Who dares to walk in the footsteps – tyre tracks? – of giants such as Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney, Jenny Holzer and Jeff Koons? The names BMW has collaborated with in its long-running art car series has propelled the art world down surely one of its most dizzying highways.
A week ago, the art world lost the most recent contributor to the BMW project, LA-based conceptualist John Baldessari. He was 88. A professor at the California Institute Of The Arts, a teacher, thinker and mischief-maker, as well as one of the great figures of 20th-century art, Baldessari once burned 100 of his canvases, shoving the remains into cookie batter that he kept in an urn in his studio. He would often look at and fear that it was a superior statement to whatever he was currently working on. In 1971, he created a lithograph titled “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art”, repeating the statement 17 times, school punishment style.
Baldessari was awarded the National Medal Of Arts by President Obama in 2014, appeared on an episode of The Simpsons as himself and once observed that he would be remembered primarily as the guy who put dots over people’s faces.
Or on a car, as with his 2016 BMW M6 GT LM. His gestural, text-based approach also saw him paint the word “fast” on its left-hand door. Well, there’s no arguing with that. “Pictures and text go together. All pictures by themselves gets kinda boring. All text is kinda boring,” he told me when I interviewed him that year. “You work on a magazine, so presumably you understand that it takes both to reinforce each other.”
Yes, John, I like to think so. “For me, it was very easy. I don’t get much of a chance to work on any art that’s three dimensional, so I’m attracted to anything that begins to look sculptural. On the roof, there’s a big red dot so it could be seen from a helicopter. It’s a very fast car, so on one side it says ‘fast’. On the other side, I have a picture of the car. It was the perfect project.”
Baldessari’s involvement was announced in parallel with that of Cao Fei in 2016, but Fei’s finished car – No18 – arrived later, finished fourth in a round of the 2017 FIA GT World Cup in Macau and set several significant new precedents. At 39 at the time of the commission, she was the youngest artist BMW had worked with, the first from China, and her interpretation of an M6 GT3 endurance racer is also the first in this influential 44-year old series to explore and exploit multimedia. Unless, of course, you regard the “car-as-canvas” precept as inherently multimedia. (It’s certainly kinetic.)
Fei’s car is nevertheless an elegant subversion of the Art Car. Every one of these objects is the sum of multiple narratives, but it’s incumbent on the viewer to find them. Not this time. Fei’s approach starts with a black BMW M6 GT3 but quickly transcends it, takes flight in a short film, Unmanned, and stirs in virtual and augmented reality for good measure.
In the film, directed by Fei, a young monk – BMW prefers “time-travelling spiritual practitioner” – passes through a shifting landscape that evokes China’s rapid transformation from seat of ancient wisdom to crucible of capitalism. When the monk dons a pair of VR goggles, his movements issue a sea of light, which is beautiful in itself but also honours the ritual blessing of a new car (a common practice in Asia).
Meanwhile, onlookers can access a similar display by downloading an app and using it in the presence of the car. Autonomy and AI, two things set to disrupt and transform the car industry, are clear undercurrents. (The black paint, codeveloped with Art Car veteran Walter Maurer, echoes the car’s carbon fibre structure, allows the AR to work to best effect and also echoes China’s particular reverence for “black technology” – their term for the most advanced.)
“When looking at the boundaries between the virtual and real world, my answer is light, something visible and invisible,” Fei noted during the car’s unveiling. “To me, light represents thoughts. As the speed of thoughts cannot be measured, the Art Car questions the existence of the boundaries of the human mind.
“We are entering a new age, where the mind directly controls objects and where thoughts can be transferred, such as unmanned operations and artificial intelligence. Which attitudes and temperaments hold the key to opening the gateway to the new age?”
According to BMW’s cultural ambassador Thomas Girst, “[Cao’s] work is testimony to how much art has evolved. The BMW Art Car series was never about turning a design into an art object but paying tribute to the latest developments in contemporary art, to the vision of some of the greatest artists out there. Cao Fei never wielded a brush. And there is no need to. By going digital, Cao Fei takes the BMW Art Car series into the 21st century.”
BMW’s association with the art world is that most treasured of things: authentic. A triptych by an unknown German artist called Gerhard Richter was commissioned for the firm’s Munich HQ back in 1972, whose opening coincided with the Olympics. It’s still on display there today, though rather more valuable now. But it’s the Art Car series that has most enhanced the company’s cultural legacy. Many major artists have approached BMW about becoming involved and it’s the job of an independent jury of international museum directors to decide who to honour with the opportunity.
“We do not consider ourselves sponsors, which would imply a mere transaction of budget from A to B,” Girst insists. “We consider ourselves partners; our long-term commitment is important. This is a true interaction. And do keep in mind, in pre-Socratic times you had one word for artistic achievements and those in engineering: techné. We’ve just come full circle with the Art Car series.”
The idea originated in 1975 when French racing driver and auctioneer Hervé Poulain decided to fuse his two great passions, art and speed, in a racing car. He convinced his friend, American artist and sculptor Alexander Calder, to treat his BMW 3.0 CSL as a mobile canvas, and the head of BMW motorsport, Jochen Neerspach, was an enthusiastic supporter. The car didn’t finish the race but when I spoke to Poulain recently even he expressed surprise at how durable the concept has become. “The public loved the idea. It was easy to understand and it looked rather like a kid’s drawing, with very bright colours. It was like a moving sculpture.” (Interestingly, Calder had rehearsed the idea on a passenger jet for now-defunct US airline Braniff in the early 1970s.)
Frank Stella’s 3.0 CSL arrived a year later, Roy Lichtenstein’s 320i racer in 1977. By now, the series was sufficiently well-established to attract none other than Andy Warhol. “I adore the car,” he observed. “It’s much better than a work of art.” Unlike his predecessors, Warhol didn’t conceive his car on a scale model before transposing the work, but set about the real thing with thick brushes and pots of paint. It was done in 20 minutes. The M1 duly finished sixth overall at Le Mans that year in the hands of a team led by driver Manfred Winkelhock (one of his codrivers was the indefatigable Poulain). Warhol may have owned a yellow Ferrari, but this is the only car of his that has outlived its allotted 15 minutes.
David Hockney’s 1995 850 CSi has never turned a wheel, in anger or otherwise, and reflects a more bucolic and possibly romantic aspiration. Although fellow Art Car alumni Robert Rauschenberg once described Los Angeles “as 35 miles long by 35 miles wide, and seven inches deep”, Hockney loved driving through the canyons north of the city. He also delivered a deliberate transparency. “BMW gave me the model of the car and I kept looking at it and looking at it, and then, I must admit, I also looked at the other Art Cars. In the end I thought, probably it would be good to perhaps show the car so you could be looking inside it.
“Driving and design go hand in hand in a way. Travelling around in a car means experiencing landscapes – which is one of the reasons I chose green as a colour. The car has wonderful contours and I followed them.”
Few car companies are more adept at managing their brand than BMW, but to corporatise the Art Cars would defeat the object – literally and figuratively. In other words, Hockney could have run wild but chose not to. His call. Two of the most satisfying, Jenny Holzer’s 1999 V12 LMR and Jeff Koons’ 2010 M3 GT2, are also arguably the most political and playful. Holzer, whose work has appeared on billboards, giant LED signs and even airport information screens, noted that “for me, there isn’t a more suitable medium than a racing car”. Her BMW LMR featured six texts from her Truisms and Survival series, and used chrome lettering and phosphorescent paint for maximum visibility. “Protect Me From What I Want” is visible on the car in plan view. “What Urge Will Save Us Now That Sex Won’t?” is stitched into the head restraint on the race seat. Going fast in a racing car, perhaps.
“Artists have to want to do this,” BMW board director Ian Robertson tells me, “they come to us. We don’t pay them, either. The lure is that they become part of history.
“The moment you say, ‘You don’t have total creative freedom’, then what’s the point?” he adds. “Now, that’s risky, and there’s a chance we wouldn’t have been in tune with what was created. By and large, though, it’s worked. If you put restrictions in place, then art disappears. Look closely and you’ll see that there are some provocative elements on Jeff’s car...”
No kidding. Koon’s M3 GT2 racer, how can we put it, celebrates life energy; it begins with an insemination and achieves a vividly depicted climax. But what did you expect? In 1985’s “One Ball Total Equilibrium”, he submerged a basketball in a tank of water, a comment on “an ultimately desirable but ultimately unattainable state”. In 1988, he held an exhibition called Banality. His most notorious work, “Made In Heaven”, emerged in 1989 and depicted the artist and his muse and soon-to-be wife – the porn star-turned-Italian politician Ilone Staller, AKA Cicciolina – engaged in a variety of highly committed sexual activities.
Since then there have been balloon animals, giant puppies made of flowers, and inflatable lobsters. Koons currently holds the record for the most expensive work sold at auction by a living artist: “Balloon Dog (Orange)” made $58.4m at Christie’s Post-War And Contemporary sale in New York in 2013.
As far as his Art Car was concerned, he immersed himself fully in motor racing, and even went testing with BMW’s ALMS team at Sebring in Florida. Ultimately, the project was pulled together in around six months, designed in 2-D on computer then translated onto a 3-D shape. His team were careful not to interfere with the M3’s aerodynamics or add weight. The finished artwork is actually a digital print on car wrapping vinyl, with a double-clear coating applied on top. Each of the lines was positioned painstakingly by hand. Physics and aerodynamics are made visible; on Koons’ Art Car, that symbol of 1970s suburban escape, the go-faster stripe, lives to fight another day. (Thinking about it, furry dice are very Jeff Koons, but they wouldn’t cope with the g-forces generated by a race car.)
“Art is all about a narrative,” he told me during the car’s reveal. “The narrative I enjoy and trust the most is the one that connects us all – life. This car is about life energy, it’s that millisecond before life comes into being. This car is striving to get where it needs to go, to beat all the obstacles in its path. So it’s a metaphor for our lives, and a reminder that we’re all winners. Because if we’re here at all then we’ve won, and we should embrace all the possibilities that exist.
“I like the idea of this car pushing that millisecond just a bit further, to play with time. In terms of the actual art work, I looked at light bursts, explosions, tried to work out where the forces at work on the car were most accentuated. The idea of light bending, of something travelling so fast that fragments of its surface are pulled apart...”
A month later we sat in Le Mans town square enjoying french fries and beer ahead of the race. Say what you like about the guy, but he gets stuck in – less glamorous racing rituals and all. The most mundane racing reality – a broken gearbox and fuelling problem – hobbled the car in the race itself, after just five of its intended 24 hours. Robbed of its real purpose, a racing car could look forlorn as a static object. But as Koons’ car reappeared in the paddock at the Le Mans circuit, there was no diminution in impact. Or ambition. “Art always wants to become life itself. The power of art is connection. My work is a celebration of being human, and when people experience art it happens inside them, it’s about their own potential, their own desire for a vaster life. My work leans towards optimism, but it’s not just cheerful without any reason. It has a debate and ends up saying, this is why we should go forward with a sense of purpose.”
BMW’s Art Cars
1975: Alexander Calder, 3.0 CSL
Philadelphia-born Calder was best known for his abstract “mobiles” (as opposed to automobiles). The BMW was one of the last works he finished before his death and tested his ability to impose a sculptural idea on something that was effectively already a sculpture. Raced in the Le Mans 24 hours in 1975 but didn’t finish.
1976: Frank Stella, 3.0 CSL
“My design is like a blueprint transferred to the bodywork.” Stella’s use of the black and white square grid is a reflection of the car’s technical character. Was a works entry in the 1976 Le Mans 24 hours race but didn’t finish.
1977: Roy Lichtenstein, 320i Group 5
“I thought hard and put all I had into it. I wanted to use painted lines as a road, pointing the way for the car. The design also shows the scenery as it passes by.” Revealed at the Pompidou Centre and raced at Le Mans, where it finished first in its class, ninth overall.
1979: Andy Warhol, M1 Group 4
“I tried to portray speed pictorially. If a car is moving really quickly, all the lines and colours are blurred.” Raced only once, at Le Mans in 1979, it finished sixth overall and second in its class.
1982: Ernest Fuchs, BMW 635 CSi
Austrian artist Fuchs founded the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism in the 1940s. “Actually the car needs no embellishment. It has its own aesthetic appeal. I call this car ‘Firefox on a hare-hunt’. It represents a hare racing across a motorway at night and leaping over a burning car.”
1986: Robert Rauschenberg, 635 CSi
The Art Car goes post-modern. Rauschenberg’s entry utilises other works, including “Man Of The World” by 16th-century Florentine artist Bronzino, and its hub caps are antique plates. Rauschenberg’s Art Car inspired the later “Beamer” series, which used silkscreens originally made for the 635 CSi.
1989: Michael Jagamara Nelson, BMW M3
An aborigine, Jagamara Nelson spent seven days transforming his BMW into an example of traditional Papunya art. “The car is a landscape as if viewed from an aeroplane – I have included water, the kangaroo and a possum.”
1989: Ken Done, BMW M3
Another Australian, Done’s car took inspiration from the country, but also has technical elements. “I have painted parrots and parrot fish. Both are beautiful and able to move at fantastic speeds. I wanted my BMW Art Car to express the same qualities.”
1990: César Manrique, BMW 730i
Lanzarote-born, Manrique claimed he had “tried to unite the notions of speed and aerodynamics with the concept of aesthetic appeal in one and the same object”.
1990: Matazo Kayama, BMW 535i
“The clean lines of the BMW came clearest to me once the car was fully masked.” One of the most intricate Art Cars, Japanese artist Kayame used traditional techniques like ‘Kirigane’ – metal cutting – and “Arare” – foil impression – along with airbrushing to celebrate Japan. And the car. Kayama admitted that it was tricky to appreciate the full work on the 3-D automotive “canvas”.
1991: A.R Penck, BMW Z1
“I am interested in how art relates to art, how art relates to technology and above all how art relates to a solid object.” Penck’s car presents a series of symbols as ciphers that the viewer decodes. We haven’t managed it yet.
1991: Esther Mahlangu, BMW 525i
Mahlangu works in the traditional African tribal art form Ndebele, which is passed down through the generations. “Ndebele art is naturally grandiose in form and only needed the concept of motion added.”
1992: Sandro Chia, BMW touring car racer
“The automobile is a sought-after possession in society, and all eyes are upon it. People look closely at cars. The one I have painted here reflects their gaze. Like a mirror, it confronts the people who look at it.”
1995: David Hockney, BMW 850 CSi
“It was lots of fun.” Hockney turns his Art Car is inside out. You can see a depiction of the engine’s intake manifold, the driver and also one of his beloved dogs.
1999: Jenny Holzer, V12 LMR
“The unattainable is invariably attractive.” Holzer’s truisms found a high-speed platform in the guise of this full-blooded Le Mans endurance prototype. It didn’t finish at Le Mans in ’99, but the other works BMW V12 LMR won the race.
2007: Olafur Eliasson, BMW H2R
The most radical and conversely least well-known Art Car, Eliasson’s work is based on the record-winning, hydrogen-powered H2R research vehicle. Two layers of metal covered in ice hide the car’s form. Rarely seen for obvious reasons.
2010: Jeff Koons, BMW M3 GT2
“Art always wants to become life itself. The power of art is connection.” Raced at Le Mans in 2010, Koons’ car retired after five hours, but helped reignite global interest in BMW’s Art Car programme.
2016: John Baldessari, M6 GT3
“On the roof, there’s a big red dot so it could be seen from a helicopter. It’s a very fast car, so on one side it says ‘fast’. On the other side, I have a picture of the car. It was the perfect project.”
2017: Cao Fei, M6 GT3
“As the speed of thoughts cannot be measured, the Art Car questions the existence of the boundaries of the human mind.” Not just a car, but also a film and a light installation.
Now read:
GQ Car Awards 2019: all the winners revealed
BMW’s M1 is the Italian supercar time forgot
Jenson Button interview: ‘The euphoria when you finally cross the line is just incredible’
