A Car Is Born--Again : The Yugo died an agonizing, humiliating death as the worst thing to hit the road. Now, it’s found a higher purpose as art.

Reviled when alive, celebrated only when it rattled into extinction, the awful Yugo is back from perdition: as a fun cluster of three-dimensional art.

“It’s the total, abysmal failure of the car that makes our exhibit a success,” explains art teacher Kevin O’Callaghan, father of the collection. On the basis, presumably, that any purpose for a Yugo is a huge improvement. “Exactly. If we’d done it with a Volkswagen Beetle people would have killed us for desecrating something that once was very useful.”

But nobody has sympathy for the Yugo. Only bad dreams.

Junkyards wont take them. Dogs never chased them. No Yugo was reported stolen because no owner wanted it back. When O’Callaghan picked up one for his project with Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts, he got it for nothing plus a spaghetti dinner.

“Negatives were the challenge,” says O’Callaghan. “So a year ago last Thanksgiving, I told my students: ‘Take the Yugomobile and give it some purpose beyond what it was originally designed to do.’ ”

Three dozen students and graduates took an equal number of dead Yugos--average purchase price $100, total price $3,900--and snipped, sliced, disemboweled and restuffed them into “Yugo Again: Fuel For Thought,” a winking, fanciful, whimsical muster of what might have been.

And this week, while Washington ummmmms thoughtfully over 21 oils by Johannes Vermeer at the National Gallery of Art, Los Angeles gets to giggle at 19 recycled Yugos at Saturday’s opening of the Greater Los Angeles Auto Show at the Convention Center.

Look for the paneled, intimidating Yugo confessional by Ann Marie Mattioli, complete with stained-glass and tape-recorded mutterings. Inspiration was no huge reach for Mattioli. She spent 12 years in Catholic school.

Then there’s the blue-tiled, fully plumbed, steamed-up Yugo Shower by Jude Dominque (“the ultimate commuter convenience, a car you can shower in”) and a Yugo movie theater by Brendan Kennedy (“There’s a movie projected on the inside of the windshield. . . . We thought something dreadful like ‘The Blob’ more in keeping with something terrible like the Yugo.”) and a 750-brick Yugo BBQ by Polish expatriate Piotr Wozniak. (“I wanted to create something that’s a backyard fixture, because that’s where most Yugos wind up anyway.”)

Artistic cute is the show’s characteristic. Coils glow, Styrofoam bread pops up, and smoke curls from the rear windshield of a Yugo toaster. The neon above Hugo’s Diner is broken and only “UGO” gleams. The Yugo Port-O-Potty, with a toilet roll mounted on the steering wheel, looks grubby enough to be viewed at a distance.

Like most concepts of substance, O’Callaghan’s inspiration was a quick glimpse and instant realization. He was driving from his mother’s home on Long Island and saw kids playing stickball on a vacant lot. Their backstop was an abandoned Yugo.

Somehow, it made less of a waste of the Yugo.

Whenever one purpose is done, he mused, creative process can begin.

O’Callaghan, a movie set director, designer of Elton John’s over-huge sunglasses, and teacher of three-dimensional design and illustration at the School of Visual Arts, took out an ad: “Yugos Wanted: Dead or Alive.”

Eighty offers were fielded. Two cars came running. One poor soul implored O’Callaghan to take his immaculate, perfectly waxed, fully registered Yugo. Please.

“Seems he’d blown the engine years earlier and couldn’t get a new one,” remembers O’Callaghan. “The condominium association said if he intended parking it at his place, he’d have to keep it polished and registered.”

Yugos, a bastard Fiat coupe built in Yugoslavia, arrived in the United States in 1985 as a plastic-lined tin box costing $3,999. It was the closest thing yet to a disposable car.

Six months later, with the nation’s highways already ankle-deep in ailing Yugos, Consumer Reports said the car was the worst it had ever evaluated. The National Highway Safety Administration ruled the Yugo the most dangerous car on the road. Seat belts broke, engines froze, windshields popped out, and an auto magazine said Yugo’s manual shifter felt like a baseball bat stuck in a barrel of coconuts. Which was being particularly unkind to the coconuts.

In 1992, Yugo America was in bankruptcy.

Parts were unavailable because the country of origin collapsed at about the same time as its infamous export. The sad symmetry of broken Yugos from a broken Yugoslavia, was lost on no one.

“When you start looking at what’s left, you realize how bad these vehicles really were,” says O’Callaghan. “One was rigged with a doorbell buzzer you pressed to start the engine. Another had a gate latch from a hardware store holding a door that wouldn’t close.

“I felt bad about taking one because Tiffany, the young woman who owned it, said it had been her first car and she had named it Sophie. Then she told me she’d named it Sophie after an aunt she couldn’t stand.”

Since O’Callaghan and crew began squeezing art from the sourest of lemons, “Yugo Again” has been applauded from New York to Tokyo. Friday, from 7 to 10 p.m., at the Convention Center, their artistic used car lot will be open for a Comic Relief charity preview benefiting Homeless Healthcare Los Angeles.

There’s talk of exhibiting the collection in Montreal and maybe the Pompideau Center in Paris.

All that traveling, loading and unpacking, of course, is tough on the exhibits. Pieces fall off. Bits don’t work. Sometimes only ingenuity keeps things moving.

Rather like owning a real Yugo.