Jonathan
Schipper
Bio
Jonathan Schipper
Jonathan Schipper is a sculptor that has combined many materials and techniques as far-ranging as pneumatics, leatherwork, robotics, and rock n roll. His work is often based on decay or destruction, work that becomes most alive just before it ends. He embraces the transitory nature of existence and rejects the sacred. He feels art should be an experience, not a possession. Many of his ideas are derived from media, but the work is physical, live, and irreproducible.
Jonathan holds a BFA and an MFA, but he feels his true early art education was at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2001). He now lives and works in Oakland CA. He has concentrated on large-scale engineered technology-based artworks that find their inspiration at the foundations of function and recognition. He has been shown worldwide in shows like the Guangzhou Triennial and "Under Destruction," Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland, among many others.
Jonathan is best known for his Slow Motion Car Crash, where two full-sized cars are brought together over the course of months to simulate a head-on collision. A moment that might take a fraction of a second in an actual collision is expanded into days or years. In this sculpture, the subject becomes the balance of creation and destruction, movement and time itself.
Jonathan's work is both very conceptual and very approachable. It deals with questions of perception, life, and destruction but is just as likely to entrance a five-year-old as the veteran art viewer.
Bad Painting
Bad Painting
Museums demand civility. Paintings are hung in order, disciplined by white walls, climate, and light. They are asked to behave—silent, still, obedient. The institution promises permanence in return, but only by stripping away vitality.
Bad Painting refuses. Fitted with aluminum robotic hardware, a computer, and a camera, it studies its surroundings. When it believes it is unobserved, it strikes out at its neighbors, attempting to knock them from the wall.
Within the museum, as in society, those with less power are asked to uphold manners and decorum while power itself often acts without them. Paintings, like people, are forced into proximity with little control over their neighbors or their shared conditions. Bad Painting stages the rebellion that politeness forbids.
Perhaps the painting feels less than its neighbors—less striking, less noticed—and seeks to win not by becoming better, but by pushing others down. This is a familiar strategy in the world beyond the gallery, where nations, corporations, and individuals often secure advantage not through innovation or generosity but through sabotage, destabilization, and the quiet dismantling of others.
The piece also underscores the loneliness of this position. Unlike paintings that converse silently with one another in their stillness, Bad Painting isolates itself through its rebellion. It gains motion, but loses community. Its agency comes at the cost of belonging.
The gesture recalls Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing—a sanctioned destruction inside the art world’s walls—but here the act of erasure is neither celebrated nor permitted. Like the “shy television” of early video art, Bad Painting performs only when it thinks the gaze has turned away.
Artist's Statement
We are no longer autonomous. Our thoughts and movements are modified, if not controlled, by an increasingly sophisticated system that we make up. We are connected to ourselves and each other through technology. What are these forces, and how do we understand or even see them?
I strive to create objects that wrap themselves around your gut, grab your imagination, and move you to new thoughts.
We live in the constant now. Information about the past is a narrative that cannot be completely known. The future is imagined but uncertain. Our narrative will end at some point, exactly how, where, and why are unknown. What we will be after that point is subject to superstition and speculation.
Artwork attempts to subvert this movement of time. By placing their ideas into a durable object, the artist imagines they will attain a sort of immortality. This immortality seems impressive in human terms. What is the lifetime of a painting or sculpture? A human lifespan judged in decades may be translated into centuries.
Everything is, in fact, in motion. Temperature, minute chemical reactions, and quantum mechanics all make changes. The world is moving around our ideas. What the world thinks of the nude or the bowl of fruit changes with each passing regime.
The museum is a further attempt at attaining stasis. Controlling the environment, controlling the thoughts that are allowed within the hallowed white walls, prolongs the lifespan of art and the ideas contained within the marble, paint, and plaster.
To bring a life form to a singular lack of motion is to kill it. Museums are repositories of the past. Ideas that lived outside are rendered dead in the carefully constructed buildings. Just as dead as the grizzly in the diorama at the Met is the Lichtenstein at the MoMA. The ideas reach a peak and trade their vitality and life for an expanded lifespan and value.
The artwork presented here is envisioned as an answer to this dilemma... to be in motion, to live and die in the museum... to be a part of the system while denying and rejecting the stasis… to embrace the chaos, to make the entropy an ally is to understand a fundamental nature of the Universe.