How This Artist Makes Sculptures Out of Old Typewriter Parts

[curious string music]

When I was 10, I wanted to take apart

my mom's Underwood typewriter.

And it was really pretty,

different kinds of materials, shiny black paint,

and chrome and nickel-plated parts.

It looked very organic

and then I just wanted to see what was inside of it.

I finally got a chance to take one apart

when I was in my 20s.

And I decided that, you know,

I'd try to make something out of it.

I am Jeremy Mayer and I make sculptures

out of typewriter parts.

[Narrator] For more than two decades

artist Jeremy Mayer has been disassembling typewriters

piece by piece and then carefully turning them

into remarkably detailed sculptures

of birds, insects, and people.

I think the reason that I do living things

with the typewriters is that

the typewriter has to be powered by us,

it has to start with our fingers.

[tapping]

So it's based entirely entirely on our actions,

on our shape. [grinding]

The designs of the components match a lot

of different things in nature.

I knew you had, I just saw that the first time

I opened one up and spread it out.

It all looks like pieces of plants

or cell structure or feathers.

It didn't make any sense to do anything else with it.

I think the best path for a machine to take, you know,

path of entropy, is for it to turn back

into something that inspired it in the first place.

[Narrator] Where most might see a broken

and outdated machine, Mayer sees fingers and faces and more.

You know, that's a wing.

It's in, you know, by itself,

it's an individual feather.

But what this is is a typewriter, it's a typebar.

It actually has the letters on it

and it hits the rubber platen

and transfers the letters onto the paper.

It's a raven.

The torso is, it's the back of a Royal typewriters.

You can see it here.

Royal.

This is a bell.

These are mainsprings that allow the carriage

to come back after you push it.

[Narrator] Mayer makes his pieces within

a strict set of creative rules.

The first, only typewriter pieces to make the sculptures.

Oh, I had completely disassembled the typewriter

down to its most basic components.

It'll look an Erector set or LEGOs or some kind of puzzle.

So, I figured if I just do the hardest possible thing,

and that was just to assemble it as it was.

[Narrator] The second, as little modification

to the parts as possible.

I used to alter pieces more,

so the rule that I wouldn't alter or drill or screw or cut

kind of came later.

I'm still working around that one.

Like, if I do any of those things, you can't see it.

[Narrator] The third, the only way

to assemble the sculptures is

by using original typewriter parts.

Wires, bolts, and nuts.

No tape, no glue, no welding.

And if I didn't have these rules,

I think you'd see that.

You'd be able to see that I didn't spend enough time.

I could just weld this stuff together

and you would look at that and you'd say,

well, it made it to this certain shape.

But, for me, that's not enough.

The interconnectedness of the parts is interesting to me,

and the more rules I have on it,

the more surprised I am by the outcome.

[Narrator] Mayer's rules mean that constructing

a sculpture can take a lot of time.

Even the raven, it took about a month to do it.

From typewriter to sculpture,

the way I get there is, first, obviously,

I gotta get the typewriters.

I have friends who repair them

who give me their broken ones.

Sometimes people will text me

and text me a picture of a typewriter

and say, hey, this is 50 bucks.

And I say, yeah, talk 'em down to 20.

I'll take it.

So then when I have time, I take them apart,

or if I need them, if I need a specific component,

I'll take it apart.

Then I have to take those pieces, you know, organize them.

[Narrator] Mayer keeps the little bits

loosely organized around his studio.

Lots of keys.

Like, tons and tons of keys.

And then I just keep everything labeled.

But eventually, it all winds up on the floor.

Once it hits the floor, then I need to keep it organized.

When it's on the floor, it's next to things it's related to,

so I have ideas about what I wanna do with it next.

When I start to assemble,

if I have a formula, I start to use it.

If not, then I spend a bunch of time playing around,

trying to figure out how the thing can hold its own weight.

Like this raven's gotta stand on its own feet.

So, that took a while to figure out.

You know, how to balance this whole thing.

So there's a lot of assembly

and then disassembly and then reassembly.

Over and over again, I could assemble an entire arm

on a full-scale figure and it doesn't quite look right,

I have to take the whole thing apart.

[Narrator] Mayer may spend a year or more

working on his larger sculptures.

Full-scale human figures usually have components

from about 50 machines in them.

These are the little bars that the typebars rest on.

When you hit the key, the typewriter comes up

and when it falls back down, it rests on this curved thing,

and each one of these is from one Smith Corona typewriter.

I had to collect that same typewriter

for about probably six years

before I could even make those ribs.

[Narrator] And Mayer's rules can lead

to incredible frustration.

If I were younger, there would be

a lot more holes in the walls in here

from throwing tools or throwing stuff.

But I don't do that anymore,

I just kind of breathe through it

and it'll figure itself out eventually.

I've always thought the art that's hardest to make

is trying not to get made.

In the same way that particles

kind of try to avoid detection.

It takes increasing amounts of energy

to see smaller and smaller particles.

I think art's kind of the same way,

that if it's difficult to reach your vision,

the harder it is, the harder it'll fight you.

And the harder you have to push through that.

[Narrator] And injuries are also common.

I cut myself every day.

I don't know if I'm bad it or I'm uncoordinated or what,

but well, it happens when you sharpen your screwdrivers.

But I have to sharpen them, otherwise they wouldn't work.

[Narrator] But after he's pushed through,

how does he know a piece is finished?

Sometimes I know a piece is done

just by I feel like I'm done.

It looks done, I'm happy with it.

Sometimes I know right when I do

that last twist of the screw.

Sometimes I don't it until

I walk in the room the next morning.

But the last full-scale human figure I did,

I knew when the Snapchat filter for the face worked

and it applied the filter.

And I was, okay, that works, that's good, that's done.

[Narrator] That kind of fidelity

has made Mayer's work sought after by collectors.

Different people like my work for different reasons.

Doctors and people into biology, anatomy, like my work.

The hands are just made from keys.

They're just like the hand,

they're a mirror image of the physical process

of what your fingers do.

I think when they're anatomically accurate,

it's a good base for a personality.

Like that bird, it's definitely just a raven,

but if you just caught it out of the corner of your eye,

you'd be waiting for it do something.

You'd be waiting for it to jump.

It has a presence there.

When I do the anatomy accurately,

then that's a good base for creating

like a personality for the piece

over the top a bit.

[Narrator] Many of his patrons also work in tech,

which might seem odd at first

because, after all, their industry essentially

killed the typewriter.

I think it has something to do with the keyboard,

but it's also, I think, for tech people,

a way to look backward and say,

here's something we've kept.

This is part of the seed of this good idea

that we have about moving forward.

[Narrator] One might expect after more than 20 years

of working with typewriters,

that Mayer would be an excellent typist

with a love of the analog writing style.

No, I'm a terrible typist.

I hate typing on typewriters.

I'd rather write if I'm gonna write somebody a letter.

[Narrator] And though Mayer's work

is entirely typewriter based,

he is not precious about the old machines.

Another reason people are interested in the typewriter,

like, I'll tell them I take apart typewriters

and they go, oh, I don't know how I feel about that.

Like, there's this sorrow, this, you know,

we don't feel bad for the machine,

we feel bad for us.

We feel bad for something that we, we say,

oh, we shouldn't destroy that yet

'cause we don't know what we're missing.

I kinda do know what we're missing,

that's the point of doing this is that,

oh, I wanna keep this, I wanna throw this away,

this is junk, this was a terrible typewriter,

it shouldn't even be used anymore.

This one's really nice, this one's beautiful,

or this one works really well.

I decided that I'm the person who gets to do that

in this context.

[Narrator] And while he doesn't enjoy typing,

Mayer hasn't lost interest in finding feathers and faces

among the spacebars and ribbons of the old machines.

The only reason I can think of that I keep

working with this stuff is that it just,

it doesn't get boring.

It's still interesting to me.

[curious orchestral music]

[funky rock music]