The Artist With the Race Car in His Studio Rigorously considered, unapologetically masculine and over-the-top ambitious, Matthew Day Jackson's art breaks all boundaries: collaborator and employee, home and work, life and death. IT'S AROUND 10 on a hot July morning when the bulk of Matthew Day Jackson's many co-conspirators arrive at the mysterious black brick building in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to begin the day's work. The 39-year-old artist has more than 200 projects in various stages of completion, but only 20 or so need to be finished for his show "Something Ancient, Something New, Something Stolen, Something Blue," which opened at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York on Sept. Jackson looks around the bright, orderly studio, a series of interconnected workshops, and runs his fingers through his enviable beard. "We're about 60 percent there for the show," he says, "but 60 to 100 goes fast." He certainly has the manpower. On any given day this summer, there are more than a dozen craftsmen, metal workers, welders, fine artists of a variety of disciplines, all working to realize - in polyurethane, cedar bark, Formica or human hair - Jackson's dense, historically pungent, multilayered visions. On this particular morning, two of them will occupy the print room, where they'll make fictional Life magazine covers (one of returning World War II veterans, another of J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of Jackson's longstanding fascinations) using Flavor Aid (à la the Jim Jones massacre) and rust on paper while four guys in safety goggles will manipulate various metals in the machine shop. Another crew will spend the day bathing an aerial rendering of contemporary Paris in a deep Yves Klein blue, while Jackson painstakingly scorches a wood panel of an aerial view of San Francisco, as it may have existed on Aug. 6, 1945, if the atomic bomb had been dropped on this city instead of on Hiroshima. But first someone has to move the race car out of the studio. Or, rather, one of the race cars. Vehicularly speaking, the 18,000-square-foot space is well appointed: beyond the sensible station wagon in the garage is a forklift, a race car Jackson's uncle designed and his cousin built from scratch, a Harley XR1000 Jackson and an artist friend are reimagining as something much bolder, a Super Duty Ford F350 and a ski resort gondola he purchased on eBay. "If you want to find something on the Internet," Jackson says, "I'm your man." Jackson's past auction and Internet scores have included: an inflatable raft and the dog tags worn by one of the chimpanzees - both from NASA's first spaceflight program, Project Mercury - and the fuselage of a B-29 bomber. And then there's the Super Comp dragster that Jackson races most Wednesday evenings in the summer in New Jersey. It's equipped with a 960-horsepower Hemi motor capable of propelling the car and its driver down a quarter-mile track in the time it takes most cars to merge. The process - violent, explosive, mechanical - encapsulates many of Jackson's chief preoccupations as an artist: speed, power, the technological pursuits of a confident postwar America, the era that gave us hot rods and moon walks along with the threat of nuclear annihilation. His work is a rigorously considered grappling with history through icon and material and imagery that's made him one of the art world's most ambitious talents. He's a serious dude: workmanlike and well read despite the Zach Galifianakian beard, the six-figure toys and the boyish joy he takes in setting things on fire or crushing mannequins under the wheels of his truck in the name of art. On Set: Scenes from the race car track with Matthew Day Jackson in New Jersey, as filmed by Sean Donnola. Jackson, who studied at the University of Washington before earning his M.F.A. at Rutgers University, comes from a long line of gear heads - men who built, rebuilt and raced their cars. He credits their ingenuity and self-reliance with providing him with "a blueprint for how to exercise a vision." The race shop was where he learned to be a sculptor without even knowing it. "Seeing my cousin build this remarkable, scary thing," he explains, "and then be able to get into the seat and drive the thing is really beautiful." He got his start in the art world working as a printmaker in Los Angeles for artists like Ed Ruscha and Richard Serra. There's something unmistakably masculine and American about Jackson's artistic pursuits: bending and conjoining and manipulating material, forcing his will upon it, in order to comment on the blood lust and destruction baked into American history, a past he believes we are, on one level or another, still implicated in. I just recognize that we live in an extraordinarily violent place. And that the boundaries between the haves and the have-nots and those who are and those who are not are usually defined by violence. This residue of belligerence can be found everywhere in his work. Even the aerial re-creation of Paris in stunning Yves Klein blue is informed by a flyover, bomb-target view. One of Jackson's other primary fascinations is the human body - his, in particular - its limitations and ultimately its degradation. In 2006, Jackson learned he has multiple sclerosis, an event he calls "the best thing to ever happen to me." He acknowledges that he's lucky that so far he's been able to manage it, but like the majority of MS sufferers, he doesn't know for how long, and that knowledge has given his life and work a propulsive sense of urgency. "Everybody knows they're gonna die," he says, "but few people are given that knowledge that they might be in a wheelchair. And that's a totally different thing. There is an elevator over here so I'll be able to roll around and stick myself in the elevator to go upstairs. I don't think it'll get to that," he says with a laugh. That's the real dark part. He has routinely depicted his own death (in a coffin, on a funeral pyre, being picked over by vultures) in a photo series called "Me Dead at . . ." Over the past decade he has sent CT and MRI scans to forensic experts for various re-creations, including one to a Swedish forensic sculptor, Oscar Nilsson, whose work resulted in a silicone replica of Jackson's head that sits on a shelf in the office. He happily picks it up and holds it next to his face. It's like a more handsome Scandinavian version of me. Jackson and his wife, Laura Seymour, bought the Brooklyn building three years ago. Another leap of faith. Its previous tenant was Studio B, a legendary if short-lived, semilegal rock club. On his first visit inside Jackson waded through a deep layer of broken glass in the dark. The artist realized it was going to be a lot of work. "And at the same time, you could do anything here," he recalls. One of those things is to create a small gallery space, Bunker 259, co-founded with Seymour, which will open this month, by appointment only, and feature one artist and one writer at a time. "We'll make coffee and maybe something sweet to eat and you can just sit here and experience it," Jackson says. He also hopes to eventually create a philanthropic branch of the gallery. Only it won't be to benefit other artists, but to help support the kinds of writers and poets who have inspired him. "What's under assault right now?" he asks. How a writer's intellectual property is distributed, and how their work finds itself in the world, is really under assault. And for so many artists that's where everything comes from. Jackson's goal in all of it - the work, the studio, the gallery space - seems to be to create something noble and durable. Even the sculptures and videos and prints don't prove to be as lasting as the collaborative studio system he's created. Rashid Johnson, an artist and longtime friend, says that he and Jackson often discuss how to create a nurturing community that allows everyone in the studio to learn different concepts and techniques. "He's done that really well, and he's seen a lot of artists go on and have success," Johnson says. While the building was being renovated, Jackson and his wife turned the design of the studio kitchen over to the hive mind of the staff. Last year, they devoted a few work days to decide the room's fate: it's now a Swiss Family Robinson-themed common space, with all the shipwreck accents you'd expect (bamboo and a ceiling net) and some you'd expect from a group of artists (the lost luggage veneer on the fridge and the animatronic parrot that spews "really nasty things in Swiss German," to be recorded by the gallery owner Iwan Wirth). Jackson, who lives with Seymour and their two young children above the work space, strives to break down the barriers between life and art, studio and living space, employee and collaborator. "There is no division between art and life, racetrack and gallery, the space between the museum and the studio," he says. I'm never stymied. There's never a moment when there's a hole of ideas. There are no boundaries in that way. There are physical boundaries - time, money, resources - but the structure is constantly regenerative. These days Jackson has considerably more resources than he once did and enjoys a level of support very few artists of his scale and ambition wouldn't covet, even if he remains less interested in pouring those resources into making money than making art. Ambitious and monumental art. Art that lasts. He explains the process of one of his new works, what he says is a meditation on the Pietà that requires his studio to ship a multiton block of stone from Brooklyn to Wisconsin, where it will be shaped, and then sent back to Brooklyn. "I'm making a sculpture for 30,000 years from now," he says, laughing a little at himself. I know the audaciousness of that is ridiculous.