Creativity on wheels
By S.S. YOGA
yoga@thestar.com.my
When BMW hits the race track at the world-famous Le Mans, what you see is an artistic spectacle.
WE normally envision art as static or stationary – pictures, sculptures, installations, even buildings, and structures. Of course, you have the “motion picture,” but can you imagine a canvas that moves?
Well, since 1975 BMW has been transforming their cars into an artistic canvas, albeit with breaks in between years. Racing cars to be exact, and for a specific race – the historic, legendary and celebrated Le Mans 24 Hours!
Alexander Calder (left) with Hervé Poulain in the studio discussing ideas for the 1975 Art Car, a BMW 3.0 CSL.
2010
The 17th such BMW Art Car (as they have been tagged) was unveiled last Tuesday. The launch was held at Paris’ famous Centre Pompidou where the third Art Car was launched by its artist, American Roy Lichtenstein.
This time around, the honour goes to a pop-artist American Jeff Koons who is a “celebrity” in his own right. His most famous work must be the series of Balloon Animals in stainless steel.
“It is fascinating and inspiring to witness an artist presenting his vision through one of our cars. Jeff Koons worked with our team to translate his art into a race-ready car. It was a challenging connection between technical and artistic intelligence,” said Frank-Peter Arndt, BMW management board member and head of cultural commitments.
The car model used is an M3 GT2 and will carry the number 79 for the race this weekend. The number pays homage to the fourth Art Car done by the legendary Andy Warhol in 1979. Fittingly enough, that car achieved the best placing so far for BMW at Le Mans; it came in sixth.
As part of his creative process, the artist collected images of race cars and graphics, vibrant colours and speed. He layered them into a digital collage depicting his sources of inspiration. The resultant graphic is evocative of power, motion and light, and rendered in the artist’s signature saturated hues on a black background set against the car’s silver interior.
“These race cars are like life – they are powerful and there is a lot of energy,” said Koons. “You can participate with it, add to it and let yourself transcend with its energy. There is a lot of power under that hood and I want to let my ideas transcend with the car − it’s really to connect with that power.
Koons had used 3D computer-aided design models of the car to simulate the application of the graphic to the car’s surfaces and evaluate it from all angles.
The first BMW Art Car, with design by Alexander Calder, for the 1975 Le Mans race.
1975
Back in the 1970s, work was done the old-fashioned way – through inspiration and perspiration! Celebrated American minimalist painter and sculptor Frank Stella said of the second Art Car, which he designed in 1976: “You know, nowadays, we could do that on the computer in about 10 seconds. But we had to wrap that by hand back then.”
The BMW Art Car for Le Mans tradition started when French auctioneer and racing driver Hervé Poulain came up with the idea of asking an artist to paint his car for the race. He thought that it was time to do something grandly communicative and heroic, and unite his two passions.
None of the French carmakers responded to his request for a car except BMW. Poulain had already approached his friend, famous American artist Alexander Calder.
“The condition of the project: I bring the painter and BMW supplies the car. It had to be like that because the operation and the work of the artist were not allowed to be, dare I say, ‘polluted’ by sponsoring,” said Poulain in a BMW-commissioned 2005 video shown during a world tour of the Art Cars the following year.
He was asked to register the BMW 3.0 CSL for Le Mans. In fact, he was asked to do the same for the following three Art Cars (something not many people know). Poulain was also given the privilege of picking the artists.
The late Calder was the inventor of mobiles (think of those crib mobiles), the kinetic sculptures that use the principle of equilibrium. His enormous sculptures that appeared to float were hailed by critics as among the most innovative of the 20th century. The Art Car was one of his final works of art; he died in 1976.
For his design, Calder used intensive colours and gracefully sweeping surfaces distributed generously over the wings, bonnet and roof.
“There is a critic who says: ‘What is a Calder? A Calder is a car without wheels ...’ When you do a mobile you abandon it to the air, to the wind, to the caprice of movement. I have brought this mobile sound and noise. The dimension of the car race!” noted Calder in one of his conversations with Poulain.
A blaze of colours: The 17th BMW Art Car, designed by Jeff Koons using the BMW M3 GT2. ‘These race cars are like life – they are powerful and there is a lot of energy,’ says Koons. – Pictures courtesy of BMW
1976
For the second car, another BMW 3.0 CSL, Stella disassociated himself from his random style to seek inspiration from the technical fascination of the racing coupé (he was a racing enthusiast). He created a black and white square grid, its precision reminiscent of oversized graph paper. This graph paper pattern ran across the entire bodywork, formally capturing and accurately describing every curve and indentation.
“It is really about lines. Which is barely straightforward. But there are three thicknesses of lines. A graph grid and then sections of the graph grid. And then the lines that create the forms going through it. But they hold it together in a way so that the car is sort of an overall. It is held together by the design. My design is like a blueprint transferred onto the bodywork,” said Stella.
He noted that as the design was in black and white on the race circuit, it stood out from the rest of the field. Stella pointed out that with the Art Car, he went outside the world of art to the world of real objects!
1977
The “father of pop art,” Lichtenstein took to his iconic paintings of comic strips to fashion his design for the third car, a BMW 320i (Group 5 race version). He wanted the lines on the car to be a depiction of the road showing the car where to go.
“The design also shows the countryside through which the car has travelled. One could call it an enumeration of everything a car experiences – only that this car reflects all of these things before actually having been on the road. Indeed, if one looks closer, one can perceive a passing landscape,” said Lichtenstein.
Victoria & Albert Museum (London) researcher and curator Ulrich Lehmann said the way cartoons expressed speed was used in the design. “Those speed lines move across the whole car. In addition, the passing landscape is represented by the sun and the guard rails visible behind the speed lines.”
1979
The king of pop art, Warhol, had his turn after a year’s hiatus for the Art Car. Warhol painted the BMW M1 (Group 4 race version) from start to finish, unlike his predecessors who left their assistants to work on it from models.
There is a story to that. Poulain said that he first sent Warhol a model BMW 320 and it came back all in black including the windows, covered in little mauve flowers. He then told Warhol BMW was coming up with a new model, the M1, for the following year and asked him to work with that model.
“He had covered up the car in a sort of camouflage. In the racing world of colour and party, the car would stick out because it would be the only thing that was rather lacklustre. He completely ignored the actual beauty of the car.”
It didn’t find favour with BMW or himself, so Poulain told Warhol the design didn’t have enough to do with the festive side of Le Mans. Warhol then offered to come down to Munich and paint the car himself!
“I said to myself, this time he’s going to do what I want. That is to say, his images – the ones that had made him famous, like Marilyn (Monroe), or soup cans, he’ll cover the car in these, because that’s him. But not at all! He arrived with a model – which I had the pleasure of giving to BMW – which he had painted very expressively and in abstract.”
There was a break again for the Art Car and the next one was only in 1982. According to BMW corporate affairs, cultural communications spokesman Thomas Girst, it was never a policy to have one every year. They served the needs of the time; many a time, market forces decided if there was one. And there was no single factor in deciding on the artist to be chosen.
“The 16th artist, Olafur Eliasson, was chosen by a group of distinguished curators. Koons in a way chose himself as he had already spoken of his willingness to design one for us,” said Girst over the phone.
It also become more international as it wasn’t just the Americans who were commissioned. There were artists from Australia, Japan, Austria, Spain, Italy, Britain, Denmark, South Africa and even Germany (in 1991).
But the common denominator was that none of the cars was actually for racing. They were intended solely for exhibition purposes.
Roy Lichtenstein’s Art Car, the BMW 320i Gruppe 5 Renn version, for the 1977 Le Mans race.
1999
It was back to a race car in 1999, a BMW V12 LMR done this time by another American and the second woman to do so – concept artist Jenny Holzer. To allow the characteristic BMW colours, blue and white, to remain visible during the race, she used reflecting chrome letters and phosphorescent colours.
“I tried to design the car and choose the text so it made sense for the racing public, not that I really knew what a racing public was. I wanted the car to look good at night, so we had it glow in the dark. And I wanted it to reflect light so that it would be distinctive in the daytime. And I wanted to choose text that would at least make people laugh or maybe be a little anxious,” said Holzer.
A sample of her text: The unattainable is invariably attractive. Lack of charisma can be fatal. What urge will save us, now that sex won’t?
What indeed? The urge for the next Art Car, perhaps?
