Subject: just left

Just Merit is Dead.

Just Merit, the artist from Linz/Austria, died of cancer earlier this week.

Just had been working as one of the pre-eminent international machine

artists since the 1980's and was the driving force behind projects like

Contained (in the Voest steel factory) and Time's Up (based in Linz harbour

- www.timesup.org).

Just's creativity, energy and enthusiasm were an inspiration not only for

the people who worked closely with him, but also to the visitors of the

shows and art projects he participated in, as well as to the international

electronic art community. Strange physical experiences, the limitations of

the human body, the pleasure of working with machines and having fun with

people - all these were characteristics of his rich artistic life.

The world is a poorer place without him.

However, heaven will be a better place, and I am sure that Just is going to

prepare a few wild machinations and biomechanical concoctions for those of

us who join him.

Sad greetings to those who were closest to him.

Andreas Broeckmann

BLADE RUNNER

Just Merit, who died on January 22 from cancer-related complications, was

the raffish, real-life embodiment of William Gibson's techno-bricoleurs-a

wheelchair-bound machine artist (Just hated the term "artist"!) who

reanimated the detritus of industrial culture to savagely funny, often

subversive, effect.

An Ars Electronica 1996 catalogue bio (badly in need of linguistic

debugging) described the Austrian artist's work as "fanning conceptual

sparks" into philosophical firestorms. "Using tools of noise [with the group

Krueppelschlag] and mechanical sculpture (Gyroscope)," the writer noted,

"[Merit] attempts to track down the traces of human bio-mechanical

dependencies."

Located in Linz, Austria, in the moribund Voest Alpine steelworks (formerly

the Hermann Goering Ironworks, a major producer of armaments for the Third

Reich), Just's studio-cum-installation, Contained, was both work and

workshop, a grungy memorial to the passing of the machine age and a delivery

room for hopeful monsters-wondrous additions to the machinic phylum. In an

online essay <timesup.servus.at/contained/Domsich.html>, the critic Johannes

Domisch likens Just's "hodgepodge/museum" to "a replacement-parts depot of

modernism, a genetic data bank of a post-constructivism never consistently

carried out. [Merit] administers fragments whose charm lies in their lack of

function..." In the artist's own words

<timesup.servus.at/rearview/Merit.html>, Contained was "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"-a one-line manifesto

reminiscent, ironically, of the Viennese aktionists' desire to resurrect a

pre-civilized kinship with the corporeal (blood, death, earth), or of Joseph

Beuys' attempts to create an elemental language of fur, fat, and primal

muck.

In the mid-'90s, Just moved his base of operations from the Voest ironworks

to its current location on the Danube, near the Linz harbor. There, he, Tina

Auer, and Tim Boykett founded Time's Up <www.timesup.org>, 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"; Time's Up makes no apologies for "charging the

barriers of brain damage." Art as electroconvulsive therapy for unsuspecting

bobos.

According to the artist John Duncan, the group will continue to administer

corrective jolts to the docile and the dozing. "Only hours after the

funeral, new plans were being made," he wrote, in a recent e-mail. "Ideas

for new projects and practical suggestions of how to implement them were out

on the table and under discussion. Which is probably exactly what Just would

have wanted." Tim Boykett adds, "Although we will miss Just sorely, we have

all learned so much from him that it would be a slap in the face for us to

drop any part of the project. One of Just's ongoing concerns was assisting

people in hammering their ideas out and helping them get their ideas

happening. There [were] simply so many things that he was involved in, and

continues to be involved in as he whispers in my ear. And he never forgot to

(at least) nibble the hand that feeds."

I spent an inspiring evening with Just at Ars Electronica '96, in Linz. He,

like Jim Whiting, Chip Flynn, Liz Young, and the rest of the all-star cast

of amok tinkerers at that year's Ars, had been banished to the suitably

gothic ruins of Voest---for fear, presumably, that their grease-monkey

machine art would soil the Armaniwear of the artistocracy, not to mention

the prospective corporate underwriters power-lunching at the festival's main

hall. Lit by the welding torches of other artists working out the

last-minute kinks in their contraptions, Just held forth from his

wheelchair, effusing about the works-in-progress and surveying the infernal

machines around him with something like paternal pride. Nearby, in the

functional part of the steelworks, a colossal crane shuttled back and forth

on tracks, a Jurassic Park survivor of the days when heavy industry ruled

the earth. Soon, the blue-black stormclouds massing ominously overhead

opened their bomb bay doors, sending everyone running for cover. Bit rot has

gotten the best of my memories of that day, but I have a blurry (perhaps

wishful?) image of Just wheeling himself to shelter, beatific in the midst

of the downpour.

Just's contribution to Ars '96 (a collaboration with Sam Auinger and Rudolf

Heidebrecht) was a propeller equipped with an electric motor and two antique

loudspeakers. The motors' struggles against the wind spinning the propeller

were converted into acoustic signals and transmitted through the old

loudspeakers, artifacts of propaganda campaigns. Located on the site that

was slated, in Hitler's dreams, for a future Museum of German Electrical

Engineering, Just's installation was, in the words of the Ars catalogue, "a

kind of anti-propaganda." It was also a gloriously noisy monument to the

slacker hacker ethos---the post-industrial article of faith that work sucks,

play rules, and what the world needs now is more pointless, profitless

basement tinkering that flips an index finger at revenue streams and

return-on-investment.

The San Francisco-based machine artist Matt Heckert, who participated in Ars

'96, remembers, "I've never met anyone like Just. We first came into contact

in 1988. He came over to my place [in San Francisco], we talked for a while,

and the next day he asked me if I would make some aluminum wing/blades that

would spring out from the wheels on his chair, 'Ya know, like the ones on

the chariots in BEN HUR.' At that moment, I realized I was with a different

sort of person."

Heckert made the blades, mounting them on spring hinges so that Just "could

pull a lever and they would spring into position." In another, equally BLADE

RUNNER customization, Heckert attached blades from a small hedge-trimmer to

one side of Just's wheelchair and grafted a frame from an automatic pistol

onto the other side. "He was very put off by people pushing his chair

without asking him first, which frequently happened in public places such as

airports," notes Heckert. "He wanted them to have to think about what they

were doing." Wheelchair activists take heed: This is empowerment-with teeth.

Just's visit to Heckert's workshop turned into a one-stop shopping spree. He

rounded out his order with the purchase of one of Heckert's hand-held

flame-throwers. "Why would anyone want a hand-held flame-thrower?," wonders

Heckert. "I only asked him to assure me he wouldn't maim anyone with it and

that that wasn't his intention. He did end up using it on stage when

performing with Krueppelschlag."

A wry critic of our born-again faith in technology, Just celebrated

breakdowns and runaways, uselessness and obsolescence. In so doing, he held

a lit match to the overblown gas-bag of cyberhype, reminding us that even

machines ail, fail, and ultimately grow old and die. Even so, he was no

nihilist: His was an iconoclasm with heart---a kinder, gentler irony, in the

spirit of Bruno Munari's useless gadgets or Jean Tinguely's suicidal

devices. A poet of the Rust-Belt Sublime, he made us see that dead machines

and decaying steelworks are the perfumed ruins of our age.

He found his own uses for things.

- Mark Dery <markdery@mindspring.com> is a cultural critic.

Dear Mark,

Your eulogy of Just Merit was very much appreciated.

His illness caught everyone by surprise, including his doctors. It was

good to know that he didn't suffer very long. It was great to find out

that Just's character had changed, from the cynicism that was always

present as an undercurrent in his earlier work, into a genuine will to be

alive, to get the most from each moment -- as well as to relax and accept

things, let them develop at their own pace. According to everyone around

him during these last months, Just had made peace with himself.

It was difficult to concentrate on a computer screen last Friday, or on

much else for that matter, apart from trying to find roadsigns to the

village where Just had grown up, in order to attend the catholic mass his

father had insisted on. Pews crammed too tightly together. Church

interior several degrees colder than the drizzling winter rain outside. If

you understand German, then perhaps you'd have understood from his remarks

that the priest had absolutely no idea of who Just had been or what he'd

accomplished in such a remarkably short time. This entire ceremony, the

procession on foot through the village behind local marching band, and the

one later on in the cemetery (again with the band, who played three numbers

before marching off to their next gig at the inauguration of a shoe store),

couldn't have been more antithetical to Just's aesthetic -- with the

welcome exception of a friend's tuba solo from the church choirloft, which

was openly frowned upon by the church staff.

At the cemetery I started thinking that somehow Just may well have had a

hand in setting this up after all: playing an elaborately subtle joke on

all of us, letting his father make these surreal gestures to his neighbors,

bringing the rest of us out to get a taste of what he'd escaped from,

smiling at us all standing in line waiting to toss a hand trowel full of

garden soil down onto that wood box. Then the grounds crew took over,

unceremoniously clearing off the ropes and planks, driving a small bobcat

in to transfer the real soil -- gray clay -- back into the hole. Watching

the operator's moves with the scoop arm brought back a sense of balance;

easy to imagine that Just would have admired his skill.

It will be interesting to see how Time's Up will develop. It was

impressive to see the range and number of projects that Time's Up has made

happen in a frew short years. The publications, photos, documents and

other detritus from them is everywhere, in boxes, on shelves, on the walls,

under every computer mouse. At this point it's clear that everyone

involved is prepared to give the energy and focus to continue. Only hours

after the funeral new plans were being made, ideas for new projects and

practical suggestions of how to implement them were out on the table and

under discussion. Which is probably exactly what Just would have wanted to

see happening.

Best wishes,

John Duncan