Art and Automobile: BMW's Art Cars, in C-Arts Magazine (March 2008)
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.
The Frozen Fish
If the focus of the first fourteen Art Cars was firmly on the cars, with Holzer’s V12 LMR as a knife-edged moment of balance on the eve of the millennium, then Olafur Eliasson’s 2006 leap into the 21st century totally deconstructed the underlying automobile with an immobile ice sculpture that, instead of lapping Le Mans, sits inside an 800-square-foot refrigerator at the SF MOMA. Elisson removed the outer shell of his hydrogen-powered BMW H2R, covered it with a translucent skin of interlocking steel mesh and reflective panels, and covered these in turn with two tons of sculpted crystalline ice. The museum audience wraps blankets around themselves for what Henry Urbach, SF MOMA’s curator calls, “an intimate, immersive and social engagement with the artwork.”
Eliasson is known for recontextualizing elements such as light and water, and the history of the Art Cars Collection makes his recontextualization of the BMW that much more radical. But Eliasson is also known for engaging the viewer as an active participant in his work (e.g. in The Weather Project he created a giant artificial sun, under which viewers could bask), and while the 16th BMW Art Car explores alternative perspectives on objects we manufacture and, in his words, “tries to attune our attention to the moving world and the consequences to our actions,” it’s difficult for a two-ton ice sculpture to be as participatory as a car that comes first in its class at Le Mans.
As a work of art, Eliasson’s piece is fantastic. But it’s also the first Art Car to disappoint car lovers, who seemed bewildered that anyone could do away with an aerodynamic body that set nine world records and hit 300 km/h running on hydrogen. Car reviewer Ken Gross: Road Warrior, for example, wrote that “Eliasson certainly challenges the way we look at car design versus climate change. That’s cool. Upon reflection, we prefer an Art Car that still looks like a BMW… Reminiscent of a giant frozen fish, the flash-frozen BMW Art Car is somewhat unnerving. You stand there wondering if you’re the only person who doesn’t get it.”
The Pendulum
BMW claims its Art Cars reflect a symbiosis of art, design and technology. But while they’ve been exhibited in such museums as the Louvre in Paris, the Royal Academy in London, the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney and at the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, the combined impression of BMW’s Art Cars is of a fundamental tension between two powerful cultural forces. If both artworks and cars are seen as personal accessories, projected images of who their owner thinks he is, then the two images clash surprisingly often.
Yet if Eliasson’s critique is anything to go by, the 20th century power of the automobile has begun to wane. Others can speculate on the why-a loss of individual freedom, increased enlightenment about the consequences of our actions, simple crowding or some other poignant reason-but from the perspective of someone who loves both cars and art, his success in pulling BMW towards the art end of “Art Cars” is enough to hope that, like a swinging pendulum, perhaps we are not far from a piece that truly meshes art and automobile.
BOX
Alexander Calder (USA) 1975 BMW 3.0 CSL
Frank Stella (USA) 1976 BMW 3.0 CSL
Roy Lichtenstein (USA) 1977 BMW 320i Group 5 Race Version
Andy Warhol (USA) 1979 BMW M1 Group 4 Race Version
Ernst Fuchs (Austria) 1982 BMW 635 CSi
Robert Rauschenberg (USA) 1986 BMW 635 CSi
Michael Jagamara Nelson (Australia) 1989 BMW 635 CSi
Ken Done (Australia) 1989 BMW M3 Group A Race Version
Matazo Kayama (Japan) 1990 BMW 535i
César Manrique (Spain) 1990 BMW 730i
A.R. Penck (Germany) 1991 BMW Z1
Esther Mahlangu (South Africa) 1991 BMW 525i
Sandro Chia (Italy) 1992 BMW 3 Series Racing Prototype
David Hockney (Great Britain) 1995 BMW 850CSi
Jenny Holzer (USA) 1999 BMW V12 LMR
Olafur Eliasson (Denmark) 2006 BMW H2R
–by Alexander Boldizar
Art and Automobile: BMW’s Art Cars was originally published in C-Arts Magazine (March 2008)
