Matthew Day Jackson {read more}
Spring 2010
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
- Cynthia Coffield -
Matthew Day Jackson, Heart of Prometheus, 2009; 1957 Chrysler Hemi Display Engine built by “Big Daddy” Don Garlits; (Nitro/Fuel Supercharged-2500 HP-354 CID-3 15/16” Bore-3 5/8” Stroke, as run in Don Garlits’s Swamp Rat VI-B), steel, gold plating, brass placard; 44 ½ x 48 x 34 inches
Chariot II—I Like America and America Likes Me, 2008; car frame, steel, wool felt, leather, stained glass, fluorescent light; tubes, solar panel, fiberglass, and plastic; 48 x 78 x 172 inches; images courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York; installation view courtesy MIT List Visual Arts
At the moment of discovery, one encounters a profound moral decision. What does one do with the creative or destructive potential in his hands? For Matthew Day Jackson, the weight of unanswerable moral questions perpetuates the myths that resonate through our cultural history. Holding this weight against the technological, mechanical, nuclear and aeronautical innovations of the twenty-first century, Jackson constructed the works that comprise The Immeasurable Distance, curated by Bill Arning for the MIT List Visual Arts Center and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
Let us clarify where the myth lies. Roland Barthes proposes that “myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form.” Research is Jackson’s inspirational component, reflection the modus operandi. Man’s place in time and his quest for knowledge determine the scope of both; through references, a narrative emerges. Jackson explored MIT’s history during his residency there. In a storage room Jackson found the computer code that safely delivered the Apollo crew to the moon. Luminary IA and Colossus present printouts of this code bound in leather tomes modeled after the 410-page books in Borges’ “Library of Babel,” a warning on the consequences of excessive pride. Counter-culture phrases such as “Burn Baby, Burn,” embedded within the seemingly endless stream of ciphers, echo the mindset of the Apollo era and remind us that real human people made this journey. The hands of visitors flipping through the pages leave physical traces for the future.
For Jackson, a positive transformation takes place when individuals move past the boundaries of physical and mental endurance. In Chariot II, I Like America and America Likes Me the restored remains of a crashed racecar frame, sans engine, appear to levitate on a circle of colored lights that follow the ROYGBIV visible spectrum sequence. The MIT Energy Initiative assisted Jackson in wiring these lights to solar panels, powering the Mad Max car with the energy of the sun. The title references Beuys’ 1974 shamanic action I Like America and America Likes Me, a performative attempt to reconcile the materialistic, mechanical side of modern America with its pioneering spirit of individualism by cohabitating for three days with a coyote. Beuys ambitiously believed the audience’s spiritual reaction to his art could heal the schism in the social body between native earth and modern industrial spirits. Jackson’s postapocalyptic response links polluting consumer technology to nature and transforms it with a self-sustaining power. Where Beuys’ approach seems redemptive but oppositional, Jackson’s is generative.
What is an “immeasurable distance”? According to the exhibition catalogue, it’s a line that stretches forever but never arrives at its destination; a point suspended in time. Jackson presents this myth of delay in a video of a nuclear squash game where a ball bounces from racquet to wall but never leaves the room; videos of Fat Boy and Little Man falling forever, never to detonate; and in references to Apollo missions triumphantly embarking into space never to reach their tragic end. For Jackson this distance is an artistic point of departure on a road of spiritual progress across the innovations of the twentieth century.
Cynthia Coffield is an artist and writer living in Houston.
