The March of the Strandbeests :
Theo Jansen’s wind-powered sculpture.
Theo Jansen’s wind-powered sculpture.
From NewYorker by Ian Frazier
If you’re like many people, you know about Theo Jansen already.
You may not know you know, but on reflection perhaps you realize you do.
You’ve come across his kinetic sculptures in videos online, or a kid has shown the videos to you, or you’ve been with friends who were watching them.
Once seen, they are remembered.
Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist who lives in Delft, near the North Sea.
He could almost be a single-name artist, because everybody calls him Theo, pronounced “Tayo.”
For the past twenty-one years, Theo has devoted himself to constructing animals that can walk on the beach powered only by the wind.
His
name for his animals is Strandbeests, which means “beach animals” in
Dutch.
The first time I saw them, I was in a restaurant in Manhattan
having lunch with friends and somebody brought out a laptop and we
watched and re-watched them.
The creatures were many-legged, they seemed
as at home on a beach as sandpipers or crabs, they high-stepped with
the vivacity of colts, they fit perfectly next to the waves and sky.
Some had batwing-like sails, one was made of plywood, but basically they
were accumulations of stiff plastic tubes.
To see inanimate stuff come
to life that way was wild, shiver-inducing—like seeing a haystack do the
Macarena.
At
this lunch, people said how great it would be if the Strandbeests came
to New York.
And they might, because Robert Kloos, the director for
Visual Arts, Architecture, and Design at the Consulate General of the
Netherlands, has been working with other fans of Theo’s to find a venue
and funding for a show in the city in 2013, and has described such a
show as “a dream come true.”
The photographer Lena Herzog, one of Theo’s
fans, who was at the lunch, said the show would draw a big audience,
because a commercial for BMW cars featuring Theo and his Strandbeests
had already received more than four million hits on YouTube.
Then she
told me that Theo would be bringing out some new Strandbeests for a
trial run, or walk, on a beach near Delft very soon, that she would be
going over to photograph them, and that I should come along.
I thought
this was a good idea.
Before the Strandbeests appeared here, I would see
them in their native environment.
So
in mid-May I went, and Theo himself met me at the airport in Amsterdam,
holding a hand-lettered sign with my name on it at the customs exit.
(Lena would be joining us in a day or two.)
He greeted me warmly and we
wandered off.
At first, he couldn’t find his white Volvo in the airport
parking garage, and I set down my suitcase while he listened for his
dog.
Theo has a small, wool-colored dog of a French Madagascar breed who
goes almost everywhere with him and is named Murphy.
In a minute, he
picked up Murphy’s bark and we homed in on it.
The dog barked more
encouragingly the closer we got to the car.
A
drive of about forty minutes brought us to Theo’s outdoor workshop, on a
man-made hill in the suburb of Ypenburg, near Delft.
The hill is on
land that used to be a military airport, and serves as a sound barrier
between a highway on one side and apartment houses on the other.
A sort
of no man’s zone, it remains mostly unoccupied, so local officials let
Theo use it to assemble and store his Strandbeests.
The yellow PVC
tubing the animals are made of bleaches to bone white in the sun; wrecks
of defunct Strandbeests lay in the hilltop grass like heaps of old
bones.
A few newer, ready-to-travel models stood in a line next to the
storage container where Theo keeps thirty miles of plastic tubes for
future use.
Others of his more recent animals were absent, returning
from an exhibition in Japan.
Theo
is sixty-three.
His collar-length white hair frames his head like two S
shapes facing each other, his eyes are china blue, and he has a wide,
guileless smile.
That he is handsome contributes to the success of his
videos.
When he is working, and at other times, he wears a well-tailored
purple corduroy jacket narrow at the waist and flared below.
His
jacket, unrestrained hair, long legs, and antic energy often give him
the look of a storybook sorcerer.
He is somewhat deaf—the result, he
says, of spending so much of his forties hanging next to the loud
engines of the para-planes he loved to fly in many places, but mainly
over the North Sea coastline. His country’s famous landscape, intensely
cultivated and flat as water, floors a vast column of cloud-filled sky,
and the image of a younger Theo careening around up there in his sketchy
flying machines somehow still is part of him.
Numerous specimen of the Strandbeest evolution on music of Khachaturian's Spartacus.
It open the archives of fossils.
Theo Jansen's work since 1990.
He tries to make new forms of live on beaches.
His animals get their energy from the wind so they don't have to eat.
In the future he wants to put out in herds.
It open the archives of fossils.
Theo Jansen's work since 1990.
He tries to make new forms of live on beaches.
His animals get their energy from the wind so they don't have to eat.
In the future he wants to put out in herds.
In
fact, Theo’s first important work was a sky piece.
In 1980, he made a
flying saucer from plastic sheeting on a light frame.
The saucer was
lens-shaped, about fifteen feet across, and carried beneath it a plastic
paint bucket that emitted outer-space-like beeps.
One afternoon, he and
some friends filled the flying saucer with helium and launched it over
Delft.
Immediately, a local sensation resembling the “War of the Worlds”
episode (if less frantic and more civilized) ensued.
The object he had
made looked and behaved as a flying saucer is expected to.
It hovered,
rose, darted (with the wind), went in and out of clouds.
The police gave
chase, people ran from their houses to look up, authorities reported
that the object was moving at great speeds, it was said to be as big as a
nuclear reactor, etc.—all satisfying developments, from Theo’s point of
view.
After exciting the population and inscribing in thousands of
memories its flight through the spacious skies of Delft, the saucer
vanished in the direction of Belgium.
When the author of the event was
revealed, he got a lot of press.
The experience ruined him, he says, for
the landscape paintings he had been doing before.
I
was thinking it must be strange for a landscape painter to live in a
landscape that was fixed in oil and ratified permanently by the great
Dutch painters of the seventeenth century.
From Theo’s man-made hilltop,
for example, I could see several familiar-looking towers, including the
fifteenth-century church steeple that appears in Vermeer’s “View of
Delft” (1660).
I could also see a small flock of storks flapping to the
horizon, and a canal lined with possibly invasive reeds, and blunt-faced
trucks on the highway, and red rooftops, and rows of thin, dark trees
like sawteeth.
The only other structure as tall as the old steeple or
the towers was the two poles holding up the golden arches of a
McDonald’s restaurant.
With binoculars, I might have picked out the
crows and ravens that throng around the sign and descend on the garbage
cans in the McDonald’s parking lot.
My hotel was near the McDonald’s, it
turned out, and I observed the birds close up later.
Theo
showed me around his small on-site workshop.
It was filled with tools
like vises, saws, clamps, and heat guns for softening the plastic tubes.
On perforated wallboards, tools hung neatly inside their black
magic-marker outlines.
From a workbench Theo picked up a piece of
three-quarter-inch PVC tube about two feet long.
He said this was the
basic element in the Strandbeests’ construction, like protein in living
things.
“I have known about these tubes all my life,” he told me.
(He
speaks good English.)
“Building codes in Holland require that electrical
wiring in buildings go through conduit tubes like these.
There are
millions of miles of these tubes in Holland.
You see they are a cheese
yellow when they are new—a good color for Holland.
The tubes’ brand name
used to be Polyvolt, now it is Pipelife.
When we were little, we used
to do this with them.”
He took a
student notebook, tore out a sheet of graph paper, rolled it into a
tight cone, wet the point of the cone with his tongue, tore off the base
of the cone so it fit snugly into the tube, raised the tube to his
lips, blew, and sent the paper dart smack into the wall, fifteen feet
away.
He is the unusual kind of adult who can do something he used to do
when he was nine and not have it seem at all out of place.
“I believe
it is now illegal for children in Dutch schools to have these tubes,” he
said.
Theo grew
up in Scheveningen, a small port city just north of Delft.
His father, a
farmer, moved the family there after losing his farm during the Second
World War.
In Scheveningen, the family supported itself mainly by taking
in German tourists who wanted to vacation at the beach, just across the
street from the Jansens’ apartment.
Theo remembers his mother waking
him and his six brothers and four sisters early in the morning during
the summers so they could deflate the air mattresses they had slept on
and get them out of the living room before the guests occupying the
family’s beds woke up.
He went to primary and secondary schools in
Scheveningen, studied physics at the Delft University of Technology, and
left in 1974 without a degree.
After
university, he became an artist and did other things, like work in a
medical laboratory.
His landscape paintings, which he spiced up by
putting in women wearing only underwear, had some success—“They were
vulgar paintings, but they sold”—and after the flying-saucer episode
ended them he invented a light-sensitive automatic painting gun that he
demonstrated at local fairs.
The Delft city government gave him a
subsidized studio in a downtown building converted for artists, which he
still uses.
In it he built a large pair of feathered wings and
propelled himself through the air by means of them while suspended on
cables.
He had several shows of his work in Dutch museums and galleries,
marking one opening with the launch of a twenty-foot-long rocket he’d
made.
In 1990, in a column he was
then writing for De Volkskrant, a national newspaper, he warned that
rising sea levels might re-flood Holland and reduce its size to what it
had been in medieval times.
As a solution, he proposed to build animals
that would toss sand in the air so that it would land on and augment the
seaside dunes.
What he envisioned were self-propelled creatures that
would restore the balance between water and land, the way beavers do in
Dutch marshes.
He promised to devote a year to the project, and it has
occupied him exclusively ever since.
While fooling around with plastic
conduit tubes at a building-supply store, he realized that they were the
perfect raw material.
More even than the Strandbeests, the
possibilities he saw for the tubes changed his life, he says.
He
divides his different generations of Strandbeests into time periods
like geologic eras.
In the earliest period, he was taping the tubes
together. He calls this the Gluton Period (1990-91).
The first
tube-and-tape creation, Animaris Vulgaris, could not stand up, only lie
on its back and move its legs.
In the next period, the Chorda Epoch
(1991-93), he began to connect the tubes with nylon zip strips, a great
improvement on tape, and he built Animaris Currens Vulgaris, the first
animal that could stand and walk.
To figure out the best way to make the
legs, he ran a genetic algorithm for leg design on his computer, and it
suggested a foot that pivoted at the ankle and a double-jointed leg
that allowed the foot to stay on the ground as long as possible before
lifting for the next step.
Basic Strandbeest design now uses multiple
pairs of these legs set on a central crankshaft, which produces a
galloping-herd effect.
Later
refinements added sails, a shovel arm for tossing up sand, pneumatic
power with fanlike blades pumping air into plastic bottles for
pressurized storage, “nerve cells,” which can detect when the animal is
in shallow water, and directional cells, which count steps and cause the
animal to back up when it is about to go into the sea.
As of now, none
of these technologies work very reliably.
Theo says he envies the
original Creator’s supply of countless millions of years for animal
evolution, and is sure he could make perfect beach animals, given that
much time.
“The walking
Strandbeest is a body snatcher,” he told me, while disassembling one for
transport.
“It charms people and then uses them so they can’t do
anything else but follow, and I am the worst victim, you could say.
All
the time I think about them.
Always I have a new plan, but then it is
corrected by the requirements of the tubes.
They dictate to me what to
do.
At the end of my working day, I am almost always depressed.
Mine is
not a straight path like an engineer’s, it’s not A to B. I make a very
curly road just by the restrictions of goals and materials.
A real
engineer would probably solve the problem differently, maybe make an
aluminum robot with motor and electric sensors and all that.
But the
solutions of engineers are often much alike, because human brains are
much alike.
Everything we think can in principle be thought by someone
else.
The real ideas, as evolution shows, come about by chance.
Reality
is very creative.
Maybe that is why the Strandbeests appear to be alive,
and charm us.
The Strandbeests themselves have let me make them.”
Theo’s
beach headquarters is a thatch-roofed cabaret-restaurant called De Fuut
(the Grebe).
ts owner, Leo Van Der Vegt, likes to have him and his
Strandbeests on the sand beside his restaurant’s outdoor dining area,
and sometimes he picks up the tab for Theo and his entourage.
The
Scheveningen beach is huge.
From the dunes to the water it’s at least a
football field, and maybe half again as far at low tide.
In one
direction, the beach stretches more than a mile to the piers of
Scheveningen harbor, where a monumental wind turbine rotates
counterclockwise against the sky.
In the other direction, the beach
dwindles out of sight to the faint silhouetted cargo cranes of
Rotterdam.
Along the middle of the sand, parallel to the shore, runs a
row of metal-and-plastic trash barrels set in concrete foundations.
Toward Rotterdam, these barrels extend onward until the row becomes a
dotted line.
As a visual reference, they are modernist and daunting, and
I’ve noticed that photographers and filmmakers who record the
Strandbeests’ ramblings try to keep them out of the frame.
On
a Saturday morning, Theo loaded several Strandbeests on a rented
flatbed trailer and the roof of his Volvo and drove to beach ramp No. 10
with the wind whistling in the tubes.
His friends Hans and Loek came
along to help.
Hans teaches language skills to vocational students and
Loek takes photographs, teaches high-school and university students
about the Strandbeests, and sometimes works as Theo’s assistant (paid).
At the beach, four admirers of Theo’s who are in the master’s program at
the Delft University of Technology were waiting for him: Esra, a young
woman from Istanbul; Baver, a young man from Ankara; Marta, from
Portugal; and Miguel, from Monterrey, Mexico. All spoke English, the
language in which classes in the D.U.T. master’s program are taught.
With Theo and his friends, they unloaded the Strandbeests and carried or
frog-marched them half a mile from the ramp to the restaurant.
A
strong onshore breeze was blowing, causing flags to point inland.
Waves
broke and foamed.
Dark shadows of incoming clouds sped over the white
sand and carried the dunes in a blink, like the waves’ secret
intentions.
Windblown sand was whipping along at ankle level and leaving
little drifts behind pebbles.
The few other people on the beach
appeared tiny in the immensity, except for the para-surfers, whose
scoop-shaped chutes bucked and pirouetted and lifted the riders
sometimes twenty feet above the waves.
Theo
was toting a long-handled wooden mallet of the sort usually associated
with circus tents. Employing roundhouse overhead blows, he pounded metal
stakes into the sand and tethered Strandbeests to them.
One of the
animals was a worm that isn’t wind-powered but writhes violently when
infused with compressed air; he left it unstaked.
A large Strandbeest
seemed about to blow over rather than walk away, and he adjusted its
tether to hold it up.
Another, Animaris Longus, was light and limber
enough so that it appeared on the verge of trotting off at any moment on
the breeze.
Theo laid this one on its side and staked it down.
He then
went among the Strandbeests, tinkering while the blown sand hissed
against them and the wind made them creak and strain.
Murphy, his dog,
followed him and watched everything he did.
Beach
trials the next morning were called off owing to rain, so I took a
train to Amsterdam and visited the Rijksmuseum.
Most of the museum is
closed for renovations, and its most in-demand paintings have been
concentrated in just thirteen rooms—sort of a Rijksmuseum’s Greatest
Hits.
I got there at opening time and for twenty minutes or so it wasn’t
crowded.
Such a mass of visual sublimity all in one place tramples the
viewer like the legs of a thousand Strandbeests, but I did have one
thought, despite my dizziness, as I paused in a nook of
seventeenth-century landscapes.
I had never been to Holland before, but
the minute I arrived I felt as if I had been.
I was comfortable in it.
The reason, I now saw, was that I had previously habituated myself to
the place during long contemplations of Dutch landscapes in American
museums.
I was like those first-time visitors to New York or Los Angeles
who immediately know their way around from having seen the cities so
much in movies and on TV.
Soon,
the visual trampling administered by the Rijksmuseum’s greatest art was
matched by a literal trampling from fierce tour groups speaking every
language, and I caromed into Gallery No. 12, a dark room featuring the
Rembrandt masterpiece “The Night Watch.”
Packed multitudes stood there
in the dark letting the gigantic and glorious and well-lit painting
blast them.
Just off that room was a smaller one, not part of the
Greatest Hits, with an unassuming show of landscape sketches on paper.
People were passing through it without stopping. I ducked in and took a
breath.
The show, “Dunes: Holland’s Wilderness,” was about the shore
where I’d just been.
The introductory label said, “Holland’s landscape
is man-made.
Only the sands and the dunes along the coast are more or
less nature’s creation.
They are our natural defense against the sea. . .
.
The earliest known drawings of Holland’s landscape are views of the
dunes near Haarlem recorded by Hendrick Goltzius around 1600.
Many
landscape specialists followed in his footsteps. . . .
Their work shows
the wide, endless space, the quiet and the wildness.”
All
the drawings were sketchbook size, done in pencil, ink, or black chalk.
If the giant Rembrandt in the adjoining room was jet-engine powerful,
his little horizontal sketch here, of a shore landscape, was moving for
its simplicity and self-effacement.
Some of the dune sketches showed the
blades of windmills against the sky; the main purpose of Dutch
windmills wasn’t so much to mill anything as to pump the incoming sea
back out.
A Jacob van Ruisdael sketch with a heavy shading of cloud in
one corner showed more clearly the same quality of torque that his
paintings often have.
In a vitrine, a leather-bound sketchbook of Gerard
ter Borch the younger lay open to a black-chalk drawing of a tangled
patch of brush on a hillside.
Such a no-count, lovely piece of ground!
The drawing dated from 1634, though it could have been done in the
Scheveningen dunes, or maybe West Texas, just last week.
The
weather did not let up, but Theo went ahead with beach trials the
following afternoon anyway. Lena Herzog had arrived from New York, and
Alexander Schlichter, a German documentary filmmaker who has been making
a film about Theo for ten years, had driven up from Hannover.
The four
D.U.T. students were there, and Theo’s twenty-year-old son, Zach, and
his seventeen-year-old daughter, Divera, and Loek, Theo’s sometime
assistant.
Beach passersby and restaurant patrons and their dogs came to
watch and stood around and moved on.
Almost everybody took photographs.
Lena Herzog stood on a stepladder, and crawled under the Strandbeests,
and lay on her back on the wet sand for her shots.
Alexander Schlichter
erected a tripod for his camera, and then, since I was doing apparently
nothing, asked if I would be his soundman.
Taken by surprise, I gave a
polite and complicated answer that was not “Yes.”
Theo
was devoting all his energy to getting a Strandbeest he called Animaris
Gubernare up and moving.
This colossus had fan-blade-driven air pumps,
ninety-six plastic 1.5-litre bottles to store the compressed air, and a
stegosaurus-like nose.
Sand had drifted over its many feet and become
soggy with the rain.
Blown sand had got into its joints.
Theo prodded
it, repaired some broken tubes, fooled with the blades, sprayed the
joints with lubricant, coaxed.
His hair was flying.
His fingernails had
become chipped and there was a scrape on his forehead.
Really, all that
gets the Strandbeests moving is the enthusiasm of this one guy, and he
was in the middle of an agon.
He said to Alexander Schlichter, “If we
can get even eleven seconds of videotape today we’ll be doing great.”
But
that was not happening.
Theo had us all assemble on the sides of the
monster Strandbeest to lift it out of the soft, soggy sand and take it
farther down the beach to where the sand was smooth and hard.
When we
lifted it, it felt inert, like a heap of wet sand itself.
We carried it,
its legs walked stumblingly and unwillingly, we set it down, we carried
it again.
Two feet burrowed toe first into the sand and stuck, causing
shafts on the corresponding legs to break.
Theo told us to carry it back
to where we had begun and the disabled legs trailed brokenly.
Theo
often says that he does not know if he is a sculptor or an engineer or
what.
His Strandbeests have been in exhibitions all over the
world—Munich, London, Taipei, Madrid, Tokyo, Seoul—and he does not care
whether they are in art museums or science centers; they have appeared
in both.
My theory about Theo is that he is secretly a landscape artist.
His flying saucer was a landscape piece that for a few minutes brought
the classical Delft sky up to date.
His Strandbeests, magnets for
filming and photography, are really decoys to get us to notice the
dunes, sea, and sky.
The endless painful artifice involved in the
Strandbeests’ construction is his version of the great painters’
technical skill.
They painted windmills, he builds wild new kinds of
windmills for the most acute observers to photograph.
Artists
produced more landscape paintings in the northern Netherlands in the
seventeenth century than in any other time or place in the world,
probably.
Why?
I think the reason goes back to Holland’s landscape being
man-made.
The Dutch made it and they liked to look at it.
They had a
good workman’s justifiable pride; the landscape paintings were like the
“after” pictures of a successful home-improvement project.
Anyone who
has stood back and admired a lawn he has just raked knows the feeling.
Theo’s Strandbeests, whose long-range purpose is to restore Holland’s
dunes, attempt to compress centuries of Dutch experience; ideally, he
would remake the landscape and record it all in one career.
And since
the Dutch think constantly about their always challenged lowland, he
falls in line with some deep historic impulses.
Chances are, after all,
that soon the seas really will rise.
Theo’s ambition is civic-minded and
admirably high—to create something beautiful and save his country.
Beyond that, he gets the rest of us thinking about the actual world, and
what it’s going to be like, and how humans will actually live in it.
Torque:
the beach at Scheveningen seemed to be ruled by it.
Everything was
turning, inward-spiralling.
The northeast wind skimmed the waves along
the beach like pinwheel blades, the giant wind turbine above the harbor
rotated, the para-surfers’ chutes twisted this way and that, the ropes
on the masts of the catamarans in drydock beside the dunes snaked back
and forth and banged their metal parts on the hollow aluminum with a
racket that could frighten off wicked spirits.
In shoreline
indentations, heaps of sea foam accumulated and shivered, and clumps of
foam kept blowing free and spinning across the sand, assuming corkscrew
shapes and in the next instant abrading themselves away.
The speed of
their transition from material object to nothing happened so fast it
made me queasy.
Theo worked on,
fixing, altering, ducking in and out of the huge Strandbeest, searching
for replacement parts in plastic storage crates he had brought.
On an
outdoor table, the owner of the restaurant set out glass mugs of tea
with fresh mint leaves.
In between taking photos and standing around and
occasionally pitching in to help, all of us supernumeraries had plenty
of chance for conversation.
Lena told me again how much she admires
Theo, and how he reminds her of her father, a Russian geophysicist who
lives in Yekaterinburg and who has invented a revolutionary new method
of petroleum exploration, which, she says, the international oil
companies have resisted.
Miguel, the D.U.T. student from Mexico, said he
loved living in Holland but worried a lot about the violence in
Monterrey, where many of his friends and relatives are.
Baver, the young
man from Ankara, said that Holland’s public transportation was vastly
better than Turkey’s.
Alexander, the filmmaker, described a documentary
he was working on that concerned the creation of artificial life-forms,
such as a fish that contains plant DNA and can feed itself by floating
in the sun and photosynthesizing.
Esra
and Marta, the students from Istanbul and Portugal (respectively), said
they were working together on a research project about Theo and the
importance of the suspension of disbelief to the creative process.
Like
most other kids who know about Theo, they had first encountered him in
videos (many of them made by Alexander) on the Internet.
In their rapt
regard for him, there appeared no disbelief, suspended or otherwise.
For
a moment, Theo took a break and joined the onlookers.
He was
frustrated, vexed, abstracted with technical snafus, and unhappy that
some of us had to leave soon and would not get to see Animaris Gubernare
lumber off into the sunset (as it did successfully the following day).
Then he smiled his sparkling, camera-ready smile.
He was having a
wonderful time.
Theo
went back to work, and the rest of us continued standing around.
Earlier in the day, he had taken the smaller Strandbeest, Animaris
Longus, and moved it onto the smooth sand, maybe just to get it out of
the way.
It was a simple, elegant construction of triangular elements in
a pyramidal shape supported by two groups of six legs on a central
crankshaft.
Animaris Longus had no sails, but was light enough so that a
wind could move it without them.
From a distance, it looked like one of
those folding pole-and-clothesline contraptions you hang laundry on.
This
Strandbeest stood there for a while, unnoticed.
The shiny, wet sand
held its reflection.
Some new customers arrived and sat at one of the
restaurant’s outdoor tables.
A minute later, a stronger gust came up,
and the apparent clothes-drying rack suddenly went tiptoeing across the
sand.
The people at the table did a triple take and began pointing and
laughing, and talking in Dutch.
“Dat ding is aan het lopen! ”
(“That
thing is walking!”) they cried.
