It’s nearing six o’clock on a balmy June evening at Raceway Park in Englishtown, New Jersey, and artist Matthew Day Jackson’s jet-black dragster is sitting dormant in the parking lot. Engine problems. A cavalcade of big-block Mustangs and Corvettes of every vintage, tuner-tweaked Dodge Neons and Honda hatchbacks, and some barely street-legal motorcycles (many piloted by dads in racing slicks) zip by. Each of their drivers registers the same awestruck stare that is often seen on the faces of art patrons when viewing Jackson’s increasingly complex world of off-track sculptures. On September 6 he’ll present a new suite of them as “Something Ancient, Something New, Something Stolen, Something Blue” at his New York gallery, Hauser & Wirth. But that’s just an amuse-bouche for the restless 39-year-old: With his wife, Laura Seymour, he is also starting a film-production company, opening a gallery this month inside his Brooklyn studio, and founding a nonprofit to benefit writers, scientists, and other non–object-creating types, all while raising the couple’s two young sons, Everett and Flynn, in the home they built above the new studio.
“He’s in a very speedy car right now, doing so many amazing things very, very fast,” says Hauser & Wirth partner Marc Payot. “He’s on fire.”
Now, however, Jackson is laser-focused on the car. Capturing this nonstarter of an event for posterity are filmmaker Joseph Hung and sound technician Timothy Bright, both partners, with David Tompkins, in the production company Sleeper Pictures. They also collaborate on the artist’s myth-making In Search Of... videos, which journey into fictionalized accounts of the paranormal via truthy nuclear test–site history, zombie culture, even the artist’s own faked disappearance. This scene may appear in Jackson’s first feature documentary, Speed and the Art of Letting Go, perhaps with footage of the artist’s numerous calls to dragster guru Bob George, seeking mechanical advice.
“You,” says Jackson, motioning me over to the car. “I need you to sit inside here and press your foot on the brake.” Everyone else with the MDJ Racing team, including his friend, fellow artist and pit boss SunTek Chung, is here in a crew capacity. So I wedge myself into the cramped cockpit—basically a coffin strapped to a bomb—as Jackson attempts to start the engine by hand. To the uninitiated, it’s an intense process. One might describe the buildup to a drag race as being like war: long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror—which is, coincidentally, the same phrase sculptor Nick van Woert used to describe his stint working in Jackson’s studio a few years back.
But is this drag-racing obsession art? Or sport? Or something else? His dealer, Marc Payot, opines, “The whole process is a piece, and the car is a sculpture, but it’s going further than anything I’ve ever seen.” Curator Neville Wakefield, who traveled down to Gainesville, Florida with Jackson to get licensed at Frank Hawley’s Drag Racing School, echoes those sentiments. “What’s interesting is that he’s taking this practice that’s been part of his family history and kind of folding it into his art. He’s almost taking the activity itself as an art form.” In the past Jackson has channeled many disparate streams of his roots, from his mother’s needlepoint in his embroidered Life magazine covers to the frame from a race car his cousin crashed, which he refitted with a Corvette body and a stained-glass wind- shield lit from beneath with prismatic colors in the installation Chariot II (I Like America and America Likes Me), 2008.
To borrow a term Jackson is quite fond of, his is a radical expansion of what constitutes artistic practice. While performance artists such as Chris Burden and Marina Abramovic have put themselves in harm’s way for their work, Jackson’s drag race performance—if you can even call it that, and he doesn’t— may be the most insane extension of any purportedly no-limits practice the art world has ever known.
As an exploration of American systems, the racing does fit in with what has been a focus of inquiry in much of Jackson’s work. “In the clean water that washes over my body when I take a shower, I’m immediately implicated,” Jackson points out. “Why is my water cleaner than it is elsewhere? And why is my gas cheaper than it is anywhere else? And why is it that I can buy a pair of Levi’s jeans for $50? In thinking locally and in how I understand myself in relationship to my local surroundings, I’ve also found a way to talk about things that are maybe a bit more universal. But it’s getting more and more complicated to talk about what I’m doing because the boundaries of my practice keep expanding.”
The day before the test out in Englishtown, Jackson—dressed in the same Nantucket red shorts and Rod Laver tennis shoes he would wear at the track—receives me at his cavernous new studio in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood. Once home to the popular Studio B nightclub, the live/work building is filled with state-of-the-art metal- and woodworking shops, his uncle’s old two-tone Skip Nichols Victa race car, and a gondola from Colorado’s Keystone Ski Resort. Jackson escorts me around the various shop floors and into the staff-designed, Robinson Crusoe–themed kitchen, which will soon have an animatronic parrot that makes dirty remarks in Swiss-German, a nod to his gallery’s Zurich roots. (“I want the voice to be Marc Payot’s,” Jackson says. “I want to try to get him drunk and then have him say some nasty insults.”) Outside the relative calm of the kitchen, a dozen or so assistants—his “secret team of ninjas”—are readying various works for his show in September, which, he says, will include about 20 pieces.
With the exception of a few misfires over the past decade, Jackson has made some of the more fascinating art objects in recent memory; he likens their seemingly divergent themes to “different bodies of work, akin to different rooms in a memory palace.” MDJ’s ever-expanding cosmology has teased out singularly peculiar strains within the increasingly schizophrenic American psyche, highlighting our collectively conflicted relationships with death, the paranormal, religion, Fat Man and Little Boy, the Underground Railroad, the failed utopian visions of Buckminster Fuller and Eleanor Roosevelt, Joseph Kittinger’s pre-NASA balloon odyssey, the privatization of the space race, military perversions of aerial photography, Robert Oppenheimer, the American West, car culture, escapist mentalities, and the “violent terror cult” that is the United States post-9/11.
He’s tackled these subjects via laser-cut Formica panels depicting uniquely American scenes (from Yosemite Valley to the opening of Disney World); woodcut portraits of Harriet Tubman and Fuller; punk rock T-shirts fashioned as sails for a Viking funeral ship; a fake New York Times article reporting Jackson had gone missing; the hoax-perpetuating videos about ghosts, zombies, and the phantom planet Eidolon (inspired by the Rod Serling– and Leonard Nimoy–hosted In Search of... documentary series); his Study Collection, steel shelving units filled with polyurethane skulls (one scanned from a man who was impaled by a pole), casts of bombs, and sculptures of disarticulated body parts; as well as a photographic series of himself as a corpse. It’s a journey into the heart of the American Dream, through the eye of a tornado.
That tornado has been spinning with an urgent immediacy in the wake of Jackson’s diagnosis, in 2006, of multiple sclerosis. The chronic disease attacks the central nervous system, affecting brain, optic-nerve, and spinal-cord function, while potentially decreasing life span by a decade. When viewed through that lens, his ambitious, shotgun approach to the studio seems more than reasonable.
But this manic desire to do more, be better, work harder— whether in his work, family experiences, drag racing—has been with Jackson since the day he left the hospital in 2006. Following his discharge, he immediately went to the B&H camera store in Manhattan, bought a new SLR, and embarked on his cross- country Bummer Tour, sleeping in a van while photographing anthropomorphic rocks across the Lower 48. (He considers the resulting “Bummer Tour” photo series one of his best works.) Still, though he remains wildly productive, doing so remains a challenge while living with MS. “The side effects for the medication I take every week are renal failure and suicidal depression,” he says, laughing. “So it’s a fucking blast, let me tell you.”
Jackson’s ability to see humor in the face of death has no doubt accounted for the success of his macabre “Me, Dead at...” photographs. The series began when he became a father at 35 and so far has depicted him spread out in a casket, wrapped in a body bag, burned on a funeral pyre, and picked apart by vultures. Jackson plans to make these every year for the rest of his life, perhaps because death is not just an art concept for him. At Hauser & Wirth, he’ll unveil the fifth installment, a picture of himself tied up in the crotch of a tree. “I’m not really making fun of death, and my acknowledgment is to remind myself not that I’m going to die but that I’m alive, so now is the only time to do anything,” he says. “That’s why there’s a drag-racing car in the backyard, or why we’re starting a gallery, or why we bought this fucking ridiculous building that will basically bankrupt us.”
The willingness to push himself beyond what might be—physically, conceptually, financially— possible has propelled Jackson into the highest reaches of the blue-chip art world. His show at Hauser & Wirth will follow extravaganzas by Dieter Roth and Paul McCarthy. “Matt’s practice is a life-art experience in the lineage of Roth and McCarthy,” Payot explains. “He builds his studio, he’s got these young artists working for him whom he mentors, he writes, he curates, he does videos, he cooks.”
“I’ve made works in the past where I’m like, ‘Holy shit, what have I gotten myself into here?’ ” Jackson says. “But that’s a sweet drug, and once you get a taste of that, you can’t really give it up.” That rush, he adds, has pushed him to make a number of works for the September show that few would suspect of coming from him. This process began when he encountered a scholar’s stone (more or less a handheld memory palace) on the front lawn of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He snapped a photo with his iPhone and is using that image to craft an 11-by-7-foot replica from 4,000 pounds of man-made lunar dust, which, he explains, is “what they used to see if they could take moon dust and glue it together to make a 3-D form.” The rock will be the first work people will see upon entering the gallery—which is being divided into three smaller spaces and one larger. To Jackson, the piece works as a metaphor for our relationship with the moon circa 2013: the satellite as a meditation device, one we’ve visited but will never really inhabit.
The lunar landscape resurfaces in a homage to The Burghers of Calais, Auguste Rodin’s seminal bronze that depicts the six French burghers who offered themselves up as hostages to King Edward III in exchange for freeing their city. Only in Jackson’s 3-D printed version, the burghers are traversing lunar terra marked with imprints from all the manned space missions. From Jackson’s perspective, the burghers’ death march was echoed by the NASA astronauts who returned from space only to suffer survivor’s guilt for their military friends, who were dying in the jungles of Vietnam just as they themselves were being welcomed home as heroes.
Clicking and printing continues apace with Jackson’s computer-rendered version of a Pietà “as a human fossil of broken buildings and broken Coke bottles and bones,” he says. “I wanted it to look like you quarried it from a disaster site.”
“Matt makes sculpture like collage. I’ll fuss over how two things come together, and he’s more Cro-Magnon about it,” says his friend van Woert. “Most artists like to complicate things for themselves—he just avoids that whole conversation.”
Still, the Cro-Magnon’s efforts have an unavoidably sophisticated aspect. He once made a composite-wood reconstruction of Brancusi’s Bird in Space from memory. He’s reimagined Antoine le Moiturier’s Tomb of Philippe Pot through milled astronauts carrying a mirror-box coffin with a skeleton based on his own. He’s even refashioned the cockpit of a B-29 bomber into a swank men’s lounge with a case full of polychromatic skulls and Dymaxion-inspired design motifs. “I’m not interested in making things well,” Jackson insists. “I’m interested in making them all the way.” For him, a successful sculpture is one that “never gives up, that you can keep staring at, and it’s never going to fail.”
Finding unfailing form is easier said than done. But part of that process is playing out in the courtyard, where an assistant is power-washing flaked paint off the latest piece in Jackson’s ongoing “August 6, 1945” series. The wall-mounted sculptural grids—think 8-by-12-foot architectural renderings of cities with Monopoly-size buildings—reference the devastation wrought by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that day. Over the past four years, he’s re-created metropolises from D.C. and Tokyo to Baghdad and Dresden, typically from scorched wood and molten lead. They are the only pieces for which he’ll accept a commission, but even then he’s selective and collectors get no input beyond the city.
“I probably would not do Anchorage, Alaska,” he jokes. He hopes to make enough to have a show devoted to the series one day. “They are somehow automatic, and automated, and I like that.” The Paris model, which will hang opposite the Pietà sculpture at Hauser & Wirth, appears even more beautiful, with its “viral” Yves Klein Blue finish. But that’s a subversive seduction. As Jackson explains, Paris was the first city to be aerial-photographed, a technology that was later bastardized by the military to make smarter bombs. Thus, the Seine will run red with rust.
Jackson is also busy with two sculptural series featuring various body parts displayed in mirror boxes and made from rapid prototypes and MRI scans. They will include veins cast in steel that are allowed to rust; muscles made from a mannequin head burned inside cedar bark, cast in silicone, and colored like meat; a porcelain skull; gray matter cast in lead; white matter cast in glass; nerves hewn from tree roots cast in copper alloy. For his flesh sculpture, Jackson made a silicone life cast of a Michelangelo look-alike, flayed as if like Bartholomew. “Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel largely under protest, and people believe he painted himself as Bartholomew with his flesh flayed on the wall in the Last Judgment,” Jackson says. “In the event that Michelangelo believed in God, and he painted himself as a martyr, with that expression, he doesn’t have faith in God. Michelangelo’s ultimate faith was in art. I know that’s corny to say, but whatever.”
Born in Panorama City, California, and raised in Olympia, Washington, Jackson had no notion of art world stardom in high school, when his biggest dream was to play college football. “I come from a long line of time-card punchers,” he says. “My mom and dad worked in grocery stores, and my grandfather was a cop. There’s a bunch of military people, and up until three generations ago, they were pretty much all farmers.”
His father, Jacob, was a defensive end and offensive guard at Cal State Northridge, and managed a Fred Meyer store in Olympia. His mother, Karen, was a devout Christian Scientist who worked the cash register at Mega Foods. They both made cameos in the In Search of...Eidolon video—reminiscing over photos of their disappeared son—and Karen is now one of the studio employees, working on needlepoint. “I think I understand how I am now by the fact that I was raised around people who were really restless and recognized that there’s no really definite answer,” Jackson says. “That life is about questioning.”
The family’s obsession with speed started with Karen’s grandfather, who used to race a Model A with a flathead V-8 around circle tracks in Southern California. It was Karen herself who taught Jackson how to ride a motorcycle as a teenager, on a ’78 Sportster that had GNARLEY DAVIDSON emblazoned on the gas tank.
Aside from football and Jesus—both of which Jackson would later abandon—the only major dictum he remembers hearing from his folks was, “you can do whatever you want, but you really have to make a buck.” Were it not for a teacher inspired by his drawings, Jackson would probably never have attended art school.
“Some people are validated by money, some by fame, but I’m validated by people I look up to,” says Jackson, who earned a degree in printmaking at the University of Washington while working at the Fred Meyer and riding around Seattle on a pair of “terrifyingly fast” motorcycles. (Though those bikes are long gone, he now has two others that probably fall under a similar banner.)
Jackson is currently directing a documentary, Speed and the Art of Letting Go, which will investigate his family’s racing history while also following speed freaks like Antron Brown, the first African-American to win an NHRA championship; flat-track motorcycle legend Mert Lawwill; and a land-speed team looking to break 500 miles per hour. “The movie isn’t about understanding my familial history,” he says, “but rather how my family has basically performed the symptoms of the culture that formed this sort of automobile racing my family participated in.”
Speed will form part of a much larger, multiyear art-and-commerce project called “24 Hours of Television,” which will incorporate the film, the In Search of... videos, and presumably many hours of yet-to-be-shot footage. He’s also working on a drag-bike collaboration with van Woert (a recent speed convert) that they intend to race on the Nevada salt flats. His sustained dialogue with artists like van Woert, Chung, and Rashid Johnson fuels not only the practice but also his family life.
“I want my children to grow up knowing all my artist friends and all the people I meet through my work so they have this understanding that they have the power to do things that are difficult and strange,” says Jackson, who warehouses a selection of his art as a potential trust fund for his boys. That said, he isn’t precious about his work. If it doesn’t last, so be it. “I don’t know if my name will stay, and I don’t care about being a master,” he states. “But through doing what I’m doing, hopefully I can give back a language that’s better than how I found it.”
This might explain the fervor he and Laura are putting into their one-artwork, appointment-only gallery, Bunker259 (at 259 Banker Street, in Brooklyn), which they’re opening with the help of Italian writer and gallerist Mario Diacono, who’s been staging one-artwork exhibitions for two decades.
“I showed with him in Boston, and it was a really important experience that taught me that the language of art is ancient and has meanings beyond the contemporary,” Jackson explains. “If you asked my grandparents to go to an art museum, they’d be like, ‘I don’t want to go to a museum; that’s where I feel dumb and poor.’ So hospitality is a very important part of the gallery, because I think one of the things that makes art really hard to look at is how it’s shown.” At the gallery, he says, “I’ll meet you with a cup of coffee and some chocolate and maybe a cookie, and the book we’re publishing with the show, and hopefully you’ll leave me $25 and take the beautiful publication with you.” When a patron is occupying the space, nobody else is allowed inside. “It’s yours to enjoy like a treat.”
The inaugural show will feature one of Sandra Allen’s massive anthropomorphic pencil drawings of trees, but there will be no images of the exhibition on the invitations, no images on the website, so if you don’t see it while it’s up, you won’t see it. “The idea is that the only thing that will stop us from doing this is energy, time, spirit, emotion, and money,” says Jackson. “If all of those things collapse, then we’ll stop, but as long as there’s something left, we’ll continue.”
The week after his New Jersey track debut, Jackson returned to Englishtown for another test and tune. Everything was running perfectly; he staged well, but then forgot to turn on the air in the throttle and idled his way down the track. Though the experience was lackluster, the team joked on the ride home that they should change their name to the Banker Street Idlers.
“The thing that’s really good about being an artist is that there are so many times I’ve shown work that I’m almost embarrassed by,” says Jackson. “The fact that I idled down the track was more disappointing than it was embarrassing. I think that in doing that, and knowing that on September 6 I may even show some more work I’m embarrassed by—I’m now over the fear. I know that I’m still going to fuck up, and that’s okay—I know I can go back and do better. I just really want to do it. I wish I could go to the track every day.” Any number of multihyphenate artists might wish something similar for themselves: to inhabit a space where they’ve finally married enough ambition and bandwidth to be a talented sculptor, gallerist, film director, father (and, perhaps, even drag racer) every day of the week. What sets Jackson apart is that he actually does it—all of it.
This article is published in the September 2013 issue of Modern Painters.
