Interview: Justin Skrakowski, Photos: William Dunleavy
“Like watching a car wreck.”
The reason we got that saying is the guilt associated with our unwavering fascination with destruction. Why do we feel bad staring into horror?
Jonathan Schipper doesn’t care, he lets us revel in it. Stand next to the twisted metal, each creak and bend and pop of breaking glass as exciting as watching a nipple get erect.
“The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle” is at the Boiler, 191 N. 14th st in Brooklyn, in a show called “Irreversibilty” along with a Corona bottle fastened to a machine that simulates it’s breaking against a wall and reconstruction.
Exhibition lasts until June 28th and closing party will be on the 27th.
Come together.
Chief: So this is the third time you’ve done this, the car crash? Where have you done it before?
Jonathan Schipper: The first time was in Belgium.
Chief: Why in Belgium? And American cars also?
Jonathan Schipper: They were American cars, same title same piece. Started out, the full story is five years ago I had the idea and couldn’t afford to do it with real cars so I made two models.
Chief: Metal ones?
Jonathan Schipper: Yeah, and I used scale model cars, you know the little cast – you know they’re about eighteen inches long or ten inches long I guess – and they were cast aluminum. I made that model and then I did a show at STUK and over the course of that show we discussed doing this piece, they have a yearly festival and I was in the festival two years – or I guess three years ago now. And then we discussed doing this piece. They sponsor one piece every year.
Chief: How’d you get to Belgium, were you living there?
Jonathan Schipper: No, I don’t know exactly how they hooked up, probably internet.
Chief: Just seems like an odd place to start especially with American cars and this idea seems very -
Jonathan Schipper: Well, I think they spend a lot of time watching America -
Chief: Everybody does.
Jonathan Schipper: Right.
Chief: It seems very J.G. Ballard to me.
Jonathan Schipper: Oh, I’m a big fan, definitely. I think he’s tapped into so many amazing issues with automobiles and ourselves and our bodies.
Chief: Do you find this sexy, I think this is pretty sexy.
Jonathan Schipper: Yeah, absolutely. You know, cars are obviously an extension of our egos, our bodies and everything else and watching them slowly disintegrate is what we do to ourselves I guess. Once you’re past 40 or something.
Chief: Hey some of us do it a lot faster than that.
Jonathan Schipper: Right, depends on what you drink I guess.
Chief: Have you ever done not American cars?
Jonathan Schipper: Not yet, but I think in Europe – we’re going back to Europe in the fall –
Chief: Where you goin’ in Europe?
Jonathan Schipper: Antwerp… no the Hague… Holland. We’re gonna probably use European cars. The original idea actually was not necessarily muscle cars it was just a slow motion automobile wreck, but when I searched for the models I could only find models of kind of cooler cars, so that’s sort of what happened.
Chief: What was your original intention?
Jonathan Schipper: Basically the same idea but I was just going to make it an average car wreck.
Chief: It’s a lot different using muscle cars -
Jonathan Schipper: It’s an added layer, which I like, but I think in Europe, this time we’re just going to go back to that orginal idea mostly because it’s really difficult to get these cars there. It’s hard to get them across the ocean.
Chief: So you’re just going to use something you can get there more easily?
Jonathan Schipper: That’s our plan, but also think it’s nice to make variations.
Chief: What’d you use each time?
Jonathan Schipper: Last time it was two Firebirds, both around the same year as this one, around 1980 and then the time before it was a Camaro like this one, like a 90-something. They made them for quite a while, I think they started coming out around ’84 til the mid 90s then we used a Monte Carlo as the other car. Sort of similar colors to this one. The time in Chicago was the two prettiest cars, they were two Trans Ams like this one.
Chief: Now I’m always – nobody ever talks about this, but how do you get funding for this? Is this all you, cause who doesn’t want to wreck cars?
Jonathan Schipper: STUK paid for the production of the first one and then, they pay for the production of one piece for their festival every year, and this is what they did. Then we were able to take it to Chicago and this piece has actually been bought by the West Collection, a collection out of Philadelphia and we’re doing an addition of three so we still have two for sale.
Chief: Is the piece done once they come together?
Jonathan Schipper: In a way I guess so –
Chief: Are the other two on display?
Jonathan Schipper: They have them but they’re not on display right now, they’ll probably – once they did it again, they’ll have this set and then they’ll have another.
Chief: How do you feel about the pieces once they’re complete, once they’ve reached their full crash?
Jonathan Schipper: I mean they’re beautiful, they’re still very interesting, they’re sort of more like residue, but the center of the piece is while it’s moving, it’s just completely different.
Chief: The first time we came here a week ago, there was a very foreboding atmosphere, it was very tense, it’s like I want to walk away but I also don’t want to leave the room, you can hear it, it’s very much alive –
Jonathan Schipper: There’s this notion in art that you take an idea and you put it into an object, then you try to take that object and control it and protect it, and the idea and that object can go on forever without you. I understand and I can respect that notion but I guess this piece is sort of about things that can’t be. Like you can do a picture but it’s completely different from things actually happening. So the piece to me is so much about being the opposite of what art is intended to be in a certain way. But you’re still trying to put ideas into objects so that other people get the ideas back out. The idea that it’s gonna last forever is sort of undermined. It can be done again and in much longer durations, we could do a hundred years if we wanted.
Chief: That’d be cool (both laugh). Now, the glass bottle, that seems very tedious?
Jonathan Schipper: Oh, it’s horribly – that took a year to make.
Chief: You make all the cranes and –
Jonathan Schipper: Everything, there’s very little that is bought really. Other than maybe a few gears and electronics boards and stuff like that. All the wiring, the machine, everything’s all done by hand custom for this piece.
Chief: Before you started doing this was this what you worked with?
Jonathan Schipper: No, I went to art school and I actually started out doing ceramics so it’s been a long path to this kind of shit.
Chief: So how’d you get from ceramics to this kind of – it seems very opposite?
Jonathan Schipper: I think in a way it makes sense if you think about the idea being this sort of – in terms of technology. I’m interested in technology but I think a lot of the pieces – especially the bottle piece – is specifically about where technology can’t take us. And where science sort of can’t take us. You can examine it, there’s these fundamental principals of time and the fact that science works good, math works good forwards and backwards but whatever reason we’re locked into this progression where we only know the past and not the future between what technology does answer and what it doesn’t. I’ve always been interested in how technology has taken over religion in answering these big questions. So, these are sort of my – I’m interested in it, in a way I guess I take the opnion like there’s some physicist comparing this issue of how technology takes over, or how science takes over religion in a lot of ways and he’s like, “Well, the difference is we have this empirical evidence,” and I’m like, “But, nobody’s ever touched that evidence, you’ve probably never touched that evidence.” Not that I don’t believe you. But at the same time I think science sort of disregards faith, but if I’m gonna believe in science I think it really takes as much faith in a certain way to believe in God cause you just gotta trust these guys in the end.
Chief: Is this acting these out?
Jonathan Schipper: More the bottle is than the car crash. I certainly respect science more in the end but that doesn’t mean I buy it wholeheartedly, hook, line and sinker.
Chief: The first thing I thought of when I saw the bottle was the uncertainty principal, which I though was the greatest drinking game of all time, just drink ‘til the bottle goes through the wall. What’s your favorite part of this, the crash, does it get to a certain point?
Jonathan Schipper: I can’t say that there’s a favorite point, the last two times we did it was fun, it had a certain advantage because you could just sit around it and drink all day which was fun. It was fun, both of those were six day events where as this is six weeks. I enjoy that part of it, when there’s a crowd around and there is this dramatic thing happening but since it’s slow it seems so benign that people don’t notice.
Chief: Does this keep going after that?
Jonathan Schipper: After that it’s run its full course.
Chief: You have two more coming up?
Jonathan Schipper: I’m going to do it in the Hague and that’s the only one we got planned right now.
Chief: Did you have a car like this growing up?
Jonathan Schipper: No.
Chief: Did your dad?
Jonathan Schipper: A little bit I guess, I had a trashy sports car but not an American one.
Chief: Which one?
Jonathan Schipper: A Datsun 280Z.
Chief: Did you wreck it?
Jonathan Schipper: No, my brother did.
Bill Dunleavy (Chief Photographer and all around badass): I got in a car accident in one of these one time, I had a step-dad with one of those brown ones.
Chief: When I first came here the other day that was my first thought, It smells like my dad.
Bill: Oh yeah, this one’s got a great smell going, like 60 years of cigarettes.
Chief: Cigarettes and gasoline.
Bill: Did you pick these up from a junkyard?
Jonathan Schipper: They were sort of at the end of their life but they were on the road.
Bill: This has the greatest gear shifter.
Jonathan Schipper: The girlfriend did that. It was missing one so we added it.
Chief: So that wasn’t original?
Jonathan Schipper: Everything else was original but we added the shifter.
Bill: It has this great fiction to it.
Chief: Are you working on anything else right now?
Jonathan Schipper: Mostly just working on drawings and just trying to figure out what’s next but not actually making anything.
Chief: Did you learn how to make all this stuff in art school?
Jonathan Schipper: I started there, but I’ve been out for ten or fifteen years now.
Chief: I mean all the mechanical stuff?
Jonathan Schipper: I started there for sure but been doing it a lot since. With this piece – with the car crash – my girlfriend’s brother is an engineer so he did a lot of the work. Figured out how much the beams would bend and sizing materials.
Chief: That’s gotta be nice.
Jonathan Schipper: Yeah, it was great.
Chief: So, are you anti-technology?
Jonathan Schipper: To sum it up technology doesn’t change people as much technology says that it does. There’s this idea that progression in technology is so entirely beneficial for everybody – and it does have benefits – but if you look at medical science it’s like, we live a little longer but at the same time you’re not gonna really end death, or at a certain time you don’t want to. You’re just going to overpopulate the planet with decrepit old people which is not the way it should work.
Chief: Or you just find the ubermensch and keep all of them around.
Jonathan Schipper: … so… I wouldn’t say I’m anti-technology I just feel there’s this faith in technology that’s a little beyond rational sometimes.
Chief: Is this where you thought you’d be going with art?
Jonathan Schipper: I’m not surprised. The ceramics was a small period. I got to this pretty quickly.