If there were such a thing as an object history of the world, the 20th century
would be represented by the automobile. What an Arthurian knight had in horse,
armor and sword, a modern male has in his Mustang, his Ferrari or his Hummer.
Sir Lancelot drives a Ford GT40, Sir Gawain a Porsche 917. Arthur himself would
probably ride a Maserati, a Rolls, or a BMW painted by Andy Warhol (more on that later). Its narrative
arc could come from the movie Vanishing Point—a man alone on the open road, eventually chased by police until, inevitably,
he runs his Dodge Challenger into a roadblock of bulldozers.
From countercultural challenge through its co-option into a symbol of status
and social power, an aid in mating rituals and a source of traffic tickets, the
automobile has remained the ultimate fetish, filled with special powers beyond
its own utility.
Many artists have addressed this idol. Some have shared the passion for speed,
escape, and the open road (e.g. Richard Prince’s Hood series of paintings on the hoods of muscle cars) while others have critiqued
the fetishism (e.g. Pintor Sirait’s Paranoia, a life-sized F1 racecar) or the politics (e.g. Jonathan Schipper’s The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle, in which two iconic products of Detroit are slowly crushed against each other).
At the same time, car manufacturers have sought out artists: The body of a Duesenberg 1930s record-breaking roadster was designed by Rudolf Bauer. Daimler-Benz commissioned
forty-seven paintings from Andy Warhol (his Cars series). Raymond Lowey made designs for Studebaker; Buckminster Fuller, a Dymaxion Three-Wheeler; and Renzo Piano, a 1978 Fiat. Art Deco and Streamline shaped a generation of cars, starting
with the 1933 Chrysler Airflow.
There’s a powerful mutual attraction between art and automobile. Artists are
drawn to the cultural power of the car, while manufacturers seek the branding
opportunities of art and their designers—like all designers—seek to convince themselves
that there is no gap between art and design. In the words of Uwe Ellinghaus, BMW (UK) Ltd’s marketing director, “As you would expect from a company that
prides itself on its design heritage as much as its engineering, it is vital for
us to communicate with the art world and all those consumers stimulated by the
arts. Whether the art in question is a film, a painting, architecture, a sculpture
or even a car.”
In this regard, BMW has done more than any other automobile manufacturer to engage
the art world: providing a fleet of chauffeur-driven cars for Art Basel Miami
and Frieze, challenging students at London’s Royal College of Art to develop works
of art from BMW parts, commissioning Zaha Hadid to design their factory in Leipzig (she also designed the Z-Car), creating award-winning
art films, and so on. Its flagship effort, however, is the BMW Art Cars Collection.
The Cars
In 1975, racecar driver Hervé Poulain asked his friend, Alexander Calder, to repaint Poulain’s BMW as he would a rolling canvas. Poulain raced the car, with its strong curving colors, at the 24-hour Le Mans. Though
he failed to finish, the overwhelming enthusiasm that Poulain’s car sparked in the audience convinced BMW to start the Art Cars series.
The following year, BMW commissioned Frank Stella. Stella is both a racing fan
and famous for collecting large numbers of speeding tickets, and of all the masters
in the Art Cars series, Stella’s black-and-white grid lines sit the most comfortably
on the body of the BMW. But his technically-inspired design creates an impression
that Stella wanted to take the car apart and re-assemble it—which he couldn’t
do because the BMW 3.0 CSL coupé had to run around a track for 24 hours and arrive
at the end faster than all the other cars—and leaves the viewer with a feeling
that a car can never be just a “rolling canvas.” Stella called his own work merely
“agreeable decoration,” but when artists of his caliber “decorate” an object that
resists transformation, it creates a sense of battle between body and skin, between
a utilitarian sculpture and its fancy paintjob.
The next to tackle the predetermined aerodynamic features of the car was Roy
Lichtenstein. In 1977, he “painted lines as a road, pointing the way for the car,”
to fuse the car, its movement and the scenery: “all the things a car experiences.”
His BMW 320i finished ninth overall and first in class at Le Mans. He was followed
by Andy Warhol, who, in 1979 used his fingers to paint a BMW M1 with sweeping
colors in twenty-three minutes. “I tried to portray speed pictorially,” Warhol
said afterwards. “If a car is moving really quickly, all the lines and colors
are blurred.” But when asked if he liked the end result, Warhol’s answer revealed
that the paintjob hadn’t really become a part of the car: “I love the car. It’s
better than the work of art itself.”
After Warhol came Ernst Fuchs, Robert Rauschenberg, Michael Jagamara, Ken Done, Matazo Kayama, César Manrique, A.R. Penck, Esther Mahlangu, Sandro Chia, David Hockney. And though the work was impressive—Sandro Chia’s 1992 neo-expressionist, good-humored understanding of modern rites is a particularly
good fit—it remained a series in which good cars consistently overwhelmed their
great paint jobs. It remained art for car lovers.
The first Art Car in which art and automobile worked together to become something
new was Jenny Holzer’s 1999 BMW V12 LMR. Though she didn’t change the body in any way, there is something
fundamentally transformative about the words LACK OF CHARISMA CAN BE FATAL written
on the rear airfoil of a racecar going 350 km/h. Seen head-on with only this line
visible, the combination hits home and her car becomes much more than a car with
a fantastic paint job. Unfortunately, head-on at that speed is not a perspective
that can be maintained very long, and as more of Holzer’s recycled bumper stickers come into view (“Monomania is a prerequisite of success,”
“Protect me from what I want,” etc.), the car takes on the feel of much of Holzer’s work: trite, didactic and tonally simplistic. The symbiosis of art and car was
also undermined by BMW’s decision not to allow the priceless work of art to actually
race, opting instead for just a show lap before the real race.
...read more on C-Arts Magazine (ISSUE#02) read more in
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