artfiles.ca

Highway Star: Cate Rimmer

[Link:  Cate Rimmer ]

Highway Star


Crocheted seat protectors. Bobbleheads and stuffed animals suctioned to windows. The impulse to personalise our cars runs strong. We love our cars and want to dress them up pretty and take them to town. Through accessories and knickknacks we transform our automobiles into public statements of personal taste. In a simplistic way, these doilied portable livingrooms are puny versions of kick-ass lowriders and hot rods for like their muscled cousins they manifest the same desire to insert our individuality into the mass-produced commodity. What pushes the impulse beyond Garfield in the family Acura is the degree to which this individualism is articulated. It is the desire to really mess with the possibilities that single out the hard-core customiser and create a kinship with contemporary artistic practices. The contributors to this inaugural issue of artfiles.ca, Ruben Ortiz Torres, Rick Ross, Greg Bellerby, Laura Piasta, T&T, Patrik Andersson and Jeff Derksen, delve into the ways that aesthetic, political and economic concerns are played out in car culture and customising.

While there are clear distinctions between the different factions of car customising they are defined and driven by attitude and bravado. The hydraulically propelled, gold-plated lowrider, testosterone-pumped hot rod, even the outrageously stretched limo are there to be seen and marvelled at. In the interview, Hot Rods, Woodies and Desire, Rick Ross speaks of the aesthetic of hot rods, “the aggressive, in-your-face stance”. In the opposite camp, Ruben Ortiz Torres calls lowriders “the ultimate aesthetic statement in car culture” in his essay Cathedrals on Wheels. He later writes: “They drive slow, pumping their music and blocking traffic, messing with a social system that is not eager to accept them. Their cars are turned into political and aesthetic signifiers”. A look at the history of lowriders supports Ortiz Torres’ argument that these cars provided a means to express identity for immigrants and illegal aliens forced to keep a low profile and suppress their cultural identity within mainstream culture.

Whereas both hot rods and lowriders are largely created by devotees with more skill than capital, the stretch vehicles depicted in Laura Piasta’s watercolours are there to flaunt economic clout and privilege. Her series carries the stretch phenomena to its extreme as an epically proportioned Mazda Miata takes its place alongside the more requisite Hummer and limousine. These vehicles attest to a quenchless thirst for status and the compulsion for celebrity. The popularity of uber vehicles raises similar questions to those posited by Jeff Derksen in his long poem, Transnational Muscle Cars. In critiquing the cultural landscape of global urbanism, Derksen posits the questions “What are the politics of this new cultural landscape? And how do you drive across it? Who is behind the wheel, doing the driving? And why does this new imperialism behave so much like a classic muscle car; all brawn and horsepower, but with little braking power and an inability to negotiate curves?”

If lowriders, hot rods and stretch limos are all about street cred, then T&T’s vision of cars, though no less radical, is a kind of back-to-the- land utopianism. In their world, T&T’s Tyler Brett and Tony Romano transform cars into sanctuaries and eco-friendly power sources for post-apocalyptic hobos. In their interview with Patrik Andersson they proclaim, “Our imagined future is grounded in the objects that are readily available in today’s throw-away culture”. This statement echoes a passage from Derksen’s text, “I’m wanting transformation rather than ‘structural adjustment’ to go with the primitive accumulation and worn contradictions”. A new steering wheel cover may not cut it, but a hydraulic system that splits a vehicle apart, fracturing its function and use value into frenzied motion just may be a start.

I would like to thank all of the contributors to the Highway Star issue of artfiles.ca as well as Keith Higgins for his work both as co-editor of the issue and in developing the site. Kathy Slade also played an invaluable role in producing this inaugural issue. The artfiles.ca site is made possible through the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and is a project of the Charles H. Scott Gallery, Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design.


Cate Rimmer

Rubén Ortiz Torres - The Garden of Earthly Delights




T&T Vanama (c-print), 2002




Transnational Muscle Cars book launch invitation - Julian Gosper, designer




Laura Piasta - watercolour, 2003




Rick Ross - red engine - detail from hot rod construction