By Dan Strohl
Hemmings Motor News
Last year, both Jen and I wrote about artist Jonathan Schipper, a self-proclaimed artist who baffled us by one of his creations, a gear-driven machine that slowly pushed two 1/18th-scale muscle cars together in a twisted slow-motion Ballardian statement of some sort. I earned a degree from college in something I can actually make money at, not in art, so I guess I don’t have the capability or pretentiousness to understand that statement.
What really made me cringe last year was the vague threat that Schipper promised to recreate the creation on a full-size scale with two actual muscle cars. And it appears he did just that recently in Belgium, though he used two cars that fall outside the bounds of the traditional definition of muscle: a 1988 Monte Carlo and a 1992 Camaro RS. Not to say that I don’t appreciate late rear-wheel-drive Montes or third-gen Camaros, but at least he didn’t use a second-gen Trans Am and a Hemi Charger, as he did in his first piece.
Still, I don’t get it. He did all of this so he could take an elaborate time-lapse video and speed it up? And if he’s going to make a statement such as he did in the title of the piece, then he should back it up with, ohidunno, an actual argument. Maybe this is actually some sort of stunt in which he shows how easy it is to get gallery space and, possibly, public art funding.