The art world is a funny place where you can see eye-wateringly expensive sculptures and performance works that slowly crash muscle cars into one another. Now, a piece of performance art has captured our imagination as it sees an artist slowly but surely destroy an aging Volkswagen Bus.
The work is called Transporter and it’s the brainchild of Finnish artist Silokunnas Jukka. On its debut at Finish art institute AV-Arkki, the piece took the form of a stop-motion film that saw a white VW Transporter van rapidly disassembled into nothing.
In the film, the van starts off in pretty good condition, before dents start appearing in the bodywork, the windows smash and panels start falling off the van. The collapsed panels then begin fragmenting further until the room is filled with what can only be described as van dust. In its culmination, all that is eventually cleaned away until the room is empty.
Over the course of a little over a minute, the piece shows a full VW van disintegrating into nothing, which Jukka says represents the “true nature of time.” In a description of the piece on Forum Box, Jukka explains:
So time means movement. A movement that always goes forward. When time is a thing that never stops and cannot be touched, what is left of it?
My work is a personal journey to this invisible movement. My works aim to record and bring out the true nature of the time. To play with the impermanence of everything and the endless emptiness. However, emptiness is not the same as meaninglessness. Every action we take moves inexorably forward. They cause new reactions, events, and miraculous coincidences.
In practice, the whole process of destroying the van and turning it into art took longer than a few minutes. Much longer. Jukka spent days smashing up the exterior of the van, snapping a few pictures of his progress as he went. Once the panels were off the van, he spent even longer mercilessly cutting pieces down to tiny van fragments, I imagine it was pretty therapeutic at first and then, perhaps, a little draining.
The artwork was last displayed at Forum Box in 2023 and there aren’t yet plans to put it on show again. Instead, there’s a neat behind the scenes film of the making of the piece that Jukka shared online. It’s linked above to give you a glimpse at the work that went in to creating this piece.
If car-based artwork is your jam, then why not head here to find out more about an installation that crashed two muscle cars together at a painstaking rate, or here to see how one British artist turns trash into treasure.