another room, a giant collaborative knitting machine, inflatable bags that pit two participants’ comfort against each other. The work applies what Lubell has called “kinesthetic comprehensions of childhood” to serious inquiry, aiming to reawaken a childlike sense of wonder in adult visitors.
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