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BMW was the first car company to collaborate with artists. Since 1975, it has commissioned 16 artists to transform one of their cars. Thomas Girst from BMW discusses BMW's amazing art car collection.
Car art is all the rage. Whether it's companies commissioning artists to customize a car, or artists such as Erwin Wurm, Richard Prince and Damien Hirst making car artworks, the fusion of art and cars is on a high gear. BMW ignited this trend over three decades, as the first car company to commission artists to paint its cars. Today, BMW counts 16 art cars in its collection. The cars have been exhibited in museums, and the initiative has been widely copied. Indeed, you can barely walk into a car trade show today without seeing a customized car being presented.
The story of the BMW Art Car Collection began in 1975, when the French racing car driver Hervé Poulain asked the American artist Alexander Calder to paint his BMW 3.0 CSL racing car. The Pop artists Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg all got their paintbrushes out too, and their eye-catching cars were driven in the 24-hour Le Mans race. Since then, the program has extended to include series vehicles, too. All the art cars are unique.
The first 15 commissions mostly involved the artists painting onto the cars themselves. Changing tack, BMW reinvented the notion of the art car last year when Olafur Eliasson unveiled the frozen BMW H2R hydrogen-powered car. The Finnish artist, who was selected by a committee of curators from various museums that BMW appointed, covered the alternative-fuel vehicle in a new skin of steel mesh, mirror-coated stainless steel, and many layers of ice. The artwork, titled "Your mobile expectations: BMW H2R project," was included in exhibitions about the artist at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (www.sfmoma.org) and Pinakothek der Moderne (www.pinakothek.de) in Munich. Eliasson's intention was to draw attention to the relation between car design and global warming.
Luxuryculture.com spoke to Thomas Girst from the BMW Group, who is responsible for the BMW Art Car Collection.
To what extent has the art car initiative boosted BMW's profile?
The art car should be seen in the context of BMW's larger cultural engagement. BMW is active in over 100 countries, with three decades of cultural sponsorship in opera, art exhibitions, etc. What's at the nucleus of the BMW Art Car series is that it was thanks to the initiative of a racetrack driver, Hervé Poulain, who asked his artist friends to paint his cars. It wasn't about PR and marketing. We don't use the art cars in major advertising campaigns.
For years, artists painted BMW's cars, some of which were driven in races. What made you invite Olafur Eliasson to create the radical, frozen H2R car that is more like a sculpture?
Over the past 30 years, art has evolved and is no longer about painting onto a surface but about sculpture and creating an environment. The history of the BMW art cars has to pay tribute to this development. This is precisely why Olafur, who has never used a paintbrush in his art, was chosen by an international committee of curators from major museums to tackle the subject of the BMW art car in a whole new way. He didn't use the actual surface of the H2R car, which is a prototype of a race car that only uses hydrogen as an energy source. We're debating whether to show Olafur's car at the 1st World Congress of Environmental History in Copenhagen in August 2009.
How was it made?
Olafur took the chassis away and made his own chassis formed from stainless steel wire and hundreds of stainless steel plates. The surface is covered with hundreds of liters of water that have frozen onto the surface, with a yellow light source emitting from the bottom of the car. This fragile environment necessitates the temperature being kept at -10 degrees Fahrenheit for the entire duration of any exhibition. Olafur worked with our top designers and engineers. He conducted interviews with philosophers, engineers, environmentalists and designers to look at the essence of the car at the start of the twenty-first century from every angle. Our chief designer, Chris Bangle, has made the book compulsory reading for all his designers.
What ideas do you have for the next BMW car?
We'd like to see the BMW art car go back to the racing tradition, and we want to continue working with the best contemporary artists. A few years ago, we discussed whether it still made sense to do the BMW art car in the new millennium, or if it should be considered as something that was an established series in the past with a beginning and an end. The curators convinced us
otherwise and picked Olafur Eliasson, who took the BMW art series to a whole new level. Now, we feel confident enough to approach an artist again to tackle the subject of mobility, design and contemporary art.
Which artists are you thinking of commissioning next?
We're in the early stages of discussions, so we can't reveal anything yet. But if we look at contemporary artists dealing with mobility, there's Damien Hirst, who designed the Spot Mini; Jeff Koons, who designed a yacht for the Greek millionaire collector Dakis Joannou; Matthew Barney, who crashed cars into each other in his Cremaster series; and Richard Prince, who designs his own cars and exhibits them often throughout the world. There are many others, but these are the ones that come to mind first. The subject of cars and mobility is very important for the most controversial and established contemporary artists.
What forthcoming exhibitions are planned with the art cars?
The four pop cars, by Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella are being shown in an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (www.lacma.org) for three weeks next February. Then they'll be shown at the Grand Central Terminal (http://grandcentralterminal.com/) in New York for two weeks, before traveling to museums in Mexico City, Guadalajara and La Montera in Mexico to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of BMW in Mexico. And the Calder car is being shown at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (www.imma.ie) in Dublin next spring in conjunction with the exhibition "Calder Jewelry."
What do you think about how numerous other car companies have commissioned artists to design cars for their trade show displays?
First of all, the greatest compliment is having a successful idea copied. At the same time, it is crystal clear in just a split second to anyone who spends a few moments on the history of artists and car companies that BMW was the first to collaborate with artists. You also have to differentiate between artists being asked to do a gadget for a car show and car companies that actually involve artists in the design of their cars. Our cars were already made and we asked the artists to do whatever they wanted with them. Most of them painted the surface, but they could have done anything.
What is your definition of luxury?
Luxury is independent of earthly possessions. It is rather about a state of mind, involving a solitary tale of beauty, aesthetics and excess imagined in as many ways as there are individuals on this planet
If luxury were:
An object:
It would be the one thing independent of necessities that you would part with last.
A moment:
It would be one of those moments you cherish above all others and love to bring back to memory, ever changing each time.
A person:
It would be the one person you love and who loves you back, thus making sense of life itself.
A place:
McClure's Beach, north of San Francisco, inside the Tule Elk State Natural Reserve, to see the vast expanse of the ocean, rocks and wind and sun all becoming part of you and you of them, to see things untouched by anything in hundreds of thousands of years.
Buy "Your mobile expectations: BMW H2R project" online:
http://www.amazon.com/Your-mobile-expectations-BMW-project/dp/3037781173
For more info:
http://www.bmwinfo.com/500.html
"Calder Jewelry" is at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin from April 1 through June 21, 2009. www.imma.ie
www.olafureliasson.net