Exhibit highlights his dark side
Artist's focus: death, violence, and race cars
Matthew Day Jackson's mother prays for him.
In fact, the first artwork viewers encounter walking into "Matthew Day Jackson: The Immeasurable Distance" at the MIT List Visual Arts Center is a small video of his mother praying for him outdoors in Olympia, Wash., where he grew up.
"She's been saying prayers for me my whole life," Jackson says. "I can't look at it too much. . . . I almost always get misty, and so does my mom."
Enter the rest of the exhibit and you'll understand why it begins on this grace note. Jackson, 35, a multimedia artist who shot to acclaim in 2005 after his inclusion in the exhibit "Greater New York" at New York's P.S.1, confronts death and destruction in his art - and projects a faith that somehow, on the other side, regeneration occurs.
"A lot of [my work] talks about suicide," says Jackson. Soft-spoken, with a bushy beard and long brown hair, the Brooklyn-based artist stands near his sculpture "Lonesome Soldier," an astronaut suit made of woolen military blankets pinned at the neck by a plank propped against the wall. It looks as if the astronaut is being beheaded. To Jackson, suicide is a potent metaphor.
"Suicide is essential in the process of growth, to cast aside the things you think you are, to make the next step," he says.
If his language is severe, consider his imagery. Works here include "August 6th, 1945," mapping Hiroshima and Washington, D.C., in burned wood and molten lead, and "Chariot II - I Like America and America Likes Me," the reconstructed charred wreck of a crashed race car. In "Tensegrity Biotron" he suspends casts of his own bones on tension wires in a neon-lit box; it looks as if his skeleton has just been blown apart.
But death, violence, and rebirth aren't his only concerns. Jackson is a polymath whose work lustily embraces American history, science, mythology, and art history. Many of his pieces explicitly reference giants of 20th-century art, such as Bruce Nauman and Joseph Beuys.
"Matt is an idea percolator," declares curator Bill Arning. "The Immeasurable Distance" is Arning's last show at the List Center; he became the new director of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in April, but has returned to Cambridge for the first days of the exhibition. "We'd start talking about one piece, and six more concepts would come up," Arning says, nodding at Jackson. "Were I given a small city and endless time to mount the show in, there's no end to what he'd do."
Since Arning tapped Jackson as an artist in residence at MIT, Jackson has delighted in availing himself of local resources. He made one piece in MIT's Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel. He visited Harvard University's Warren Anatomical Museum, from which he borrowed the skull of Phineas Gage, a 19th-century Vermont railroad worker who had his head shot through by a 3-foot-long iron rod and survived.
Jackson scanned Gage's fractures onto a model of his own skull for "Study Collection," a stainless-steel shelf unit inspired by the MIT Museum's basement storeroom. "It's set up like an evolutionary chronology," Jackson points out, traversing technology and art. It includes other skeletal casts, replicas of Gage's iron rod, Brancusi's sculpture "Bird in Space," and several atomic missiles.
After hearing MIT professor David A. Mindell lecture last fall about his book "Digital Apollo," Jackson lit on the 1969 Apollo 11 mission that landed men on the moon. (MIT marks the 40th anniversary with a celebration June 11 and 12; Jackson and Mindell, a professor of the history of engineering and manufacturing and of engineering systems, will both be on hand.) Then he went on his own mission to the MIT Museum, a regular stop for the List Center's artists in residence.
"He was in the thrall of the intellectual ideas David presented," recalls Deborah Douglas, the museum's curator of science and technology. Jackson found a 1,400-page document containing computer codes of guidance systems MIT scientists developed for Apollo 11.
The artist's desire to turn a facsimile of the computer codes into a work of art, and his questions about how to do that, prompted Douglas to reach out to NASA and to a community of Apollo aficionados.
"It was a huge conversation involving all sorts of different people," says Douglas. All the brainstorming resulted in Jackson's multivolume artist's book "Luminary 1A and Colossus (after Borges and The Library of Babel)," which ties the code to a Jorge Luis Borges story about an infinite library.
Douglas, meanwhile, posted scans of the document online.
"In all my previous artist experiences, they just want to take something. Matt has given something back, an enormous gift, to the technical community," Douglas says.
Astronauts fit perfectly into the death-defying content of much of Jackson's art. "[They] live in imminent danger to go to a place no one has ever gone before," the artist observes. "They have faith in the apparatus. Nobody is signing up to die."
Race car drivers belong in the same category. The dragster in "Chariot II" originally belonged to Jackson's cousin, race car driver Skip Nichols. For the video "Mapping the Studio (Fat Chance Colonel John Stapp)," shot in a speeding car, Jackson attended drag-racing school, he says, "as a gauge of my faith in my ability and in the car." (Stapp, a colleague of legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager, used himself as a guinea pig when studying the forces of acceleration on humans.)
While Jackson's great joy is plumbing the metaphors of human consciousness in art, he allows that he digs racing hot rods.
"The fastest I went was 159 miles per hour. The feeling of acceleration" - he pauses, a glint in his eye - "If I ever was to be addicted to anything, that's it."
While much of Jackson's work is harrowing, ultimately it addresses the possibility of reinvention and renewal.
"He's saying, 'Let's talk about the future and let's learn about the path.' There's nothing nihilistic," says Arning. "There's a dark side - dealing with the nuclear legacy is dark. But in 2009, nihilism is over."
"It's so 2007," Jackson cracks.
Indeed, there's something sweet and self-effacing about this artist. He loves his mom. He boasts about his sister (a prodigious athlete) and his dad (who has great "patience and clarity"). When asked if he's married, he grins and says, "No, but I'm in love" - with erstwhile designer Laura Seymour.
"My role is to lead in the affirmative. Saying what I am and what I believe in presents something regenerative and inclusive," Jackson says, even as he points out the charred maps of "August 6, 1945." "It's about creativity. Our creativity and intuition makes us totally connected." 