Blade Runner
A Eulogy for Just Merrit

by Mark Dery

According to the San Francisco-based mechanical-sound artist Matt Heckert, the Austrian machine artist Just Merrit died Tuesday, January 23, from cancer-related complications.

Just was the raffish, real-life embodiment of the William Gibson-ian techno-bricoleur – a wheelchair-bound machine artist who reanimated the scavenged detritus of industrial culture to savagely funny, often subversive, effect. According to an Ars Electronica 1996 catalogue bio (badly in need of linguistic debugging), "Merrit's work deals with the boundaries between human behavioral patterns and driving compulsion. Using tools of noise [with the group Kruppelschlag] and mechanical sculpture (Gyroscope), and fanning conceptual sparks to catch fire, he attempts to track down the traces of human bio-mechanical dependencies." In an online essay, Johannes Domisch observed that Just's "hodgepodge/museum," Contained, "resembles a replacement-parts depot of modernism, a genetic data bank of a post-constructivism never consistently carried out. He administers fragments whose charm lies in their lack of function..."

Located in Linz, Austria, in the moribund Voest Alpine steelworks (formerly the Hermann Goering Ironworks, a major producer of armaments for the Third Reich), Contained was, in the artist's own words, "a conglomeration of adventurous ideas, carved out with passionate obsession in the heart of a steelworks, mostly due to me but never borne forward by me alone. For 54 months, this construction of man and material (with considerable wear and tear on both) grew rampant like a malignant tumor at a location which I, bourgeois junior high school boy that I was, took to be at a maximum distance from my family home and my origins." In short, Contained was "the place where life could be felt most directly," wrote Merrit.

In the mid 1990s, Merrit moved his base of operations from the Voest ironworks to its current location on the Danube, near the Linz harbor. There, he and Tim Boykett founded Time's Up, a "laboratory for the creation of experimental situations." The organization's modus operandi, pithily stated on its website, is the short, sharp shock intended to spark "mindshaping discourse," in pursuit of which Time's Up will not stop "at charging the barriers of brain damage." Art as electroconvulsive therapy for unsuspecting bobos.

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