Robot Boy
When Tim Burton comes calling on a quirky Santa Ana artist, the result is a motorized creature that’s drawing crowds in the Big Apple
By Barbara Thornburg / Photograph by Jen Rosenstein
Published April 2010
Robot Boy
When Tim Burton comes calling on a Santa Ana artist, the result is a motorized creature that’s drawing crowds in the Big Apple
Cal State Fullerton graduate art student David Brokaw stands in the Santa Ana Artists Village studio where he lives, intently eyeing “Kennie Gee.” No, not the smooth-jazz sax player, but Brokaw’s latest “instrument” sculpture he jokingly describes as “the world’s largest, continuously powered whoopee cushion.”
The 6½-foot-diameter steel armature that resembles a rusted doughnut has an interior fan that passes air through a latex reed. It’s one of several instruments that will make up a robotic “band.” The name was partly inspired after Brokaw Googled Kenny G and discovered that the saxophonist once owned the Guinness record “for holding the longest note ever played—something like 45 minutes,” says Brokaw. It certainly has all the ingredients of his art: a combination of pop culture, basic physics, and his own wry sense of humor.
Brokaw grew up in Abilene, Texas, and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Texas Tech University. Although he took a couple of art courses in high school, he says the most helpful experiences for his work today were an auto body class that taught him metalworking skills, and an amazing physics class. For the latter, Brokaw and his classmates designed radio-controlled airplanes, egg-drop capsules that challenged them to build vehicles that protect eggs [passengers] from harm, and—his favorite—a wood-and-carbon contraption that catapulted a hefty pumpkin more than 100 yards.
Recently, the artist had a chance to combine his metalworking and physics skills in a project with acclaimed illustrator-turned-filmmaker Tim Burton (“Edward Scissorhands,” “Alice in Wonderland”). The challenge: to bring Robot Boy, one of Burton’s sympathetic, albeit macabre creatures, to life for the filmmaker’s current retrospective, “Tim Burton” (through April 26), at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
The university picked Brokaw, along with fellow grad student Preston Daniels, to use a Burton drawing of the robot described in the filmmaker’s book “The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories” to create the motorized, tin-headed lad who animates after being plugged into an outlet. Brokaw used lights and flickering, hand-blown glass eyes to simulate the boy’s coming to life, and programmed his antenna-studded head to open and shut like the trashcan for which he’s often mistaken.
Today, the kinetic-sculpture artist is back to his band, putting finishing touches on “Tommi Li” (Tommy Lee), a distorted percussion instrument, and conceptualizing “Kortknee Luv” (Courtney Love), the group’s vocalist that will employ a theremin, “the oldest electronic instrument you can play without touching,” he explains. A red lips telephone he picked up at a garage sale for $5 also will figure into the piece, although he’s not sure exactly how at the moment. Brokaw hopes to have his unique instruments ready for a fall performance at Cal State Fullerton. Stay tuned for some otherworldly music.
Barbara Thornburg is an Orange Coast
contributing writer.