A Vehicle for Their Art

These are ordinary artists.

That makes them a semi-ordinary group of the classically trained, plus fugitives from routine, two filmmakers, several nomads and misfits, a recovering alcoholic, a heroin junkie, one serious ally of aliens, two roadside evangelists and a topless dancer.

Their art is equally characteristic.

It is total self-expression underlaid by political statement, maybe a rich chuckle against society or one thinker’s message of a perceived good. Or art as therapy and catharsis, with colors and symmetry breathing a sigh for a lost love, a fight against old injustices or the firing of a new rage.

Which means the anatomy and animus of these artists and their art haven’t changed a stroke in the millenniums since Paleolithic Picassos daubed bison on cave walls to bring luck to the hunt. Or to their fertility.

Except.

Filmmaker Harrod Blank’s canvas is a 1965 Volkswagen Beetle with a loudspeaker soundtrack from Old MacDonald’s farm. Because, he suggests, in our slavery to automobiles, we have become sheep.

Sculptor Ron Dolce of Oakland has found his marbles, thousands of them, and has glued them to his car in rows, alongside slivers of stained glass and shards from roadside bottles. He calls this lovely labor of 18 years and several relationships a frozen watercolor on the move. Or migs in a kaleidoscope.

Philo Northrup of San Francisco, a multimedia producer, says his creation is a truck (its make quite indiscernible) in flux, a work in progress for seven years with no end in sight because even he isn’t sure what it all means. He’s just groping when he says it is elastic symbolism, and a movable shrine to whatever you might like to commemorate.

And so rolls the nascent culture of art cars--subtitled Things You Never Want to See in Your Rearview Mirror--a form of sculpture- decoupage- auto- abstractionism- and- city- dump- Impressionism that is spreading faster than rust beneath cheap primer.

Although yet to be blessed by Sotheby’s, this art colony formed from zillion-mileage beaters with dings covered by 37,000 buttons--or 3,040 dog biscuits, or 37,000 beads, or 24 television sets, or 1,705 cameras, 2,274 spoons, 300 vases, 175 bowling trophies, countless (go ahead, you count ‘em) coffee beans, even petrified road kill--has shown up as community parades in Baltimore; Portland, Ore.; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Minneapolis; and Indianapolis, where folks reeeeeally know cars.

Art cars are slipping into museums. Some, granted, are more artless than artsy, and their makers skilled only to the point of being able to glue a three-family garage sale to a junker. But others--in particular a 1960 Cadillac Sedan de Ville that artist Larry Fuente of Mendocino has mosaicked into a psychedelic flashback--could be worth $80,000 to perceiving minds.

Fuente’s “Mad Cad” was featured in a National Geographic cover story and is a caricature of American society that its caricaturist claims brings “the whole [front] yard, the American suburbs, the flamingos, the tail fins, the overstated enormity of everything, out on the streets.”

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Creators of these American Totems have their books, calendars, postcards, a manifesto, Web sites (https://www.artcars.com), television documentaries (next is a 30-minute film scheduled for Oct. 5 on TBS) and their Acropolis, pilgrimage and Sturgis-style annual assembly.

This year, 200 beaded Beetles, daubed Fords and Day-Glo Dodges--and a stuffed heifer straddling a Japanese motorcycle and titled, of course, Cowasaki--drove to Houston from all points for the 10th annual Roadside Attraction Art Car Parade, sponsored by the Orange Show Foundation, a dedicated supporter of serious folk art.

And car art, says parade coordinator Jennifer McKay, must be considered folk art. It has a legitimate place, she believes, alongside quilting, downtown murals, lowriders, choppers and some better forms of graffiti. It’s pure Americana and kin to the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile, hobo carpentry of the ‘30s, flamed Mercurys of the ‘40s and the gospel according to hot rod pioneer Ed (Big Daddy) Roth, who believes Deuce Coupes and art cars epitomize America’s impulse to think free.

In “Art Cars: Revolutionary Movement,” James Harithas, a former director of the Houston Contemporary Arts Museum, digs deeper and sees art cars as a grass-roots rejection of government and corporate control, and part of “the growing attempt to renew our commitment to ourselves.

“Change your vehicle, improve it, personalize it and make your own statement with it so that you can once again become one with it,” he says. “Art cars are an expression . . . of the God-given American right to be yourself and flaunt it on the highways and byways of America.”

McKay agrees, of course, adding: “Car art represents a handmade, heartfelt attitude that reduces the high technology of the automobile to an abstract.” Really? “Yes. And with the car taking the messages of the artists to the streets, instead of just to private galleries and closed collections.”

And that’s much headier than the unappreciative cop who once ticketed Blank for driving a distraction and impeding traffic flow. He radioed that he was pulling over “a multicolored Volkswagen Beetle . . . er, um . . . with junk all over it.”

Blank, 34, a ringer for Matt Le-Blanc impersonating a skinny Jim Belushi, is the movement’s curator, chronicler, guru and producer of those books, calendars and documentaries. He’s also heavy into planning West Fest, to be held in San Francisco on Sept. 26-28 as the art car’s official West Coast coming out.

Reared in a Santa Cruz commune he sometimes blames but mostly credits for his off-center artistic meanderings, Blank has built two art cars.

There’s the VeeDub he has driven since high school and in which he lost his virginity, both as an artist and young male animal.

Cardinal reds, yellows and greens speak his love of reggae, there’s a poem to his deflowering sweetheart on the right fender (“she went to work in a Cape Cod fudge factory and put on 150 pounds”), and the whole is topped by a television set framing a plastic skull and a sun-mutating Barbie doll (“a protest against sex and violence on television”).

Then there’s Blank’s 25-year-old Dodge van groaning from age and a half-ton of Polaroids, Instamatics, SureShots and Brownies, exposure meters and Pallard-Bolexes, cemented by silicone caulk to every square centimeter of its outsides.

Ten forward-facing cameras work. Forty flash. Most of the video cameras are functional, and a loudspeaker plays Hawaiian music to better relax gawkers. From two continental crossings, Blank has built a portfolio jammed with photographs of the grins, blushes, downcast looks, poked tongues, hand waves, single digits and general muggings of men and women in the street the moment they realize they are being photographed.

Blank believes art cars say more about who we are than, say, driving a Lexus. It returns an individual’s identity, satisfies the tiny exhibitionist in all of us, makes the populace smile and clearly is reducing the nation’s banality level.

And whether driving a pulpit (two artists in the movement preach throughout the South from the beds of decorated pickups) or a Dodge Colt reshaped into a spaceship (crafted by a former member of Heaven’s Gate who says he is close to communicating with aliens), Blank sees a core value to it all.

“The validity is that you, the artist, are taking a chance on expressing yourself and going public,” he explains. “In an age when the norm is privacy, hiding, keeping to yourself, you are putting yourself up for judgment and scrutiny, and that’s pretty courageous.”

Still, his 15-year pursuit of art cars, as a hobby and then as commerce, has left Blank well below the poverty line. His books and films haven’t earned back production costs. He lives in a guest shack behind the home of his father, Les Blank, a fellow film documentarian and creative radical, borrowing Dad’s computers to edit his next television edition of “Wild Wheels” and being quite unsure of what’s next.

“Look at the camera van,” he says. “I thought it would take six months and maybe $5,000. It took two years, and I’m still paying for it. What’s the payoff? I got $2,000 for being in a Kodak anniversary parade in Rochester.”

Yet living off change in donated digs to better indulge artistic freedoms is a social standard in this university town, where most days seem to begin with a search for a clean T-shirt and two aspirins.

And with its geographic and spiritual closeness to the subcultures of San Francisco and Oakland--birthplaces of hippie vans in the hallucinogenic ‘60s, definite preambles to car art--what better hub for this state of painting our wagons?

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The common start is finding by purchase, gift or junkyard bankruptcy, something mechanically terminal, well-crunched, probably two decades old and certainly dirt cheap. There is absolutely no percentage in buying a 1995 Mercedes and covering it with beer bottle caps of the world.

Our sculptors and painters are artists first, car guys way last. It shows in their choices of rolling canvases, old hulks in search of mechanical transplants or middle-aged clunkers that smelled lemony when new. Comet. Gremlin. Dodge Dart. Corvair and Valiant.

Then it’s on with the gutting and gluing, the cadging and foraging, the borrowing from friends and buying from thrift shops, while reaching deep inside and letting the visceral be thy guide.

Snow-blond Texas stripper Jackie Harris sees grand synergy in topless dancing and her 1965 Ford Country Squire covered with highly lacquered plastic fruits and vegetables.

“It’s all performance,” she says. “The Fruitmobile is a very luscious and sensuous art object.”

Gene Pool--OK, it says Eugene on his birth certificate, but this is show biz--has spent more than a decade growing grass where no tiff has grown before: on automobiles.

His chef d’oeuvre was a 1981 LeSabre sprayed with petroleum-based adhesive and seeded with Manhattan perennial rye. He added water, warmth, light and a whispered ballad (an obvious choice: Neil Diamond’s “The Grass Won’t Pay No Mind”) and in days, Pool transitioned from artist to gardener while his car morphed from Buick to bowling green. “It’s like a portable environment,” he says.

Charles Hunt of Van Nuys is no credentialed artist except when it comes to his day job as an interior-exterior plasterer. He has pasted and piled his purple Comet with bumper stickers, discarded ropes, emblems from other cars and just about anything that ever fell off a Pep Boys truck on its way to a recycling plant. Also cow bones as a reminder of our mortality in this fragile life.

Don’t Touch the Fish Head Sauce. Granola, Guns and Videotape. The Truth Will Make You Pee. So will the tone of other slogans painted on his decapitated, hollowed-out sedan. And a cage glued to the rear is the final resting place of former campground friends, a dried frog and a dead sparrow.

“A neighbor called recently and wanted to give me a pair of dead rats,” says Hunt. “Had to tell him I just don’t have the facilities for drying out wet dead animals.”

It all began a decade ago: “I was going to drive my old, hand-painted purple wreck--we called it the Grape--to the dump, and just for fun stuck a cow bone on the front. A kid looked at it, pointed and started smiling. I figured that if one bone made him smile, a bunch of bones would make him laugh. It did. And as people kept laughing, I kept adding things.”

He thinks he knows what it all means: “It is saying we all have freedom to create something different, and not be tied to something that has been stamped out. A blue Taurus. A red Corolla.”

Hunt doesn’t know where the Grape will end up: “A few months ago, a liquor store owner asked me to name a price. I asked him to name a price. He didn’t. I didn’t. I guess I just don’t want to sell something that is so much fun.”

To save spit when crowds surround his marble-crusted VW, Dolce has prepared an answer sheet that takes care of recurring questions: “Yes, I did it myself. . . . No, I don’t worry about getting into an accident. . . . No, I don’t have insurance because you can’t get any. . . . Yes, my wife likes it and rides in it.”

The ways and whimsy of art cars are endless, and that’s the way it has been since God gave us fuzzy dice, plastic Jesuses and oogah horns.

Dan Lohaus, a Blank disciple and co-worker, is covering his truck with TV sets and portraits of game show hosts because “there’s a definite cheesiness to a business where somebody with a name like Wink Martindale can become famous.”

One owner used a ’60 Corvair for therapy and a memorial to his late wife. He layered it with her jewels. Another covered an automobile with dolls and toys as his prop during a clown act for kids. Because he had been beaten as a kid.

And there’s Dalton Stevens of Bishopville, S.C., who began gluing buttons to his car as a cure for insomnia. It has taken over his life; it will follow him in death. Stevens has covered a casket with buttons and made button suits for his eight chosen pallbearers.

The beauty of art cars, however, isn’t only in the eyes of beholders. Driving one of these generally clutchless, largely brakeless, chronically polluting wonders with its perpetual odor of hot fan belt, is a fine art all its own.

And so we borrowed Blank’s VW--its license plate now “OMYGAWD,” honoring the popular response to a look that is early “Sanford & Son”--and clattered the length and breadth of Berkeley: up University from Interstate 80, then west along Oxford Avenue.

Its plastic sunflowers twirled, the skull glowered, Barbie beamed, and we favored a crowing rooster over what sounded like mating possums on the PA system.

Berkeley loved it. Adults stumbled over curbs. Students scurried to look, laugh and wave. Kids beamed and covered their eyes and peered through their fingers to make sure this huge toy hadn’t gone away.

Almost everyone made eye contact with the driver. That’s certainly not what you get driving a Bentley down Sunset Boulevard.

But where’s the art in that?