THE STORY OF A LOCAL BOY WHO WENT OFF TO SAN FRANCISCO AND DREW A CROWD. WHAT HE DOES IS A CROSS BETWEEN A PUPPET SHOW AND A PLANE CRASH. IT IS ABSOLUTE TRASH . . . BUT IS IT ART?

Miami Herald, The (FL)
January 29, 1984
Author: JOEL ACHENBACH Herald Staff Writer

Mark Pauline, the handsome young artist from Sarasota, stuck out his mangled right hand. He wore a glove. We shook, and through the fabric I tried to count the fingers. One. Two. Three? It was hard to tell.

We were somewhere on the fringe of San Francisco, in a sprawling tin shed tucked beneath a Highway 101 overpass. This was the little shop of horrors known as Survival Research Laboratories, a dark place cluttered with black motorcycles, industrial tools, and machinery of unfathomable design.

Pauline, the Director, gave a tour.

"This is the Flippy Man."

It was a robot, hanging from the ceiling. Pauline hit a switch and the Flippy Man started to dance and juke, rattling as he kicked in the air.

"This is the catapult."

It was a huge thing, capable of launching a bowling ball 150 feet. Sometimes the boys at Survival Research Laboratories catapult bricks across the room at the Flippy Man.

"This is the Mummy-Go-Round."

The round device sat low in the corner, holding half a dozen leathery objects. A closer look revealed them to be mummified animal carcasses, grimacing in death. Pauline said he was led into a train tunnel by a drug addict, where he found the mummies.

"This dog was cut in half by a train. I imagine his death must have been very violent and painful."

The creature's head was impaled on the neck stump of a robot. If the robot is turned on, the dog head will spin. The idea is, he says, "to reanimate the flesh."

Behold the works of Mark Pauline, 29, son of a gangster, former juvenile delinquent, high priest of something called performance art:

On Nov. 13, 1982, in a Greyhound Bus Lines parking lot in San Francisco, in front of a thousand art patrons and numerous television crews, Pauline attacked these robotized mummies with homemade rocket guns, flame throwers and heat lasers. A Billy Graham robot battled a mobile Mr. Satan. A 400-pound mechanized tick bobbed its head up and down, and then blew up, spewing tennis balls everywhere. A severely decomposed canine was christened Stink Dog, and dragged across a bed of nails while a wind machine blew the stench into the audience.

Signs advertised the show as A CRUEL AND RELENTLESS PLOT TO PERVERT THE FLESH OF BEASTS TO UNHOLY USES.

The art patrons clapped.

This show had been even more elaborate than the much- acclaimed previous effort, titled A FIERY PRESENTATION OF DANGEROUS AND DISTURBING STUNT PHENOMENA. Pauline, wearing padding and a protective metal plate, detonated powerful bombs on his back and blew himself around a parking lot. Matt Heckert, Survival Research Laboratories' assistant director, drove a stunt car across blazing vats of gasoline. When he caught on fire, an asbestos suit saved him. Pauline fired a rocket at 150 miles an hour into the metal-plated leg of another assistant, Eric Werner. Nothing could faze these men.

The fun never stopped: A robot with an expanding and deflating rubber head mated with a flaming black bag. A radio-controlled buzz saw-equipped tank careened into the crowd, forcing the art patrons to scatter. Painful music blared from the industrial band Factrix, a group that has been trying to find a sound that will induce spontaneous combustion in humans.

And the art patrons clapped.

Finally, here was an artist who was not boring. Here was an artist who made Christo look like Norman Rockwell. Here was an artist so committed to his craft he even blew his hand off.

"The effect on the observer? Anything from bowel-loosening fear to pure erotic excitement," wrote one reviewer after a recent performance.

Today San Francisco loves the boys from Survival Research Laboratories. People flock to the shows by the thousands. They pay admission. Mark Pauline has become the glory boy among local artists. ("No one else has his name or following in San Francisco," local art pundit Renny Pritikin says.) For many Pauline is a revolutionary, at the vanguard of a loosely defined art movement labeled Industrial Culture. For others he is proof that no matter how weird you are, there is always someone weirder. "It's too far out for Sarasota," says Mark's mom, 3,000 miles away.

"It wouldn't go over here at all," chimes in Mark's stepfather.

"I guess it's past New Wave," mom continues.

Marilyn and James sit in their modest Sarasota home, 15 minutes from the Siesta Key house where Mark grew up and only a couple of miles from the Sheriff's Office where detectives frequently interrogated Mark during his JD days. Marilyn has been a clerk in a bookstore for 20 years. James is retired. On the coffee table are some magazines sent to them by Mark -- including No Magazine, featuring, it says, "SEX -- DEATH -- MUSIC -- GARBAGE."

"I think I'd consider it the same thing as the goof that covered the Miami islands with pink vinyl," says Marilyn.

James, retired, is more skeptical.

"That's art, behind you," he growls, pointing to the wall behind the sofa.

It is a painting of a flower basket.

"There's art, over there."

It is a painting of a barn.

"Those are paintings."

The debate over the merits of performance art is as old as the medium, which is to say, roughly 20 years. It was born of the politics of the 1960s, when young artists decried the commercialism of art and urged that it no longer be treated as a commodity, as something that could be bought or sold or owned.

The idea was that you could just do something and it would be art. Skill was unnecessary. Inspiration helped.

In 1968 performance artist Bruce Nauman walked in an exaggerated manner around the perimeter of a square. He titled the piece "Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square."

At the Oakland Museum of Art in 1970, Tom Marioni gathered with a bunch of friends and drank beer. Title: "The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art."

These were heady times. Who needed talent? Art was as easy as dropping your pants. You could bonk yourself on the head and it would be art. Bleeding could reveal the Zeitgeist.

In 1971 Chris Burden performed "Shoot," in which a friend, standing at five paces, shot Burden in the left arm with a copper jacketed .22-cal. long-rifle.

Other Burden works include "Through the Night Softly," in which he wiggled over 50 feet of broken glass with his hands behind his back and wearing only bikini briefs. He once had himself crucified to the back of a Volkswagen bug. In a mellower moment he taped two marijuana cigarets to a paper airplane and sailed it across the United States border into Mexico. He called that piece "Coals to Newcastle."

Another artist, John Duncan, predated Pauline in explorations of violence, sex and death. On two nights in 1976, Duncan, wearing a psycho mask, rang the doorbells of his friends and shot them with a blank pistol when they answered. Then he ran away. Title: "Scare."

A few years ago Duncan tape recorded himself having intercourse with a corpse in Mexico. On returning to the United States he had a vasectomy, so he could know that his "last potent seed had been spent in a cadaver." An audience subsequently heard the tape and saw pictures of the vasectomy. Title: "Blind Date."

Wait a minute, people said. That was going too far. Friends, fellow artists, turned on Duncan. Art magazines blared headlines reading "Art or Atrocity?"

Performance Art Under Fire.

And into the flame flits Mark Pauline.

Pauline lives in what could be charitably called a pit. An old hot plate, rusty toaster oven and a half-size refrigerator serve as his kitchen. There is a battered couch, a desk, a television. A framed Madonna hovers over the bed; Pauline can throw a switch and her halo lights up. Across the room a "rabot" dangles from the ceiling like a marionette. When Pauline throws a switch, the dead bunny walks backwards.

"I like to explore the nightmare world," Pauline said, welcoming inside.

"The true men of genius," he said, paraphrasing the French playwright and philospher Jean Genet, "deal exclusively with either sex or death, or both."

French philosophers have said a lot of stupid things, of course. And perhaps art, however it is defined, must necessarily be more than just a carnival of the grotesque.

I don't know. It is hard to judge something when there are so few points of reference. Where I come from, no one does what Mark Pauline does. If someone did, he'd either be quickly dispatched to a windowless cell in the county stockade or stomped senseless by young rednecks. Where I come from, art is Young Woman with a Water Jug. But Mark Pauline does not demand that the "straight" members of society enjoy or approve or comprehend his work, only that they react.

Well, OK. But is it art?

Some reviews:

"He really is elevating the American tradition of backyard machine tinkering to an art form. His art is about, rather than denying or ignoring the violence of the contemporary world, he's trying to look at it and find humor in it." -- Renny Pritikin, San Francisco art gallery manager.

"For the last half of this century there has been a real breakdown in the traditional categories of art. What is involved here is a breakdown in the traditional lines between sculpture and theater. . . I think there's a tradition since Dada and Surrealism to use art as an affront, for shock value. There's even a longer tradition of artist-as-prankster. I just wonder whether it's a metaphor for violence or a celebration of it."--Jim Crane, art professor at St. Petersburg's Eckerd College, where Pauline graduated in 1977.

". . . the Enemy is human. Humanism is depicted as an infernal agency for producing mindless automatons. These Human Robots are pictured as conformist, soul-less, unconscious conspirators of an Orwellian Mind Police. Individual creativity is the vehicle for liberation. . . . The Industrial Wasteland is the iconic remnant of Romanticism. Capitalism is the last roman(tic) ideology that has exploded, leaving mutant species to fend for themselves." -- Irwin Irwin, Art Com magazine.

"We're perfectly willing to accept these things in paintings and in literature, but when they get acted out for us in real life, then it's too close for comfort."--Allan Kaprow, professor of art at University of California, San Diego.

"Better than TV."--unidentified woman at the STUNT PHENOMENA show.

"I really have no objection to people calling it art. But I don't really think of it as that. It's more of a lifestyle. It's an occupation. It's an obsession. It's the only job that I'm fit to have."--Mark Pauline.

"He wasn't like the others," said Mark's mother, Marilyn Busch. "He was always--I don't know--he was always different when he was little."

Mark's father, Rick Pauline, had ties to underworld crime figures. He evidently had no interest in his four young sons after Marilyn won a divorce in 1960 on grounds of absenteeism. Rick Pauline, born Herbert Rick Paolino, ran the Celebrity Club and the LaRivera Lounge in Tampa. Over the years he piled up a lengthy arrest record, including assault charges and vice-squad busts for running a house of prostitution.

In 1978, a jury found the senior Pauline guilty of tax evasion after prosecutors showed he concealed income from, among other things, fencing jewels. Two years later, while appealing his three-year prison sentence, he died. Prominent lawyers, local politicians and a judge attended the funeral. Funeral notices in the local papers did not mention any sons.

None of the four Pauline boys saw their father buried.

So Mark, from the age of 3, was raised by women: his mother, his grandmother, his great-grandmother. His mother worked most of the time, and her attention was spread thinly over her four sons. His grandmother provided the home. They would take the boys to stock car races, where Mark's interest in machines took root.

Mark watched a lot of monster movies.

Then he fell for demolition derbies. There was a great period in the late '50s when someone invented a figure-8 track for the demolition derbies. This insured that metal would smash metal.

"It just seemed really uncontrolled and really dangerous. It was very exciting. It was unreal. It was just like monster movies, such a contrast to the way people really behaved," Mark said.

The police museum in nearby Port Charlotte had a large display of homemade weaponry--zip guns. Mark saw them and knew he had a calling. He and his friends would cut the spokes off motorcycles and make their own zip guns. They had zip gun wars. They would procure M-80 explosives and play terrorist.

"It was forbidden, so we did it," Mark says.

In glass cases at the police museum, he had seen pills and reefers. Another calling. In high school he sold nickel and dime bags of pot to less enterprising kids.

"They all wanted long hair," Mark's mother said. "They were smoking pot. If I found the pot, I burned it up. He kept getting traffic tickets. It was a crazy time. It was the end of the '60s. That was a real crazy time, when they were burning Watts."

"I may have been a little easy on them."

"I hung around with the worst people in town," Mark said. "I was just obsessed with the idea of being really bad and evil." He read "subversive" books: Vonnegut, Pynchon, John Stuart Mill.

Mark's introduction to the '60s counterculture came through his older brother Mike. Mark looked up to Mike. While still in his teens, Mike Pauline was arrested on drug charges. He spent time in prison. Last year, while working as a dishwasher on Siesta Key, Mike took a butcher knife, cut the arteries in his upper arms, and bled to death.

When Mark's girlfriend became pregnant, he took her to New York for an abortion. Afterwards, he says, she didn't want to go home and Mark found her a place to stay. He was 16. She was 15, and now a runaway. Her father, a prominent local businessman, repeatedly threatened to kill Mark.

"I knew it was happening," Mark's mother said of the abortion. "But I didn't have anything to do with it. Because she was underage, and if I had done anything about it, they would have come after us."

During school, detectives showed up in his classroom.

"Mr. Pauline."

"Yeah."

"Come with us."

They took him to the station for interrogation. Where was the girl? No comment. Police vowed to arrest him but later backed off. Much of high school was spent waiting for the police to pounce again.

"I think that really had an impact on the way I think," he said.

Radical politics seduced Mark. His alienation took on grim characteristics: Dressing always in dark clothes, he and his friends made an icon of Charles Manson. So noncomformist were his impulses he even gave up drugs at age 16, to the consternation of his pill-popping and dope-smoking friends. (He said he could feel his mind growing blunt.) And then he decided to go to college. He is the only one of the four Pauline boys to do so.

"Mark's got all the brains in the family," said Mark's grandmother, Marjorie Look. In her canal-front house in Siesta Key, where Mark grew up, she proudly points to the superbly-executed line drawings and lithographs Mark produced in college. He was good. No one in his college class could draw better, his professors say.

"Mark was fairly conservative in his art. He drew beautifully, but it was fairly classical," professor Crane said. "Sometimes he had a sort of condescending attitude towards other students who were not as gifted as he was."

In 1979, Pauline staged his first performance. He crawled up into the rafters of a warehouse and killed seven pigeons with a slingshot. He put them in his freezer.

The next day, he dressed the birds in Arab doll outfits. The Arabian garb was a cryptic allusion to Albert Camus' classic novel, The Stranger, in which the protagonist without apparent reason or purpose shoots and kills an Arab during a walk on the beach. This time the pigeons were martyred in the parking lot of a Chevron station. As painfully loud music roared in the background, Pauline put the pigeons on a conveyor belt, which plopped the birds into a drum holding a sharp blade. The birds were shredded and their remains dumped on the sidewalk.

Mark Pauline writes to his mother and his grandmother once a month. He calls twice a month. He is very consistent. In his letters he describes his shows, gently brags of his growing notoriety. His mother has never seen one of his performances.

Pauline keeps a file of everything that has appeared about him in newspapers or magazines. He has files of photographs of his work and videotapes of each performance.

He said he wants to be famous.

"I think this is going to be the largest artistic organization in the history of the world," Pauline said, surveying his macabre studio. "I'd like to stage performances in coliseums, with 50-foot machines. I'd like to scare the s out of a quarter of a million people at one time."

Matt Heckert, assistant director of Survival Research Laboratories, doesn't like the way Pauline hogs the glory. But he doesn't sweat it. Some people, he says, just have that kind of impulse.

He's had it for years.

"He did some bizarre things, but they were always calculated," Jim Crane, Pauline's art professor, said. "He wanted to be very good as an artist, and all the time he wanted to make a name for himself."

Dave Henderson, a librarian at Eckerd, recalled, "There was a certain theatrical quality to him. He was extravagant. It was almost as though he was play-acting."

Crane: "He was going to make sure that no one forgot him. That everyone remembered Mark Pauline."

In May 1977 Pauline nearly halted his commencement ceremony when he showed up in a shredded graduation gown. He wore cowboy boots and a pair of bikini underpants, nothing else. He had plastered his hair back with pink flourescent grease. He later said he wanted to "set an example for others." The president of the university, despite protests from several faculty members, ordered the ceremony to proceed, noting that Eckerd had traditionally encouraged creativity and self-expression.

His mother was not at the ceremony.

Why didn't she go?

"I don't interfere with my children," Marilyn Busch said. Later she said, "He's got his life and I've got mine. That's the way it should be."

A few years ago all four sons returned to Sarasota for Christmas, and it was just like the old times, except the Number Two Son wore his hair in vertical orange and green spikes.

A jet of flame shot across the floor and ignited a wooden door.

We were inside Survival Research Laboratories. Matt Heckert had produced a tiny hand-held flame thrower. Heckert, a musician and "motorhead" who at 27 looks like a conservative science student, described his invention: Transistorized ignition system; 9-volt and 15-volt batteries running an integrated circuit; four ounces of fuel pressurized at 100 pounds per square inch; capable of incinerating a target at 25 feet; small enough to fit handily into a purse.

"And this is the Saw Blade Gun," Heckert said. He loaded a circular saw into an evil-looking contraption, and cocked it. He reminded me of agent "Q" in the James Bond movies.

Fwang. The saw, spinning, flew into the wooden door and stuck.

"I wouldn't want to stand in front of it," Pauline said.

"Yes, it's got a nice velocity," Heckert said.

They smiled.

Minutes later Eric Werner, another SRL assistant director, wedged himself into the cockpit of a stunt car and roared up and down the street, fishtailing out of control and stopping inches short of a concrete wall. This was a hostile machine, shaped like a bullet and made out of welded pipes. A huge steel claw with spikes, powered by hydraulics, swung out from the side of the car--a big help, one assumed, when rush-hour traffic got pesky.

Werner, fearless and laughing, continued to howl up and down the road. A motorist in a small Japanese car took one look and fled.

"Fortunately we don't have too many neighbors," Pauline observed.

Pauline blew his hand off while playing with solid rocket fuel. It was the summer of 1982. One day, while foolishly hammering on a rod stuck into a hot, uncured engine, the volatile fuel exploded. Pauline landed across the room. Miraculously, only his hand was seriously injured. It had disappeared.

Pauline told me the story over lunch at Roosevelt's Tamale Parlour, a humble and cheap Mexican eatery in the heart of the Mission District. Pauline ordered an entomatada and a Tecate. He pulled off his $40 Ray-Bans -- a gift, he said -- and squeezed some lemon into his beer. He wore a green military T- shirt, black jeans and black boots. His hair was so short and straight it looked like turf.

I decided it was time to talk money. He obviously doesn't get it from the modest gate when he demonstrates ASSURED DESTRUCTIVE CAPABILITY, or whatever.

"Welding," he said. Just that week he pulled in $700 for some welding. He's freelance, more or less. He does enough "straight" work to keep him alive.

Don't people ever object to this stuff? For some reason the only significant protest against Pauline has been a few school officials who don't like him using school grounds for his shows, and from some feminist artists who think the violence is gratuitous. The cops don't even give him a hard time. This is, after all, San Francisco.

"Just wait until our next show," snickered Pauline. "We're going to use live animals." He said he is experimenting with a technique that would allow him to control the movements of living animals by remote control, using electrodes implanted in the animals' heads. He hopes to have a small unmanned helicopter spy on the animals from above.

"It's going to be all about torture and surveillance," Pauline said.

Pauline only hints at one ambition too obvious to avoid: If it is possible to attach the body parts of animals to machines, to reanimate the flesh of beasts, then doesn't it logically follow that the next move is to reanimate the flesh of . . .

But that is unspeakable.

Postscript:

Pauline pulled a black-and-white photograph from a file. I stared at it blankly; the thing in the picture looked like--I wasn't sure--some kind of meat or something.

"This," Mark said, "is what my hand looked like right after the explosion."

"Wow."

His mother came to San Francisco after the accident, her only trip to see him there. He also became a lot more famous. But he said he didn't plan to do anything like that again.

I noticed he had taken off his glove. His hand was dangling under the table, hidden. But shortly he held it up in the light, pivoting it, clenching it as best he could.

He had three fingers. Except they didn't all look like fingers.

"These two," he said, wiggling a pair of digits, "are toes."

He explained that his thumb was actually a big toe. And his outermost finger was one of those long, number-two toes. Earlier this year, they had been surgically grafted onto his hand.

"These work much better than an artificial hand," he said.

"Whose toes are they?"

"Mine."

Later--having fled the freaky hells of the California art scene--I realized: I should have checked his feet.

Section: TROPIC MAG Copyright (c) 1984 The Miami Herald