T
heo Jansen loves to fool people. Back in
1980, not long after the Dutch artist
quit his physics degree studies in search
of more creative pursuits, he launched a
four-metre-high, helium-powered flying
saucer into the hazy skies over the Delft (near the
North Sea, where he was born and lives to this day).
Much like Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds radio
broadcast over 40 years before, Jansen’s project
caused a local sensation: the public, the police and
the press all swallowed the bait; ‘UFO SPOTTED OVER
DELFT’, one newspaper headline blared.
“People really believed there were aliens landing
on the earth,” Jansen muses now, “which is of course
worrying, but at the same time it’s a relief to find out
it’s not really true. That’s the funny thing about jokes
— we need them to see life in the right perspective.
It’s the same with art — we need the balance between
imagination and reality to make life bearable.”
Jansen applied this sanguine philosophy to his
next big project, to which he has
dedicated the past 28 years of his
life. Inspired to save the eroding
sand dunes along the Netherlands
beaches from the threat of rising
sea levels, he began building
Strandbeests (Dutch for ‘beach
beasts’), colossal stick-figure
structures made of cheap PVC
plastic tubes and nylon zip ties.
Devising computer algorithms to
fine-tune the beasts’ mechanics,
Jansen grew determined to create
a species that mimicked the
movements of real animals as they
strut across the sand — kicking up displaced grains
and pushing them back to the dunes where they
belonged — propelled by nothing but the wind.
Over the years, Jansen has become world-famous.
Strandbeests have long been a viral phenomenon
online — usually described as kinetic, or moving,
sculptures — and the artist even got a cameo on
The Simpsons. (“Is this science,” ponders Homer,
“or garbage?”) He also became less obsessed with
saving the planet and more fixated on the evolution
of his creatures. Indeed, the language Jansen uses
when he talks about his beasts is deliberately
anthropomorphic: the algorithms that enable them
to walk are “DNA codes”; the beasts have “muscles”,
“nerve cells”, “stomachs” and “brains”; defunct
Strandbeests are referred to as “fossils”.
Working from his headquarters in Ypenburg,
near Delft, Jansen creates a new species every
two to three years. Experiments on the beach
at Scheveningen each summer teach him which
iterations will survive and which need to ‘die’ and
donate their DNA to the next, presumably superior,
generation. “It’s a constant evolution process,” he
says. “They are mutants, you could say, and thewinning mutant gives me a lot of hope — and
information — to continue.” The artist invites
the public to witness his process during beach
sessions at Scheveningen, with bookings available
each February via his website. He prefers, however,
to exhibit his Strandbeests at museums, where
audiences can actually engage with his work —
and with him, as he shares his creatures’ backstories.
Earlier this year, Jansen brought his beasts to the
people at Wind Walkers: Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests,
an exhibition at Singapore’s ArtScience Museum in
collaboration with Audemars Piguet. (It’s not hard
to see the link between the Strandbeests’ masterful
engineering and the Swiss luxury watchmakers,
which began sponsoring Jansen in 2014 at Art
Basel Miami Beach.) Wind Walkers featured 13
Strandbeests, ranging from the very first — the
Animarus Vulgaris, now just a sad tangle of tubes
and Sellotape — to the 13-metre-long Animaris
Suspendisse — a multi-legged contraption powered
by pistons that squeeze air into
plastic bottles, or ‘wind stomachs’.
The beasts make a whimsical
sound when they move, like rain
splashing on a fibreglass roof.
Conducting a tour of his past
and present creations, Jansen is
a passionate, hands-on storyteller;
he confesses, “I still get a kick out of
demonstrating my beasts.” A tall,
softly spoken man, he speaks
earnestly about creating herds of
Strandbeests that could survive on
the beaches, and perhaps even swim,
without his help at all. He says things
like: “The tubes advise me all the time. Sometimes
I can’t believe how beautiful they get”, or, “I have the
feeling the Strandbeests already existed before 1990.
They were in the air looking for brains to land in.
I was lucky they landed in mine; they used my brain
to affect the rest of the world.”
When he speaks like this, it’s tempting to wonder
if Theo Jansen is more Dr Frankenstein than Dr
Dolittle. But remember, this is a man who loves to
fool people. It’s no accident his Strandbeests provoke
a specific human reaction. “Our eyes are sensitive
to animal movement, because an animal could be
something to run away from or something to eat,”
he explains. “But still you see just a bunch of tubes.
That contradiction somehow throws off a switch
in our brain and we are surprised at what we see.
“You can see my beasts are fairytales,” Jansen
continues, smiling. “But everything I talk about
is based on reality. I like to sketch a world that is
not real, but that people believe in.” VL
Theo Jansen. Amazing Creatures runs through
24 January, 2019, at the Espacio Fundación
Telefónica in Quito, Ecuador. espacio.
fundaciontelefonica.com.ec; strandbeest.com“We need
the balance
between
imagination
and reality
to make life
bearable”
Jan/Feb 2019 67VLife