FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Vice Blog

JONATHAN SCHIPPER MAKES STATUES DANCE TO SLAYER

It feels weird to call what Jonathan Schipper does "sculpture." Sculpture is that thing that 45-year-old divorcees get into and which ends up with a bunch of weird face-looking things made of sandstone littering their backyard. Very rarely does it yield massive spheres covered in functioning cameras and monitors, or head-on collisions between two cars that take place over the course of 30 days, or a classical statue locked in a mechanical exoskeleton dancing to Slayer's "Raining Blood."

Advertisement

At the same time, trying to cool up Jonathan's work with a phrase like "techno-sculpture" or "sculptronics" makes it seem like he's just some Battle Bots nerd who's read a couple Walter Benjamin essays. I guess all that stuff about labels being worthless was on the money. Anyways, here's a chat I had with him in his cluttered, mechanic-from-Blade-Runner-esque studio space.

Vice: I found out about you when I typed "crazy people in Brooklyn" into Google. There was a thing on you from the Brooklyn Rail on the second page. Are you a crazy person?
Ha, really? I guess so. That's awesome.

What's your background for all this? A lot of your stuff seems like things that only someone with an advanced degree and working for NASA could pull off.
I just went to art school, undergrad and then grad school--both in sculpture. In the beginning I was very anti-technology. I didn't have a computer all through under-grad--I thought art was a way to get away from technology. I really wanted to make things that were specifically non-technological.

Then I realized that if I was so fascinated by something that I was basing my whole schooling on getting away from it, I was really just lying to myself. Right now, I do a lot of work for other people, like fabrication stuff. I've done a lot of work with animatronics, I've done stuff for the Muppets and things like that.

Whoa, what did you do for the Muppets?
You know those big Christmas windows they do at Macy's? I did that for a couple of years and one year we had all of the Muppets in there. There were like 70 Muppets in my studio. It was like a childhood fantasy.

Advertisement

What did you have to make them do?
We put internal armatures in them that would make them do whatever the Macy's people wanted them to do. Most of it was pretty basic: a lot of waving and a lot of swaying back and forth. Sometimes they would talk, stuff like that.

So as far as all the technological stuff you work with, you're pretty much self-taught?
Yeah, absolutely self-taught. In the beginning I made static sculptures but I always wanted them to do something. So much of my work is about movement to me, so it became a necessity to figure out how all of this stuff worked in order to make my objects move the way I wanted them to.

Is there anything that you really want to make but either the technology just doesn't exist or you don't have the know-how?
Or the finances. Yeah, a ton of things. That's actually what I'm trying to do in the next few months. I want to make a series of drawings and proposals, essentially of work that I would like to do if I had the resources. Some of it is semi-practical--things I could do pretty soon if I had the money--and then there'll be things I couldn't do for 20 years, but I want to document all those ideas and put them up on my website.

What's the deal with Invisible Sphere? Seems a tad Orwellian to me.
The original idea was actually based on the notion of the media being transparent. It's like, if you're a photojournalist you don't want to be subjective, you want to give this unfiltered account, and I was just thinking about how absurd and impossible that really is. So that was my take on it, like, if you really made the media invisible then you would have the camera on one side and the monitor on the other. And then I just multiplied that into a sphere of cameras and monitors to sort of underline the omnipresence of subjectivity. It's kind of a cool object in that each one of those images is unique and completely different, yet the cameras are all looking at the same space. So many different views looking at the same thing.

Advertisement

What speeds have you done the Slow Motion Car Crash at?
The fastest we've done it was three-and-a-half days, and the slowest was like six weeks. So it could be anywhere in that range.

Can you briefly explain how the idea originally came about?
Well first I tried it with models, and the models were pretty simple to make, but I really didn't know if it would work with actual cars. I never did a test in my studio, I just decided something would happen and hopefully it would be what I wanted. We did do a lot of research figuring out how much energy we needed to crush the cars though. Our goal was to simulate a head-on collision at 30 mph, and there's lots of data out there that says, you know, if a car hits another car at 30 mph and they stop over this many feet, this is how much pressure is being put against it, this is how much energy, etc. So we would calculate backwards from that point, and that was one avenue to figuring out how strong to make everything.

Another avenue was looking at those machines they use to crush cars in junkyards, and seeing how much power they use. I also worked with a friend of mine, Carl, who did a lot of FEA analysis, which is a computer model that will determine how much stress is on all the components. So we sort of combined all three of those things and came up with something that in the end felt reasonable. We didn't have the time or the money to do a test so we just set it up and let it go.

Advertisement

Why'd you use such nice old muscle cars for the piece instead of, say, a couple Daewoos or something?

Well, the muscle cars were kind of an accident to be honest. The original idea was just to use any old car, you know, like a crash you'd see outside. Then I started buying the model cars and realized it's really hard to find a model car of a Ford Taurus or something average. Everyone wants the fancy car. So there's lots of Ferraris and Porches, but not that many Ford Festivas. I liked the older muscle cars because even though they're beautiful, they're still a little closer to an average car. So I picked those and then just thought it was funny, because it kind of became like the slow, inevitable death of American muscle.

But it doesn't have to be muscle cars--in Europe we used a BMW and a Mercedes. I think it adds to the impact for the car to be something that people don't want to see destroyed. That little bit of pain is good, but it's also pretty fake in that none of the cars we've bought have been more than like $1,500. They look the part, a lot of them have a decent paint job, but inside they were way past their prime.

Do you think of it as a way of forcing the audience to examine death and destruction in a slow, really-think-about-it sort of way?
Yeah. It reminds me of watching a log burn, like, people can sit around for hours and slowly watch a fire burn. It's nice and it's warm but it's also just sort of fascinating to watch the slow decay of that log. And I think there's a lot to it, it's this transformation from one state of matter to another. And we go through that too, we came into the world that way and we're going to go out through that other door. It's such a quiet spectacle, you can just sit there and watch it and have a beer. I mean, it doesn't make you afraid like like an actual-speed car crash, but it's dramatic and compelling and intriguing.

Advertisement

Do you ever worry that some of your pieces give the impression that you're basically just on a breaking-things kick? Like one of those Mythbusters guys or Survival Research Labs?
I've been accused of destroying things, I've been told that destroying things is not creative. Somebody said, "Well, that's what kids do before they learn to make stuff--they just break their toys." And when I read that I thought, well exactly, that's what you have to do to make anything. The first step to making a cabinet is to cut the wood into pieces. And I feel like that's such an important underlying factor in everything we do--that moment when things tip and it's now something completely different.

The robotically-encased statue dancing to "Raining Blood" on the player piano is probably one of the most badass pieces of art I've ever heard of. Can you explain a bit of the technical aspects of how that worked?
It was a really quick piece to think of and make, and it was just more fun than a lot of the other pieces because it was just so stupid. I originally wanted to take the song and transfer it to a player piano reel--I was just thinking that would be the stupidest thing to do. I thought I'd have to get out the hole-puncher and punch each hole, but it wasn't like that at all. Player piano reels are basically the precursor to MIDI technology, there are actually ways to take MIDI files and put them on player piano reels. So all I had to do was find a guy who had already made a MIDI version of "Raining Blood" that you could play on your keyboard, or whatever device you have, and then find another guy who could punch player piano reels, and then all it took was a little bit of computer work to make the files compatible.

What are you working on now?
I have a piece for the Armory coming up, and another show this summer. The car crash has taken up a lot of my time lately. It was fun but its logistics have sort of taken over. In order to do a show it takes a month or two of prep, maybe three weeks to a month of actual work to set it up, and then another bit of work when it comes back. I don't want it to take over my life--I don't want to be running around making car crashes for the rest of my life. I'm trying to find avenues to expand, I want to use that piece but also expand into new pieces.

JONATHAN SMITH