The Unabomber's Cabin

I have a very good friend who is an art historian.  Let me correct that.  Art History is not her day job but she DID get an art history DEGREE, from Brown University no less, and was once telling me about the purpose, the role, of art history and why it is so important, even though very few (including her) can make a living at it (a living that includes a few incidentals like a flat screen tv or a new set of golf clubs in addition to, you know, food and shelter). 

Until that enlightening conversation, I had just assumed that art history was for trying to place works of art into these categories like Pre-Raphaelite or Flemish Luminist, or Hudson River or what have you.  Why that would be an important pursuit or not never crossed my mind..... it was like, say, DENTISTRY, something you just did.  No, says my friend.  The main purpose of art history is not art.  Nor is it history, per se.  It is actually about US, in that, in many cases, art surviving though the ages is the best narrative of the culture that there is.  And because it depicts scenes of value of the time and because it managed to survive due to somebody actually caring enough to keep it safe for hundreds of years, it tells us things about the time in which it was produced that mere words cannot.

And so it is with art produced even today.

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A few years ago (about six, I think) I happened to see an art piece (one could call it an INSTALLATION, except for the fact that it really wasn't installed anywhere).   It sat, incongruously on the sidewalk on Mass Ave. at the front entrance to MIT.  It was called, I think, the Unabomber's Cabin.

For those of us with short memories, the Unabomber (not Unibomber) was a guy named Ted Kaczynski who anonymously deposited bombs to unsuspecting victims, mostly from academia, but also to airlines and computer stores.  Unabomber, I read, stands for UNiversity and Airlines Bomber.  (Those FBI types have a way with words.)  He planted 16 bombs which killed a total of three people and injured several others.

The Unabomber offered a deal: if the New York Times and the Washington Post would print his manifesto, he would cease the bombing.  They did, and in a bit of irony, Ted's brother recognized the writing and turned him in. 

The story is rife with sub stories, but one of the most interesting ones is the Unabomber's cabin.  Kaczinski (once a stellar academic himself) was a hermit, living in the woods of Montana in a shack of his own construction.  When Kaczynski was arrested, he was a mess, his face was almost black with grime, but the thing about the shack, though, was that it was rather NICE.  It struck a chord with the public, each of us thinking how nice it would be to have a shack in the woods where we could write our souls on paper.  In addition to looking rather cozy, the cabin, in fact, had elegant proportions, a recognizable, iconic shape.

The sculpture at MIT named the Unabomber's Cabin had those same proportions, and although tiny as human habitation, was big and bulky on the busy Mass Ave sidewalk.  There was a difference, though, and that was the sculpture-cabin was sitting on wheels.  Visitors were invited to come in (the sculpture was attended), so of course, I did.  There was nobody else there.... no plaques, no instructions, no labels.... just that great sense of enclosure within those well-proportioned walls and a single table on which sat a typewriter.

Kaczynski used a typewriter for his manifesto and all his other correspondence with the world.  The cabin was not electrified, so it was a manual typewriter, not a computer.  (The FBI noted before the Unabomber was identified and captured that he made no spelling errors and no typos---can you imagine?)  So in the sculpture-cabin, the single table with typewriter was almost like an altar..... majestic even.

Here is where the art comes in, though.  In the typewriter was paper fed from a continuous roll, and visitors were encouraged to type on it.  So I did, but in doing so, I began to see something else.  Attached to the mechanism of the rolling platen of the typewriter was a long bicycle chain that went through the table and through the floor of the cabin.  I asked the attendant what was going on there, but he just smiled and was silent.

So I had to go back outside and look for myself.  The bicycle chain was connected to a sprocket wheel under the cabin, and that wheel turned gears that turned more gears, and eventually was connected to the axle of the cabin itself!  Wow.  If you understand mechanics, you know that gear-reduction creates a terrific force with  a very tiny amount of input force..... but the trick is you have to do the input force many many times to achieve only a fraction of the movement on the output side.  Simply put, you could move this cabin with merely the motion of the typewriter roller, but to move the cabin, you would have to type a LOT. 

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On the eve of perhaps the most significant Presidential Inauguration in our country's short history, I think about this sculpture, about the Unabomber, about his manifesto (have you READ the thing?  It might surprise you), about the state of the world, about our personal role in making it better, enfranchised, we hope, by the youthful wisdom of the newly-elected.

We can move huge objects with the typing of words.


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(Post Note:  I diligently searched google to identify this art work and its artist.  Nothing.  Did I dream it?  Was it real?)