Art Trend - Cars [Updated]

Jonathan Schipper, The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle, 2007-2009. Photo: 16 Miles [more]

Two cars crashing slowly together over the course of forty-five days in Jonathan Schipper's show at Boiler at Pierogi came to a halt yesterday evening. Windows were broken, chassis deformed, and the cars lifted into the air by the pressure of the powerful motors, pushing them forward at a glacial pace. Given the current status of America's auto industry, it's hard not to read it allegorically.

For our last Art Trend post, we discussed fire. This time, the topic is the car, which, as a subject and a material, has been enjoying a resurgence in popularity in contemporary art.

Update: Anaba brought up the completely fascinating work of Salvatore Scarpitta, which I had never seen. Joan Boykoff Baron and Reuben M. Baron also highlight John Chamberlain, Chakaia Booker, and Dirk Skreber this month in Art Critical.


Richard Prince, Untitled, 2007. Photo: Richard Prince

Richard Prince played a major role starting all of this. After decades of photography using the imagery of the motorcycle and muscle car subcultures - and, more recently, brandishing car hoods as paintings and tires as sculptures - Prince decided to start fabricating his own muscle cars. Here's one of the non-pornographically-painted works, which showed at Freize.


DZINE, Pimp Juice, 2007. Photo: 16 Miles

Like Prince, Chicago artist DZINE is working with real, operating cars. Pimp Juice appeared at Miami Basel in 2007 and is part of The Pig show out at Deitch Long Island City (which we covered in a previous post). According to the Times: "Complete with 14 speakers, a custom video mix playing on five screens and special chrome and 24-carat gold hydraulics that make it buck and hop." Also, there's a great paint job that you need to see in person.


Nate Lowman and Dan Colen, Wet Pain [Exhibiton view], at Maccarone, 2008. Photo: Maccarone

Lowman and Colen reworked a 1971 Jaguar, while Jonathan Monk did a little mash-up of Prince form and Ruscha content.


Jonathan Monk, Rew-Shay Hood Project XVI, 2008. Photo: Casey Kaplan Gallery


Andrew Bush, Vector Portraits [Exhibition view], at Yossi Milo, 2009. Photo: 16 Miles

Meanwhile, Andrew Bush's show at Yossi Milo, which also just closed, featured portraits of people while driving. Super elegant but also a little scary: everyone looks vulnerable and trapped, like frames from Texas Highway Murderer film in Underworld.

Then there's the sub-genre of partnerships between car companies and artists. BMW has been doing it for a while with artists like Warhol (which makes sense), Rauschenberg (a little stranger), Holzer (awkward). This year, Robin Rhode was in charge. See them all. Fiat also got involved, commissioning Tracey Emin to produce four decorated cars.

Tracey Emin, Dark Dark Dark, 2007. Photo: Fiat

Finally, we get to the classics. Charles Ray's fiberglass replica of a destroyed car, easily one of my favorite pieces at the Walker, and Ant Farm's monument out in the desert.

Charles Ray, Unpainted Sculpture, 1997. Photo: Walker Art Center

Ant Farm, Cadillac Ranch [Installation view], 1974 [1997 Version] Photo: Brian L. Romig


Chris Burden, Trans-fixed [Performance view], 1974.

Finally, we end with the extreme ancestors of today's works. Burden's inclusion is a bit of a stretch, but he had plenty of options for sites, and he chose to nail himself to a Volkswagen. Arman's example, the earliest on our list (though please do send us examples of the works we missed), in which he takes the simplest and most direct approach, blowing up advertising executive Charles Wilp's MG convertible.


Arman, White Orchird, 1963. Photo: Archives Denyse Durand-Ruel

Brian Lund, A Very Real and Very Dark Time, at Smith-Stewart [Review]

Brian Lund, Selected Edit Cuts from Sweet Charity and Lenny [detail], 2008

If you squint in front of Brian Lund’s latest series of drawings, his colorful, wiry masses of lines and shapes begin to look like Rorschach figures stripped of their flesh, rendered as angular skeletons. Eyes wide open, closer to the pieces, which are alternately tacked to and framed on the walls of Smith-Stewart, even more curious things appear in the form of text and notations: sequential numbers that snake around the paper, blocks of hatching, repeating patterns of circles, squares, and words. “Charity hope valentine” appears over and over again in one piece. “Lenny Bruce” is sprinkled liberally on the page.


Brian Lund, Selected Edit Cuts from Sweet Charity and Lenny, 2008

The drawings, one learns on consulting the press release, are the result of Lund translating the “vast editing systems of Hollywood films into abstract compositions” using his own system of notation. Here, he takes Bob Fosse’s films as his foundation. His impenetrable vocabulary suggests Cornelius Cardew’s musical scores from the 1960’s, which stretched and morphed the basic units of Western musical notation. Like Cardew’s Treatise, the viewer is left to make sense of a score littered with only barely recognizable figures. A few passages make sense; others yield only static.


Mark Lombardi

The key difference between Lund and Cardew, of course, is that the former is working after the fact, building a record of a completed work. Are we supposed to be able to piece together a narrative by looking at the work? (Could this be visual art’s Dark Side of the Moon / The Wizard of Oz moment?) By providing numbers (some marker of time, cuts, or frames?), Lund seems to be teasing a chance at legibility. Maybe we can work it out if we look a little closer. His work, then, sits somewhere near Marc Lombardi, whose overflowing schematics lead to a similarly fractured language and stifled relations.  Their drawings denote the boundaries of all closed, specialized languages.


Cornelius Cardew, Treatise [page 3], 1963-67

As rigorous as Lund’s conceptualism is, the controlled effervescence of his work (one thinks of Julie Mehretru) is what allows him to avoid crafting a vapid tribute to 1970’s systems art. Asked to diagram one of these films again, it is hard to believe that Lund would perfectly recreate every element of the complex network of signs and lines. Here, the artist mediates the system. Forced to toss out the foundational text, one gets the impression that he would still want to make exactly these types of drawings. If he gets bored with film, that’s good news.


Cornelius Cardew, Treatise [page 183], 1963-67

Brian Lund: A Very Real and Very Dark Time

Smith-Stewart

53 Stanton Street

New York, NY

Through March 1, 2009

Destroying Cars in the Work of Superflex and Arman

Superflex, Burning Car, 2008

Arman, White Orchid, 1963. Photo courtesy of Archives Denyse Durand-Ruel.

Superflex is out with a new video (thank you, Rhizome), Flooded McDonald's (an excerpt), which very literally enacts its title.  The empty architecture recalls Thomas Demand, though this set is meticulously produced.  It's an amazingly tranquil piece.  In its odd production of calm, it recalls their previous video Burning Car (2008) (first fire, now water), which is similarly serene, a slow-motion version of Arman's White Orchid, in which he took advertising executive Charles Wilp's MG and blew it up with dynamite.  

In a recent interview, the collective makes the case for the subversive content of the videos: "If you don't challenge the system, then the machine just keeps on running and being happy."  At first, the incredible elegance of their videos seems to belie that stance.  On the contrary, after watching both a few times, the visual pleasure engendered by slow, violent destruction seems to prove that the opposite is true.