In the annals of artifice-laden BMW race cars, the Homer E30 may stand alone, but the Bavarian concern itself holds a tradition of commissioning famed artists to gussy up its machines that dates back 41 years, to the mid-1970s, when first Alexander Calder and then Frank Stella painted 3.0 CSL cars for Hervé Poulain. Since then, art-world luminaries such as Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, and Andy Warhol—who regrettably didn’t live to silkscreen a banana onto Nico Rosberg’s Mercedes—have plied their trade on automobiles from Munich. Now it’s John Baldessari’s turn.
The 85-year-old Californian painter and conceptual artist once burned a collection of his early work and baked the ashes into cookies, a ferocious statement about loathing one’s past self while in the grip of a heavy jones for baked goods. Or something. That’s the explanation that we relate to, so that’s the explanation we’re going with. Baldessari’s M6 GTLM is being hailed as the 19th BMW Art Car; number 18, by Chinese artist Cao Fei, will be unveiled next summer. We can only presume the reversed chronology carries some artistic significance.
Alternately, we could be wrong. Perhaps it’s merely another example of Germany’s seeming desire to divorce itself from numeric characters with any foothold in reality, as the nation’s automakers have unmoored traditionally displacement-dependent model numbers from their cars’ now downsized powerplants. We can’t wait for that trend to trickle down into engineering. “Herr Professor Doktor-Ingenieur, what are these numbers, in truth? They can be arbitrarily arranged in the name of emotion und dynamism! The auto will still result!” Go ahead, Detlef. Try it and see.
Baldessari’s car made its debut last night at Art Basel in Miami Beach. Appropriate, since its first race will be just up Florida’s Atlantic coast at the 24 Hours of Daytona—or the Rolex 24 at Daytona, if you prefer your watch movements automatic and your naming rights honored. The car itself, to be driven at Daytona by Bill Auberlen, Alexander Sims, Augusto Farfus, and Bruno Spengler, is practically the inverse of Koons’s M3 GT2 from 2010, which wore a complement of hyperdrive-evocative colored light streaks over a black base. Baldessari’s M6 adds some bright spots of color to the white car and carries the word FAST on the driver’s door in black sans-serif type. The opposite door features a picture of the car. We’ll refrain from tired Xzibit jokes.
It’s not the most mind-bending of the Art Car series, nor is it the worst. There’s a bit of playfulness to it, and the stern 6-series certainly can use all the frolic it can get. We’re not sure the new BMW beats Ricky Bobby’s self-sponsored livery, however, or Kurt Busch’s 2012 appropriation thereof. Now and again, the referentiality of mass-market culture gives you a thicker Slim Jim to chew on than highfalutin pronouncements handed down from the art world.
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