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

The Boiler at Pierogi [Photographs]

The Boiler [installation view]. Photo: 16 Miles   [more]


Jonathan Schipper, Invisible Sphere (215 Points of View), 2005-2009. Photo: 16 Miles   [more]


Jonathan Schipper, Invisible Sphere (215 Points of View) [detail], 2005-2009. Photo: 16 Miles   [more]

While the rest of the art world collapses, Pierogi is taking over more Brooklyn real estate, showing three crisp works by three different artists in a warehouse space they have dubbed The Boiler.  Yoon Lee presents an impasto-heavy, almost-Baroque take on Julie Mehetru, while Jonathan Schipper's gigantic spherical video-monitor sculpture hangs from the epic ceilings via heavy chain.  It's a perfect use of the space.  

Tavares Strachan, meanwhile, wields more ideas than I have seen in quite a while to arrive at a piece that would be a marvel to look at even without all of the conceptual conceits.  Here's an explanation of part of the piece from Jerry Saltz, who also loved it:

In 2004, Strachan cut a 2.5-ton block of ice from the Alaskan Arctic, shipped it to the Bahamas (where he's from), and exhibited it there in a hermetically sealed refrigerated room powered by solar cells. Pictures suggest that it was interesting there; now, installed in a former boiler room, it's like hell freezing over. Far above the case two fans blow two flags: one at the current wind speed of Mount McKinley, the other at the Bahamas' Nassau airport's.

Yoon Lee, JFK, 2008. Photo: 16 Miles    [more]


Tavares Strachan, The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want (Arctic Ice Project), 2004-2009. Photo: 16 Miles    [more]

The Boiler at Pierogi
191 North 14th Street
Brooklyn, New York
Through April 19, 2009