The place was absolutely packed at pierogi2000’s project space “Boiler” lat Friday night in Williamsburg. Jonathan Schipper had two works on display, two works of beautiful futility. And while both “Measuring Angst” and “The Slow Inveitable Death of American Muscle” would capture the fascination of any gallery goer, Schipper won plenty of points from the hipster crowd by slowly destroying a beer bottle and two classic muscle cars.
“Measuring Angst,” an animatronic installation that slowly relives the destruction and subsequent inability to reconstruct a Corona bottle, slowly crept over the heads of the crowd on a steel track, commanded by a few computer scripts Schipper had written himself. On the floor, the general reaction to “Measuring Angst” consisted of lots of talk about thermodynamics, entropy, and rage. Someone was quick to bring up something or other about the damage done. Needless to say, there was a tangible feeling of compassion for the robot trying and failing to put the bottle back together. Though Schipper would have us believe this is some sort of science project, a calculated tool for determining the earlier action of throwing the bottle against the wall, the installation tells us otherwise. Schipper’s contraption, a collection of precise robot arms programed with hard math and science to put the pieces back together, is a machine that advances slowly along the track, audibly creaking and rattling. Each of its arms holds a piece of the bottle and carefully turns. The whole process is an extremely thoughtful and delicate affair, and though it fails each time, the machine keeps trying, and each time yields a different but equally broken bottle.
Just underneath “Measuring Angst” were two classic American muscle cars, touching nose to nose. The dramatically titled “The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle” was perhaps a commentary on the dying American car industry (I sincerely hope not, because that’s just too easy), but in any event, proved to be one of the best and largest installations I’ve ever seen a bunch of people ignore in a single room in my life. Seemingly oblivious to the compressor and the subsequent valve lines leading to the two cars, gallery goers enjoyed this makeshift arm rest all the same. In their defense, “The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle” is indeed a very slow installation. Schipper has rigged two cars to collide head on, but has, with a feat of engineering, slowed the process down to take place over a series of days, maybe even weeks. The compressor devotes equal amounts of air to either car mount advancing them closer and closer. What unfolds is a breathtaking almost zen-like event. The gradual collison allows one to analyse an all to common violent act in near stop-motion. Every stage of physical impact is laid out for the audience in a quiet performance. Schipper draws on two things people love to obesses over: destruction and zen, or in music terms, Black Sabbath and John Cage.
Adrian Sanders
