The first time I visited Matthew Day Jackson’s studio, I asked him to discuss some of the references in his work. He paused thoughtfully, looked at me, and asked, in absolute earnestness, “How much time do you have?” Indeed, the sources for Jackson’s sculptures, paintings, drawings, and photographs are so varied, it’s a challenge to approach them in a reductive manner. Jackson casts a wide net across disciplines of history, art, science, philosophy, sports, music, technology, and popular culture, resulting in works that are anything but homogenous. Reveling in their own contradiction, they are simultaneously quotidian and epic, grave and uplifting, vanquished and optimistic.

Jackson recently completed a residency at MIT where he researched the university archives, culling information on the Apollo 11 moon landing and folding it into particulars relating to J. Robert Oppenheimer and the first atomic bombs, visionary architect/designer Buckminster Fuller, among other sources. The resulting exhibition, “The Immeasurable Distance,” was held at MIT’s List Center before traveling to Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, where it will be on view until January 17, 2010. When we conducted this interview in September, Jackson had just shipped out an exhibition’s worth of work to the Grimm Gallery in Amsterdam (October 10 – November 21, 2009).

Lauren Ross: How do you approach the making of your work? Do you think of it serially or as finite bodies of work that are complete thoughts? Or do you shape it around specific exhibitions?

Matthew Day Jackson: It changes all the time. I think of my pieces as individual musical tracks, whether it’s 8, 16, 32, or 64, that together comprise a song. They all happen at the same time, interdependently, but each fulfills a certain facet of the greater concern, which is the relationship between my internal and external worlds. As I walk, read, talk to people, listen to music, watch television, movies, YouTube, I see, hear, feel, smell, and taste things that are a mirror of myself. At the same time, I am concerned with objects outside of myself in the greater pantheon of information that makes up the society in which I live. When I’m making an exhibition, it’s kind of like making a play; each character on its own would be nothing without its counterpart or antithesis, like a protagonist and antagonist. If there is one great strategy, it is that magic is afoot, and that I should be curious and explore always.

LR: So, the work is influenced by your immediate environment and changing conditions in your life?

MDJ: Yeah, it’s everything. Even in your most ordinary moments, your body is sensing everything around it. Why shouldn’t art-making be like that, but in reverse? It should be likewringing yourself out. Art, for me, is just a way to learn more completely and cohesively about the person I am and the person I’m becoming. As I’m making things, I’m learning new things about myself. Hopefully, that learning can be an element of another person’s learning about [himself or herself]. Maybe just one person outside of myself would be fine.

LR: Do you think about your audience’s perspective when you make your work? Do you think, “I want this to be as interesting to an art historian as it is to an astrophysicist’’?

MDJ: I have concerns that an astrophysicist might share—and maybe also a four-year-old child. I examine human predicaments, so universality is kind of built-in. In terms of audience, I do think about locale, like the cultural currency of the place where I’m showing. For example, when I did the show at MIT, my experience with the people there influenced the work.

LR: Tell me about the show in Amsterdam.

MDJ: It’s called “Dynamic Maximum Tension,” which is the full version of the word “Dymaxion” which Buckminster Fuller used to describe a principle of using the full potential of material, thinking, and form together. That idea of mashing history, form, art history, and personal concerns together—not simplifying it, but rather letting it be multifaceted and even confused and pulling itself apart—I love that. That’s what I’m after.

A lot of the images in the show address the act of falling or being buoyant, whether it’s the burned interior of the lunar module, Joseph Kittinger falling from space, or the bronze cast of the raft from the Mercury space missions. It’s not really the polarities that I’m thinking about, but rather the space in-between. Tension is the thing that keeps everything together, again like a protagonist and an antagonist in a narrative. I guess it’s like an orbit, where there is a balance of forces in play. Apart but connected.

So, a lot of the pieces in the show have to do with atmosphere. I don’t just mean oxygen and such, but everything—the culture that we create that also informs who we are. You’re constantly in culture, it’s constantly telling you who you are, and you’re constantly coming back at it. Producing things that inform culture, like writing, dance, or artwork, is equivalent to terminal velocity. It’s like reaching a point where you can’t fall any faster because the force of gravity is fighting the pressure and the material of the atmosphere.

LR: One of the things that seems to me to be distinctive about your work is that you draw on such a broad range of, not just disciplines, but modes of thought. For some viewers, the sources might seem totally disparate, but they’re not to you. You see the connection between all of these things.

MDJ: Absolutely.

LR: And you don’t seem to subscribe to the idea of dichotomies. Like science and religion, for example, which many people view as opposites, you don’t seem to think of them that way at all.

MDJ: No, not at all! However, I would say it like this: Science is akin to the spiritual, while technology is akin to religion. It’s not necessarily that I see it all the time, but I do see the interconnectivity of a lot of things, and I’m trying to get to the point where I see the interconnectivity between all things. I imagine that moment when my child will open his or her eyes for the first time, and nothing’s really delineated. Nothing will have the same meaning for him or her that it has for me. I think that for a brief moment, in a child’s eyes, everything is connected. Everything is one, nothing more important than anything else. And I think if I could, in my adult life, get some better understanding of how everything is connected, then I’m doing a good job somehow.

LR: Buckminster Fuller’s denunciation of specialization, especially the breakdown between the sciences and the humanities, seems really significant to you.

MDJ: Yeah, it is—not so much Fuller’s forms or artifacts, but his writing. And the basic structure of his thinking, making, and doing has a huge influence. It’s something that we don’t have many models for. Being an interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary artist, there’s a lot of room to be misunderstood, even now. Yeah, he’s a big influence, but he’s one player in a cast in my head. As far as specialization, I’m very much against it, for anything. To specialize is to suppress creativity. And I think creativity is an essential component to being a human being. It’s the invisible thing that connects us all.

LR: You’ve mentioned the idea of characters and narrative a couple of times now. Is there a difference between history and narrative? Or history and fiction?

MDJ: No, I don’t think so. It’s one of the most interesting predicaments of being a human being—the problem of having just one position in relationship to something that’s happening, when there are 360 degrees of perspective. History, whether I understand it or not, totally informs who I am. It informs everybody, and yet it’s all relative to one’s locale. In the United States, we grow up with these arch-deities of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant—it’s in the realm of mythology. Much of American history, much of all history, does reside in mythology. My work is largely about how history is mythology. These are big events, from the lunar landing, to the Civil War, to western expansion. Also, we share in the formal aspects of these events things that pretty much all cultures deal with.

LR: I think the way history is usually taught in school is very dry, factual, linear. This made that happen, and that made that happen…

MDJ: My perspective on pretty much everything is that an event isn’t entirely predicated on the last event. It’s all of the events that lead up to that point. I think that’s another reason why there’s a nonlinear approach to making things and bringing things together. Chronology is part of the mythology as well. The way things have been built up isn’t really the way they happened. At the same time, it’s absolutely necessary to understand that historical events happen in relationship to one another because without knowing that, you just keep doing the same thing. And, actually, I think that’s what constantly happens, a sort of amnesia built into the culture that allows us to continuously step in the same shit.

LR: So, do you feel that you’re taking a critical stance against the ways events are reported and distorted?

MDJ: I don’t believe in stances because that would suggest that I’ve arrived somewhere, but in general I believe there’s no line in art, there’s no line in making and being creative. If you follow that thing in your head that creates images, sounds, flavors, smells, or movements, then you should try to see what they look like in real space and time, in front of you, or with your body. As an artist, I just don’t believe in abiding by any sort of line.

LR: So, if the work is a totally open exploration, are all readings of it valid?

MDJ: Totally. I can’t control the readings, nor would I want to. Sometimes you hear wild interpretations of something that you’ve made. You’ve made something to try to make that dream in your head real, and then you hear someone else say something that you’ve never thought of before. There’s a certain beauty in that, maybe, for a brief moment because you’ve taken a step outside of yourself. And it’s something that you could never recreate. The vast majority of the things we do every day are powered by our unconscious, and you can’t really control them.

LR: Speaking of giving up control, you sometimes embrace the element of chance when you work.

MDJ: I use the element of chance in a lot of things. When I’m casting or doing something new, I generally just leave it kind of fucked up. It’s like a permanently frozen document of my learning how to do something. And often, when I really know how to do something, I lose interest and stop doing it. I think that’s another reason why I make so many different things; there always has to be that challenge, to see if I can do this thing that I’ve dreamt up.

LR: Well, in the history of science and exploration, the accident has been this incredible catalyst. People set out to explore one thing, but through some random act or accident, something else extraordinary results.

MDJ: Yeah, but we live in a culture that learns through trauma. I guess we do learn through amazing, joyful things, but whether it’s giant dirigibles bursting into flames or astronauts burning up on reentry into the atmosphere, those are the moments we learn a lot from. We are definitely a culture of aversive training, you know, punishment leaning. That’s how I’ve learned too—not from my parents, but from society. You don’t learn from the moment of joy. And a lot what we’ve learned has been the result of huge sacrifices. That is definitely something that I’m drawn to: the sacrifices [made by] certain individuals, whether it’s intense physical, intellectual, or philosophical sacrifice.

LR: Your work celebrates a lot of heroes.

MDJ: Heroes are the people who sacrifice to such a great degree that it shifts knowledge or experience. By examining heroes, I try to make them knowable so as to give myself permission to think about or do things differently. Trying to understand someone like Robert Oppenheimer gives me permission to think differently, but it also reminds me that everyone is capable of doing awful shit.

LR: Certainly some of those scientists didn’t know, or didn’t intend, for their work to be used towards destructive ends.

MDJ: That’s the problem when you get the army involved! The only way [the scientists] could do it was with giant funding. They really had no choice in the matter. They thought they were developing a weapon against Hitler. They had no idea that it would be used on a country that was essentially seeking terms for surrender. We wouldn’t let them surrender. We needed a real-time test to see if this device to end all wars would work. It worked and created something just as awful as intended, and changed the world we live in. Reading Oppenheimer’s biography American Prometheus helped me learn about that moment in history and how our government used all of that beautiful thinking to kill indiscriminately.

LR: Your work is often written about with reference to the failure of utopic thought.

MDJ: Yeah, but it’s not for lack of trying. The thing is, I see beauty in the people going to Jonestown in Guyana. It was powered by beauty. Yes, there was unquestionably brainwashing and murder, but the motivations to follow this man were gorgeous. Why wouldn’t you want to be with people that you love and not have the pressures of this fucked-up culture that we live in? Why wouldn’t you want to be equal with your peers and be in a community where everybody loves each other? Through sculpture, I’m saying that I see the beauty in this thing. The way that I address it visually suggests that I’m not just talking about failure. I’m interested in motivations because the power for beauty and terror is in all of us.

LR: Well, earlier you mentioned the idea of cultural amnesia. Have we learned from our mistakes?

MDJ: Absolutely. Things are getting better. Are they as good as we would like them to be? They never will be. But I have to believe that they will continue to get better. And if that means that I’m looking at the world through rainbow-colored glasses, then call me Elton John.

LR: Well, your work doesn’t suggest someone who looks at the world through rainbow-colored glasses. It’s unquestionably about mortality.

MDJ: Some things are pretty gloomy. Also, there’s an aspect of—I can’t think of a better word—“fuck you” in what I’m doing. Art is basically an anarchistic gesture, especially in the society that we live in, America, the artist is a trickster, a delinquent, a degenerate, someone not to be trusted with money or children. Yeah, so there is a dark side. And sometimes it’s more evident. But in the way that I make things, there’s also an obvious joy that undermines the gloominess. That goes back to the tension we were talking about before. How do you make the sculpture in the affirmative? Not in hugs, kisses, rainbows, and shit, but as a positive gesture. A lot of the things that I have been making recently, particularly in the MIT show, are joyful. There’s also humor to some degree, a certain boyish ridiculousness. But in the Grimm show, it’s fairly gloomy. If you were to look at it as a treatise on contemporary culture, it’s a pretty gloomy show. But in making I express a never-ending faith in the power of creativity, and an expression of joy and wonder in challenging myself.

LR: Recently you’ve been focusing on the 1960s and early 70s. Why are you drawn to that era? Do you see it as being a particularly informative time in American culture?

MDJ: You had this really powerful moment after 1969; there was the American Indian Movement, Rainbow Coalition, Black Panther Party. All of these things continued, it’s just that the hippies moved out and got jobs. But the dreams of hope and making the world a better place didn’t go away. By highlighting something like the lunar mission, which is like a military maneuver, I’m saying that it really wasn’t the end or the beginning of anything. It was just a different type of tank, a different type of machine, a different type of military vehicle. It was just a continuation of the same old thing. Technologically, scientifically, and spiritually speaking, it was of course, radical.

In my generation of artists, there’s a longing for that sort of collective concern between artists and their peers of the late 60s, as well as a radical shift in how we thought about things. That longing of recognizing that people were brazen enough to prescribe a different way, that’s something that I see all the time. There’s definitely a longing in what I do. But continuing to use the strategies that came to fruition then doesn’t make sense. Now is not the time to regurgitate the formal strategies of 1969 but rather to make new ones. I like to think of myself as a part of a generation of artists that is producing a shift in terms of ideas, art, and cultural production—how stories are told, how mythology and history coexist.

LR: Who are some of your peers who you think are doing interesting work in that way?

MDJ: There are way too many, but to name a few, Jay Heikes, Paul Chan, Josephine Meckseper, Larry Bamburg, Rosy Keyser, Cyprien Gaillard, Erin Sheriff, Rachel Harrison, Rashid Johnson, Ann Collier, Guido Van Der Werve, Christina Mackie, Charles Avery, Roger Hiorns, Adam Helms, Hilary Harnischfeger, Kalup Linzy, Will Villalongo…

LR: You have talked about a kind of generational influence on your thinking.

MDJ: Yeah, I think a lot of artists in my generation, born in the late 60s to mid-70s, shared similar experiences. We probably spent half of our lives analog and the rest of our lives are now digital. I think that plays a huge part in my basic philosophy of half-make, half-think. It’s about being in the middle space. On one hand, I was raised by people who were alive during the hippie movement, believing that everybody is equal and love is a powerful thing, but on the other, I was riding my skateboard to school, listening to Black Flag on my Walkman. It’s like being in a bunch of different places at the same time.