Jonathan Schipper @ The Boiler

Jonathan Schipper's current show, Irreversibility at The Boiler, Pierogi (191 N 14th, Greenpoint/ Williamsburg), is great: sad, thoughtful, and more than a little fun. The show is comprised of just two works, The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle and Measuring Angst, both of which slow down violent events to make of them poetic ballets.

The main work on view The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle pits two cars, one (in this particular match) a beyond totally awesome Firebird, the other a maroon car that I would now be able to identify and probably even appreciate had it not been for the amazingly gorgeous and distracting Firebird, against one another. Schipper has rigged the two cars so that they collide, extremely slowly, over a period of six weeks. At the opening, the cars had just touched and were beginning to collapse into one another. Over the course of the exhibition, the two cars will push farther and farther into one another, usually until one overtakes the other, pushing over the collapsing hood of the other, and destroying both in the process. Of course, the title of the work indicates that the work can be seen as a commentary on the slow death of the American automobile industry, muscle car machismo, or even the capitalistic enterprise in general. In the age of spectacle, it is lovely to see an event take place over such an extended time period, one that defies viewing in a single go and necessitates that the viwer return to the scene. This isn't just a one-time, never-to-be-seen-again piece, it is comprehended over time and can even be restaged (between different cars). It's a high-octane crash at the speed of boredom. And yet, the crash itself, the destruction of the two cars, allows them to become actual anthropomorphic protagonists whose death is almost torturous. The Firebird, whose scent of lived-in-ness necessitated the artist placing an air-freshener inside, came complete (when purchased) with a picture of a young man, inscribed on back (according to someone who had looked at it) with a message to the youth's father (click on image to enlarge). The car is thus the receptacle and the embodiment of lost dreams. The two cars--locked in an embrace, a kiss, a love that leads (of course) to death--prompt an inevitable sense of mourning and loss.

The other work, Measuring Angst, is composed of a mechanism that holds together the pieces of a Corona beer bottle (reminiscent of the spider-like machine that puts together Leeloo in The Fifth Element). The machine slowly catapults the bottle across the space, then slowly pulls the bottle part (as if it had hid the wall), and then pulling it back together again and rewinding/resetting. The repetition could symbolize the desire to undo things done and reassemble that which is broken. Of course, the irony is that the process just repeats itself over and over again, forever breaking, forever reassembling, again like love--this time a love ( tinged by anger and violence) gone completely wrong.