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Nina Beier Automobile, 2017
A pair of remote control vehicles (Ferrari), Human Hair
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Charles Ray Unpainted Sculpture, 1997
‘Charles Ray’s Unpainted Sculpture, from 1997, takes the form of a destroyed Pontiac Grand Am whose body, upholstery, chassis and tires are all made of fiberglass covered in a low-gloss grey finish. It sits silently in a giant gallery, each of its damaged parts joined into an impassive whole. The downbeat, colorless surface, and the single material used to imitate metal, rubber and fabric, render the car staggeringly mute. It weighs a ton but looks weightless. The accidental form of the ruined car has become a seamless, unspoiled sculpture: a ghost of itself, but an apotheosis too.’
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Ryoji Ikeda A [For 100 Cars], 2017
‘On Sunday October 15, 2017, Red Bull Music Academy and Ryoji Ikeda presented the world’s largest synth orchestra. The project brought together 100 car owners from the Los Angeles area, who performed the piece by playing their car soundsystems via a sine wave synthesizer that Ikeda developed in collaboration with RBMA’s Tatsuya Takahashi and Berlin-based firm E-RM Erfindungsbüro.’
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Richard Prince American Prayer, 2007
‘Having long cultivated his status as a renegade, Richard Prince frequently traffics in American symbols of rebellion, such as motorcycles and cowboys. It is not surprising, then, that in 1987, during an extended stay in Los Angeles, he trained his focus on the subculture surrounding the American car. He began painting on muscle-car hoods—or more specifically, fiberglass reproductions of steel originals.’
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Peter Gronquist Self-Portrait, 2013
‘An effigy of the artist is suspended in midair after apparently being catapulted through the windshield of an actual car by the force of a head-on collision with a deer. A Converse sneaker has been knocked off one of his feet, and shards of glass hang ominously around him on strings. Gronquist explained that the project took months to complete, and involved finding the old car on Craigslist and discovering the difficulty of smashing it up (he showed ARTINFO footage of slamming it into a tree). Gronquist said the idea of depicting a crash as a self-portrait came to him in a near dream state several years ago, and is reminiscent of the way the creative process feels sometimes.’
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Daniel Arsham Eroded Delorean, 2018
Stainless steel, glass reinforced plastic, quartz crystal, pyrite, paint
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Dirk Skreber Untitled (Crash 1), 2009
‘Dirk purchased a red Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder and a black Hyundai Tiburon with the intention of smashing them. He then found a vehicle-testing facility in Ohio and choreographed both accidents, before exhibiting them at the Saatchi Gallery in London. “It was fun to do, awesome and super-intense,” says Skreber. “If you pass an accident and see a car like this, it’s occupied by tragic thoughts for the people that would be involved, and you might see blood. This work gives you an opportunity to see the things like in a dream. It’s clean and polished and abstract.”’
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Suzanne Lacy Underground, 1993
‘Underground is part of a larger work titled Auto On the Edge of Time (1993-1994). Lacy worked with the Greater Pittsburgh Women’s Center and Shelter to create three sculpture cars representing different aspects of family violence. The cars were placed in Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers park as part of a yearly art festival. In addition, a 180-foot railroad track was installed, leading to a phone booth. A poem describing a woman who went underground to escape violence was inscribed on the railroad ties, readable only by walking them. At the phone booth, visitors could select from three options: talking to a live person, listening to audiotapes of women who left abusive situations, and an invitation to record your own story.’
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Thomas Hirschhorn Spinoza-Car, 2012
‘The work “Spinoza-Car” is the work of a fan. It is the work of a fan of the philosopher Spinoza – this fan is me.
‘I decided to do a customized car, as thousands of people do out of love, commitment and admiration – not for Spinoza, not for a philosopher – but for a football-club, a rock star or other objects. Beside the fact of using a car – because I love cars – what links me to any other fan is not the shared object of love but the act of love, what I share is the commitment and admiration. A car is a universal form, it is also what I call a ’Megaform’. A ‘Megaform’ is a form which possesses proprieties beyond a specific function, a ‘Megaform’ is form as such.
‘There are two different kinds of elements in the “Spinoza-Car”: I call them the ‘spiritual’ ones and the ‘profanes’ ones. The ‘spiritual’ ones are all the commonly-used inscriptions and testimonies of love made of cardboard, books and other objects, and the ‘profane’ ones are all the drinking glasses taped to the car.
‘During his life Spinoza was a lens grinder. By using the glass-elements, I wanted to give a form to this other activity of Spinoza. These drinking glasses stand for the ‘profane’, the ‘profane’ Spinoza himself used to work with, beside his ‘spiritual’ writing as a philosopher.
‘I love the philosophy of Spinoza, and above all, his book “Ethics”. I love “Ethics” for its logic: to follow his implacable logic through the “Proposition”, “Definition”, “Scholium” and “Corollary” – is a moment of absolute intensity and never ending beauty. I love Spinoza for his universality, his strength and for the fact that he conceived the notion “God” beyond religion. I love Spinoza’s invention of affects of joy and affects of sadness. And I love that Spinoza, as each real philosopher, established a form. As an artist this concerns me directly because form – which is essential in art is also important in philosophy. Even if I cannot – for the moment – understand everything in Spinoza’s thinking – I can be touched by its form.
‘I am for ever a fan of Spinoza, I – as every fan – love everything concerning Spinoza. I love him unconditionally, therefore I decided to do the “Spinoza-Car”.’
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Damián Ortega Cosmic Thing, 2002
Volkswagen Beetle 1983, stainless steel wire, acrylic
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Jannick Deslauriers Sentence, souffle et linceul, 2018
‘Jannick Deslauriers builds elaborate and often life-size pieces of machinery by sewing together yards of silk, aluminum mesh, and tulle. Each fabric she uses is transparent, which speaks to the hidden politics lurking behind commonly used objects and goods. One of her latest works, Sentence, souffle et linceul, is a full-scale replica of a demolished car. The translucent vehicle is slumped to the right, its broken form further exaggerated through a composition of soft and easily manipulated materials.’
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Ron Arad In Reverse, 2015
‘When the Israeli-born Arad was a child, he nearly lost his father to a car accident; his dad, driving a Fiat Topolino 500c Giardiniera, found himself plowed over by a garbage truck. The destroyed Fiats on display here are inspired by the fear and rupture of that incident—but these have been flattened, by a 500-ton press in the Netherlands, to a cartoonish perfection. There’s no crash that could’ve produced them.’
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Madeleine Berkhemer Milly’s Maserati, 2004
‘A #Ghibli all wrapped up in pink stockings’
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Jordan Griska Wreck, 2016
‘Reflecting its surroundings with a splintered and imperfect view is Jordan Griska‘s 2016 sculpture Wreck, a non-functional model of a Mercedes Benz S550 made entirely from reflective stainless steel. The piece, which is composed of nearly 12,000 individual parts, is meant to highlight both luxury and mortality from a removed perspective.’
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Lorenzo Quinn Vroom Vroom, 2011
‘A Fiat 500 is held by a big strong hand. The hand is four meters high and made of aluminium. This huge hand make the Fiat 500 look like a toy car.’
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Subodh Gupta Everyrthing is Inside, 2004
‘The sliced-off black and yellow taxi roof is seemingly sunk into the marble floor under the weight of its rope-tied bundles. “Flights back from Europe or Dubai are full of Indians with these packets, so tightly tied that even the Customs can’t get into them,” says Gupta. “I was thinking, ‘What are they carrying? What are the dreams they bear, as well as the possessions?’”’
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Erwin Wurm Various, 1993 -2004
‘Wurm thinks the creation of sculpture is adding and detracting material to an object. In all his works, he achieves this by layering clothes over each other or creating fat, inflated, or obese objects. In his series titled Fat Cars, Wurm created numerous inflated, tubby, life-size sculptures that protuberate like overfilled sacks, trying to create the look of fatness.’
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Sylvie Fleury Skin Crime 3, 1997
compressed car, enamel
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Ivan Puig Hasta Las Narices, 2004
‘A white volkswagen bug has drowned in a liquid of the same color in Mexican artist Ivan Puig’s 2004 installation hasta las narices, which means “up to the nose”.’
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César Dauphine, 1959
‘The first Compressions dirigées, with which César shocked the public in 1960, used car bodies that were ripe for the scrap-heap, mechanically crushed into prismatic bodies. The Compressions assert themselves as new, expressive products with their sharply extruded ridges, deep, broad folds, dynamized line and surface ornament and an impressive play of light.’
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Olafur Eliasson BMW H2R, 2007
‘Starting point was a hydrogen-powered BMW H2R car that was delivered to the studio in 2005. Before the actual form development was commenced, a series of conversations with architects, scientists, designers, and theorists were initiated to gain background information. Focus was on mobility, perception, design, and architecture. The car was considered not as an object, but as part of a complex set of relations and exchanges with the surroundings. Investigations were made into surfaces and patterns for a car structure that would change according to the viewer’s movement and perspective. These resulted in various tests with ice, first deploying nets hanging from the ceiling of a specially made, yellow geodesic dome, situated in the garden of Studio Olafur Eliasson, which could be cooled down to below 0°C. These tests led to a double-layer skin, consisting of welded steel rods and mirrors, based on a spiral geometry. Onto this structure water was sprayed that subsequently froze. The skin and icicles, growing between the two layers, were lit by monofrequency light, emitted from within. The work thus only exists in a special frozen-down environment.’
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Mark Mothersbaugh Mutatum, 2012
‘A fully fabricated Scion xD automobile has two back ends and no front.’
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Sergey Shabohin Depending on the Path: Autoproject, 2009
‘Sergey Shabohin prepared this project specially for the unique to the Belarusian contemporary art opening of the gallery of modern art “Ў”. He put a car in front of the gallery, decorated it with the symbol of the gallery, reminiscent of the one that marks a car intended to teach driving. The gallery asked visitors to fill in ballot papers and throw in the car. To do this the visitors lowered the auto glass. Thus, the car turned into a ballot box. The questions on the ballot concerned the painful issues in the Belarusian contemporary art. Voting results were announced later.’
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Juan Muñoz Loaded Car, 1998
‘Loaded Car features a steel sedan that has been ominously upturned on its side. Approaching the car, the viewer is soon disabused of any conclusions that he or she may have initially drawn. Eviscerated of its standard components, the interior is absent of seats, dashboard, and steering wheel and is instead incongruously equipped with what appears to be a staircase and a labyrinthine system of corridors or passageways. Alien to the vehicle, but familiar to Muñoz’s oeuvre, architectural elements such as staircases, balconies, banisters, minarets and watchtowers have long preoccupied the artist and serve as cornerstones in his visual repertoire.’
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John Scott Trans Am Apocalypse No. 3, 1998–2000
‘The Trans AM is designed for the modern horseman of the apocalypse, one who rides in an era of machismo and consumerism. Covered in black house paint, the vehicle has the entire text of Revelation of St. John the Divine from the New Testament etched across its surface.’
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Edward Kienholz Five Car Stud, 1969–72
‘Edward Kienholz’s Five Car Stud (1969–72) is a powerful work that depicts the hatred many white Americans expressed toward racial minorities and interracial partnerships in the not-too-distant-past; it stands as Kienholz’s major civil rights work. In this horrifying life-size tableau, four automobiles and a pickup truck are arranged on a dirt floor in a dark room with their headlights illuminating a shocking scene: a group of white men exacting their gruesome “punishment” on an African American man whom they have discovered drinking with a white woman. Commenting on the work and its theme of racial oppression, Kienholz said at the time, “If six to one is unfair odds in my tableau, then 170 million to 20 million is sure as hell unfair odds in my country.”’
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Jitish Kallat Aquasaurus, 2008
‘like the decomposed vertebrae of a prehistoric creature, the large-scale sculptures of jitish kallat resonate with a sentiment of death and mortality that are recurrent themes throughout the indian artist’s oeuvre. kallat’s series of bone vehicles references his own photographs of cars, trucks, bicycles, and buses that had been incinerated and torched during riots. he has transformed the visual of the burnt-umber endoskeletons into intricate white sculptures mimicking fossilized remains that he describes as ‘grotesque, burlesque and arabesque in equal measure’. ‘aquasaurus’ and ‘ignitaurus’ are two examples from the series — hybrid pieces that compound the aesthetic of mammoths found in natural history museums and specialized transportation devices from an automobile-expo. the refashioned carcasses can be seen as carrying, even through a playful approach, a broad and deep inclination of extinction and death.’
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Ma Qiusha Gift/From SWX, 2018 – 19
‘For “Gift/From SWX” (2018-19) she converted a used Chery QQ car into a car with a simple exterior, a deep rumble inside and high performance features among many details. It doesn’t drive on any real roads and is always taken to the showroom or site by a trailer. In a white box, the car would be left idle, with a constant stream of fresh exhaust, like carbon dioxide from one breath to another. Audience can get into the car and put their foot on the gas pedal to make a specially adapted external megaphone that makes more noise, and imagine the scream of a supercar on the track.’
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Li Wei Once Upon a Time, 2020
‘This is a group of children, puppets, dolls; they are easily maneuverable but also apt at controlling others, we are all ‘dolls’ of human existence. Children in playgrounds imagine themselves as actively charging forward towards an ultimate victory, igniting primitive human desires of competition and possession, their first step to becoming “human”. If “childhood” is a modern invention, fairy tales are the decorative accessory of this invention. No matter fairy tales or the playground, the essential themes of “massacre”, “occupation” and “control” are present. After all, a large number of fairy tales are derived from medieval legends, with themes that are bloody, erotic, absurd and full of zeal, difficult to hide its true colors no matter how they may be adorned. The same goes for children as people.’
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Dustin Shuler 1963 VW Pelt, 1983
‘”All the cars I have skinned and, for that matter, all the cars on the road can be considered an endangered species. While I am not arguing for the preservation of this species, I notice the ‘evolution’ that is going on right before my eyes [new cars coming off the docks and old cars being scrapped] and I want to collect a few good specimens before they are gone.”‘
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Jeremy Deller Baghdad, 5 March 2007, 2010
‘Remains of a car damaged in a car bomb attack on the book market at Al-Mutanabbi Street in central Baghdad on 5th March 2007. It is missing its engine, which was removed prior to export from Iraq. Mr Deller modified the wreckage somewhat prior to exhibition, it is not now in the physical shape it was immediately post the explosion.’
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Matthew Day Jackson Chariot II (I like America and America likes me), 2007 – 2010
‘In creating Chariot II, Jackson rescued a crashed car frame from the front lawn of his cousin, racecar driver Skip Nichols. Jackson painstakingly restored and rebuilt the car as a material metaphor for transformation. The car appears to float on a spectrum of electronic lights arranged in a circular red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet sequence.’
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Céleste Boursier-Mougenot Videodrones, 2009
‘Video cameras will be installed outside the gallery to capture the ambient activity (passing vehicles, pedestrians…). The images will be broadcast live on five contiguous screens, in several combinations, overlaps and staggered patterns. The resulting effect is a kaleidoscopic flow of images translated into sound, immersing the visitor in a second reality, a familiar yet transfigured environment. The continuity of the drone and its simultaneity with the image giving rise to it create an effect of hypnotic suspense.’
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Ichwan Noor Beetle Spheres, 2016
‘These attention-grabbing orbs are 180cm3 and are a product of Noor’s personal perception towards objects of the “transportation culture.” Beetle Spheres sit precariously in their displays due to their redefined shape; they were created out of junk parts from 1953 models of Volkswagen Beetles, combined with polyester and aluminum, and then painted and shined up to look hot-off-the-press.’
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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Morning (if it still is)! Whoever Mark Ward is, I really liked his piece. Halloween is illegal in Russia because of religious pressure put on the government, but then what isn’t illegal or soon be in Russia, I guess. Well, fantasy aside, I did see that MCR rescheduled their tour, in the US at least, so hopefully you’ll get to see them even if it’s not with 100% faves. Thank you for your love, of course, on behalf of my nervous little novel. Love in the form of a Chicago-style deep-dish pizza just because I want one so badly today for some reason and because I bet you’d like one too or, if not, love chemically altering your taste buds until you want one badly as well, G. ** Misanthrope, Hi. Yes, little Milo is growing by leaps and bounds as the saying goes. I can almost have conversations with him and stuff. Although with me at least he mostly wants to talk about how weird it is to put broccoli on donuts. If ‘CMbYN’ had been funny hell, it would have been so much better (to me). Well, agenting is a job, and making money is a job’s reason for being, so, yeah. But then again I’ve never made my agents any money to speak of, so … who knows. It is one very tricky time regarding outre subject matter vs. the loud mouthed idiot portion of the public. Which is one reason why I like being a mere cult, under the radar kind of writer guy. The six months will fly by, probably. Most six month periods seem to. Otherwise peachy is no small thing. ** David Ehrenstein, Ha ha. ** Bill, My apartment’s pretty sparse except for my desk, which is Mt. Hoarder. The guy who shot photos of me for interview Magazine kept wanting to shoot me with my desk to make me look crazy or something. Hard no. Finished the stained glass post, so … fingers crossed re: your discerning eyes. ** Jamie, Hi, Jamie! I’m okay. I am still deleting files, but I got fed up with doing that, and I’ve gotten lazy, and I have to make myself stop being lazy ASAP. Oh, and guess what? I’m putting up another one of your old guest-posts tomorrow! Happy you’re jabbed, or half-jabbed, I guess. I’m hoping for a similarly springy step and not a 24-hour flu. You sound good, buddy. So happy to hear, or, well, see –but not even actually see — okay, happy to … discern that! See you in the guest-starring role tomorrow. Love, me. ** Jeff J, Hi, J. Cool that my books post stumped you. My theory on the lack of consensus re: GbV albums is (1) GbV hardcores are a passionate bunch, and (2) consensus is a bullshit fantasy concept. Yes, for instance, ‘Let’s Go Eat the Factory’ is a controversial choice for favourite in the GbV set, whose opinions I am privy to due to my membership in the very noisy and active Facebook GbV group. But the naysayers are wrong on the front, ha ha. I like ‘Mirrored Aztec’ a lot, but it is a little spotty. ‘Space Gun’ I like, of course, but, again, it’s not peak. Get the new one. I don’t know that Egyptian film. I’ll try to find it, thanks. I’ve mostly been watching so-so documentaries, I don’t know why. Last night I watched a very talky, nerdy doc about the history of Italian giallo films, which was interesting enough. I did rewatch ‘The Holy Mountain’ again after many decades as it was the assigned film of my Zoom Bookclub, and I found my opinion strangely unchanged, i.e. the first two-thirds are mostly fun because of the insane sets and set-ups, but when they go on the quest for the Holy Mountain it turns into a stupid, boring, bad Monty Python sketch. Not much else. I made a Lindsay Anderson post and wound up rewatching ‘if…’, which was, of course, great. ** Steve Erickson, I remember that cafe where we talked, yeah. Sorry it closed. Didn’t you say it was Philip Glass’s favored hang out or something? Lara Fabian was, and may still be, I don’t know, a big star in France. Everyone, New Mr. Erickson thing for your ears. Steve: ‘Over the weekend, I wrote “Raiders of the Wrong Park” I know this isn’t the hippest reference point, but it was inspired by John Williams’ RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK score, leading to the title.’ That sounds a little scary, Steve. ** Okay. Today DC’s gets transformed into a wild and exciting car lot in its own mind and … in yours? See you tomorrow.
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