A British exhibition sums up the achievements of the 20th century with surrealistic humor

By KATE NOBLE /CROYDON

n this computer-enhanced age, when it seems that every film and television program is packed with special effects, it is easy to lose a sense of wonder at the originality and ingenuity of the human hand. For all their versatility the one thing that computers cannot generate is a sense of humor. So it is a joy when we come across artefacts that, though less than perfect, show how original, creative and--above all--witty human artists can be. Such joy is in abundance at a new British exhibition entitled "Devious Devices."

The exhibition, which will be touring galleries around Britain for the next two years, is a small but enchanting display of modern automata--art works that are set in motion by a system of levers and cogs--built by artists and craftsmen in response to 18 objects representative of the 20th century. The objects were chosen by film director Terry Gilliam, best known for his surreal graphics on the cult '60s television program Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Gilliam's choices ranged from the atomic bomb through the psychiatrist's couch to the electric toothbrush, a selection kept deliberately mundane to allow the artists maximum creativity, "It's back to surrealism," he says, "taking the ordinary and looking at it in ways you wouldn't normally look at it."

The responses to the challenge of making an automaton to depict a moving picture camera, the telephone or the atomic bomb demonstrate how individual the artist's vision can be. Paul Spooner's Movie Camera with a Short Attention Span is a world-weary roue. In front of him stands a merry-go-round peopled by a dozen characters who take it in turns to perform a little jig. Activated by a switch, they start their dance which prompts the camera to open his eyes and mouth and raise his phallic viewfinder. But after a few seconds he loses interest and returns to his normal, flaccid state.

Some of the devices offer a tangential view of the original object. Tim Lewis' Telephone is a ring of tiny clay figures which spin around endlessly in the iridescent blue light of strobes to create the impression, in the manner of the Victorian zoetrope, that they are walking. Other items in the show are powerful comments on modern inventions. Jon Mills' Geneticist is a huge test-tube made of metal infant hands, being sculpted like a topiary bush by clacking scissors. James Chedburn's Nuclear Family consists of static, transparent shells of people glowing red, with movement coming from the creatures that best survived the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki: cockroaches.

Several pieces display the gaiety and vigor of the fairground. Ron Fuller's tribute to the benefits of the electric toothbrush has a Sugar Lump Bug circling a head and knocking down teeth, prompting the Tooth Fairy to fly across with her electric toothbrush restoring the mouth. Keith Newstead's Motorcycle has a rain cover that hoists itself over the rider whenever the weather turns nasty. And like several other exhibits it shows the cogs, cams, wires and string that create the movement.

The biggest construction in the exhibition is the Newsteadmanaton, subtitled Mad God Universe, a 4 m orrery designed by cartoonist Ralph Steadman and made by Keith Newstead. The mechanism is orchestrated by the belching, squelching noises of what Steadman describes as "God's terrible stomach problems." Whirring, clicking human organs, surrounded by planets, circulate on a plinth of elephant heads which rest on a column of fabulous fluttering tissue-paper creatures.

The exhibition celebrates a long tradition of automata. The earliest records of self-operating machines date from ancient Greece, where Archytas of Tarentum made a wooden pigeon fly by suspending it from a pivoted bar and moving it with a jet of steam. The development of mechanical clocks from the 14th century opened up the possibility for ever more fanciful devices. By the 17th century advances in clockwork technology led snuff boxes to become so encumbered with mechanisms for telling the time, making music and operating moving figures that there was little room left for the snuff.

In the 20th century the art of automata was largely relegated to seaside amusement arcades, though the mobiles of serious artists like Alexander Calder can be said to fall into that category. In recent years the computer has taken on many of the artist's functions, with the predictable result that increased glibness replaces emotion and inspiration. An exhibition like "Devious Devices" counterbalances that slickness. In a little handwritten note on the toothbrush automaton Ron Fuller pleads: "Technology is speeding up the end of the world. To slow it down study art."