From the side of the road (where else?) art car artist, documentarian, film maker, photographer, writer and enthusiast Harrod Blank blabs about his special four wheel calling in life ...

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John: Can you define an art car?

Harrod: Art cars are basically art on wheels. An individual's expression using the car as a canvas. They put on their inspirations, their desires, their dreams, their feelings, what they want to communicate to others, their art, or what have you. It really is varied. We're talking objects like the telephone car which looks like an actual telephone driving down the road, or the Mad Cad which is a Cadillac completely encrusted with beads. Then there's Dennis Woodruff, an aspiring actor who put his head shots all over his car: "Dennis Woodruff, Make Me a Star!" It takes all kinds. It's kind of a movement that's involving different people from all across the country, even in Canada.

John: A-ha, I wanted to get to that. A lot of these art cars look very intricate, very delicate, they don't look like they would survive our Canadian winter with all the salt on the roads, but you say they exist up here.

Harrod: Oh yeah, there's Ken Gerberick out in Vancouver who's done maybe four or five cars. There's Ernie Penny in Saskatchewan who covered his car in Canadian pennies. There's Melanie Melody in Toronto. There's Natali Leduc in Ottawa who made the Natmobile which is a black bondo looking contraption that has what looks like giant feathers coming off the back like tail fins, and the inside is all covered with real blue feathers. I'd say there's 15-20 art cars in Canada.

John: How do you find all these people?

Harrod: A lot of them find me now, but in the beginning I would find people on the response of my own art car. I'd be parked in Santa Cruz (where I grew up), on the cliff where a lot of tourists go, and they would come up and say, "hey this is really something, oh my god!" - that's where I got the name for the car - "Hey have you seen the grass car in Kansas City?," or "the Button Man in South Carolina?" I filed all these comments away, and when I decided to do a book on art cars I started doing research, and I recalled all these names and started putting them all together. Now there's art car festivals all across the country. There's one that's called the Friendship Festival that's uniting Buffalo and Niagara Falls in Canada, which will feature the first ever international art car parade. That's just an indication of how hot the subject of art cars is. There hadn't been an exhibit of art cars before in an institution like the Petersen Automotive Museum. There hasn't been all these parades and festivals before. This year is the year.

John: The great thing about this scene is that what looks just like a fringe aspect of art, is actually a large melting pot for various artists: serious painters, conceptual artists, sculptors, assemblage artists, and even wacky craft folk can happily coexist in the art car world. I think that's pretty rare.

Harrod: I think so too. It's all inclusive. The only thing that art car people have in common is that they are different. And that's something we relish: the fact that you are a unique character, or have a certain passion that's unusual or very in-depth to the point of being obsessive, like the telephone guy. Here's a telephone collector making a telephone car. Howard Davis is a successful business man, he's not even an artist. He just wanted to do this because his passion drove him. It's a very diverse bunch of people.

John: Some of these people use the act of making an art car as a form of therapy, some have lost loved ones, some have burning desires, some need an outlet - like the failed golfer. I think that alongside art therapy there should be a real movement of art car therapy.

Harrod: Yeah that's true! I can speak for myself on that. When I had a relationship that went awry, I would take the love that I was giving to the woman, and put it into the car. Whatever reason a person makes art, is the reason that people make art cars.

John: Did you always have a burning ambition to make an art car, or did you just wake up one day and say, "I'm doing an art car!"

Harrod: I was sixteen when I got my first car which was an old beat up '65 VW bug. I was actually embarrassed by the car. I thought it was ugly, boring, and it didn't represent me at all. Because I grew up in a forest and I raised chickens, and I was quite isolated - the nearest neighbours lived five miles away - instead of having friends to play and communicate with, I went out in nature and was a wild child type of guy. I had to commute to high school 30 miles away. I was very different from the other people. So I decided to show them something about myself - that I was different, because I looked totally normal but it just didn't feel right. So I painted a rooster on my driver's door, and just by doing that I was given an identity. People started calling me chicken man. It just encouraged me to keep going. I really did think that I had a problem: I was a freak of nature and very strange because I had this passion of decorating my car and I was the only one that I knew of. Gradually I found out there were others, and what we were doing was something positive for the community and for ourselves. It's therapeutic and it gives something back.

John: So what inspired you to document all these car artists through the books and the films?

Harrod: Basically it was showing people the power behind the medium. To show why art cars are a good thing. In the beginning with my first art car, I was constantly being pulled over by the police, harassed, vandalized, I was egged, I got my car beat up with baseball bats. It took a lot to define what it is that we were doing. The only definition at that time for an art car artist was a freak, a hippie or a drug addict. It wasn't really considered art. In fact it still isn't. That's why I'm dedicated to define what art cars are as a form of art and something positive. With the Petersen Exhibit (Feb. 8 - May 26, 2003) it is being considered a part of automotive culture, and the next step is exhibits in art museums.

John: You've been at this for a while haven't you?

Harrod: Yeah, I started my first art car in '81, did the first movie in '92 ("Wild Wheels"), the first book in '93 ("Wild Wheels"), the second movie in '98 ("Driving the Dream") , the second book in 2002 ("Art Cars"), and the third movie, the one I'm working on now, the biggest epic of my whole career called Auto Biography, will feature 25 artists in depth and why they create.

John: Tell me how your Camera Van came to be.

Harrod: Ok, it actually came to me in a dream. It was actually a solution to a problem that I was having with my first art car "Oh My God," and that was: how can I show people - my parents included, and my peers - why having an art car is a worthwhile experience. Why I am not wasting my time. People feel it is a frivolous activity, like I should be getting a job in the stock market, or getting a job period. But playing with your car for some reason is assumed to be worthless. A person once said, "oh there you still are, not having grown up, still playing in your sandbox." In this dream I covered my car in cameras and the people didn't know which cameras worked, so the cameras would capture their expressions of joy and their expressions of awe, and their stares and their befuddled looks. The dream was so powerful I actually woke up and wrote some notes about it, and woke up the next morning still blown away by the idea, and thought, gee, if I really did this I think I could pull it off and it would work. The problem was getting the 2000 plus cameras together and a one tonne heavy duty van on which to put them, and how to do it. How to make them work, how to wire them up. There's no book about how to make a camera van. I did the roof three times because the first time all of the film canisters didn't stick to the glue I was using, and they fell off. Just recently, for the Petersen Exhibit, I redid the entire roof with silver Kodak Instamatics to spell out the word "smile," and around that I put black cheapo point and shoot cameras. It's really cool, though you have to be above in an airplane or on a bridge to see it. The Camera Van is going to be in Montreal for the Just For Laughs comedy festival from July 10-20th. I will be doing a tour of Canada starting in Niagara Falls on July 4th for the Friendship Festival, then I'll probably drive across Canada and photograph Canadians reacting to the Camera Van.

John: How did you get involved with the comedy festival?

Harrod: They found me on the website www.artcaragency.com which is a place where you hire or license an art car. They were looking at the website and they were laughing. So they wanted to put it together with the festival. The cars do elicit amazement, laughter and smiles. They are entertaining. And they want the artists to be part of it, and they are so eccentric and interesting themselves, that to have the artists and their cars together will be great.

John: Let's talk about an artist that crops up quite a bit in your work, and that is Mr. Gene Pool.

Harrod: Oh yeah, Gene Pool has lots of suits that he's done. He was initially known for doing the grass car in Kansas City at the Art Institute. That grass car has got him so many gigs doing grass cars that he got sick of doing them. He didn't want to be known as the grass car guy, he wanted to be known as Gene Pool the artist. After a whole collection of grass suits, he did a lightbulb suit, cork suit, an aluminium can suit ... Just all kinds of suits. They flew him over to France to do an ad campaign that featured a watch suit, a feather suit, an eggshell suit which was recently featured on PBS. He's great.

John: To see the process of Gene growing grass on a bus is simply amazing.

Harrod: Yeah, you see his passion. He takes it very seriously. You have to have a certain level of passion to pull this off, cuz things do go wrong. When you make an art car you have to make sure it can withstand the elements, the sun, the cold, the wind, people playing with it .... And then maintaining it. Just like with the Camera Van, you think "great I'm done," and the next thing you know the cameras are fading, oh no somebody stole three of my best cameras, or oh no I hit a deer and it knocked off a bunch of the cameras. It's a constant maintenance program.

John: I imagine the grass car has a short life span.

Harrod: The grass only lives for two weeks. Then it's like a dead grass car.

John: So what happens then, do you have to scrape everything off the car?

Harrod: Uh no, it's actually too much work, you'd have to get a grinder to get rid of all the old glue, the dead seeds and the dead grass. They generally leave it as a dead grass car, or destroy it. Most of the grass cars have been real cheap to begin with.

John: But what about the St. Louis Cardinals bus (an advertisement stunt for the baseball team) that Gene did?

Harrod: Yeah, I don't know what they did with that. I imagine they scraped that one off, and re-did it.

John: One of the most spectacular art cars is the penny car. I'd think car enthusiasts would be tripping all over themselves to buy one of those.

Harrod: Actually Ripley's Believe It Or Not museum has bought something like ten coin covered cars. I thought it was illegal to do that, but they do look really cool. What people don't realize is how hard it is to keep 'em shiny. They tarnish, so the penny man would spend the whole afternoon cleaning his van to have it shiny for two weeks.

John: Well you know the roofs of our Parliament buildings up here in Ottawa are made of copper, and they let them tarnish, and they turn this beautiful blue green colour. Why wouldn't they let the penny cars go and see what happens?

Harrod: There is a guy in San Francisco who did a penny covered Cadillac and he encouraged his friends to piss on it. It's cool, but it has more of a greenish look, like something from the bottom of the ocean, rather than a shiny gladiator look, like the guy from Tuscon. His van and his outfit make him look like he's a gladiator. He's very regal. He glows.

John: Let's talk about the only celebrity among the art car folk you have in your books - Uri Geller.

Harrod: He lives outside of London and he's done a Cadillac, called the Peace Car, which he's covered with spoons bent using his own mind, forks bent by an artist friend of his, and spoons he's collected from famous celebrities. Princess Diana had given him a spoon. The spoon that was in the glove compartment of James Dean's car when he was killed. Salvador Dali gave him a crystal ball which became the hood ornament. The bent spoons and twisted forks are on a Cadillac with bullet proof windows. His goal is to bring the car to the Middle East and bring peace. Though it looks like he's too late. But yeah, it's a really cool car.

John: I gotta ask: did you meet the guy?

Harrod: Yeah I went to his estate with the Camera Van. He actually contacted me when I was in the newspaper in London. "Harrod your surveillance vehicle is really something, would you like to come up to my estate etc...". I said sure, would you mind if I filmed you, and he said ok. We had a great time.

John: So can he really bend spoons with his mind?

Harrod: Yes, he bent a giant soup ladle which I photographed. He was just holding it in front of his face, did some rubbing, not a whole lot, and the damn thing just melted like butter. Then he bent another on film. That one didn't actually bend, but it broke in two. He also gets hired to determine if you have oil or water on your land.

John: So you're a believer?

Harrod: Well, uh, I, er, I'm not necessarily a full fledged believer but I really like what the guy is doing: the fact that he's doing this and he's passionate about it, it's enough to make me believe. He obviously believes in himself and he's like a magician. You wanna believe him because it's so cool and out of the ordinary. I don't care if it is true.

John: And what about Hyler Bracey's Big Horn, the most expensive art car ever made?

Harrod: The Big Horn is probably a half a million, if not a million dollar art car. Hyler Bracey actually did an earlier version, a truck covered with antique boat horns, bells and train whistles all of which worked. That vehicle was pretty incredible but it crashed. The tow hitch that was towing the car broke and the Bighorn crashed, and was destroyed. So he decided to go full out and make this millennium machine: the new and improved Big Horn. This thing is really amazing, It's got very hi-tech computer parts, about eighty LED buttons on the control panel to make all these horns and whistles blow. And I mean these things can be heard twelve miles away. If he ever gets stuck in traffic and he wants to blow his horn he could shatter windshields. It's unbelievable, he put everything he had into it. He's a successful business man and used his resources to realize his vision. Instead of trying to make money, he's trying to inspire people to live their dreams. He was badly burned in a race car accident when he was young. His point is that if you have a dream then go for it. Don't sit around cuz you don't know what's gonna happen. His piece is about fulfilling your dreams when you have a chance to do it.

John: That thing looks like a theme park on wheels.

Harrod: Yeah it's very carnivalesque. The horns are all painted a very nice iridescent blue colour, and they're all on pulleys and levers and hydraulics, so they're close to the body in the off position, but when he pushes a switch the horns will actually rise up and out. I'm talking about twenty to thirty of these gigantic, three to eight feet long, and up to three feet in diameter. They give out a phenomenal blast. They're all historical, and he knows all about them.

John: If I saw that on the road I would wonder if that was legal. What exactly makes an art car street legal?

Harrod: I believe it is street legal. He can't go in traffic and blow his horn, but he can get a parade permit. The real point of an art car is that it should be mobile. If the car's not drivable then it's not really an art car. The power of being mobile is that it can reach a lot of people. If it's just parked in your garage then no one will see it. The whole point of having an art car is visibility - getting the attention, being seen, and interacting with the public.

John: One other art car really struck me and that is the wrought iron Beetle. And there's a whole bunch of these.

Harrod: Yeah there's at least two men that I know of, and each thinks they started it. One in Mexico and one in San Antonio, Texas. They didn't know of each other, and they don't care for the other's design. The cars are very curvaceous, like a bent wrought iron fence. They're very beautiful. Of course there's no protection against rain or snow. It's so open you can feel the wind blowing, much better than a convertible. I've driven one and it's great.

John: Don't you feel too exposed?

Harrod: You do feel kinda naked to tell the truth. People can really see all of you driving the car. You're really part of the car, part of the show. A lot of cars hide people with tinted windows - you could be Darth Vader in there. This is just the opposite.

John: Do you have a favourite art car artist that you keep in touch with?

Harrod: Oh yeah, that's what I'm really in it for, is the people. Most are eccentric and interesting, they all have unique strengths. If I had to be blasted off to another planet somewhere and we'd have to fend for ourselves, then bringing the art car people would be ideal, because they offer so much random knowledge that we would get something done. One of my favourite people is Ron Dolce from Oakland, who did a stained glass covered VW called the Glass Quilt. He had to measure and cut each piece - it took him eighteen years to do it. He's an Aquarius and very loud. He's very unique and very cool. He turned sixty in late January. He'll be in the new movie so look for him there.

John: On the technical side of things, could you give a course in art car making that involves all the various aspects from painting to gluing to riveting?

Harrod: I certainly could. One part I'm lacking is welding. I've never welded. Also fibreglass, though that will be my next art car: one that the entire shape of the car is recreated into the shape of something else, say a turtle or a horse. I really want to do something that suspends a person's disbelief that they're seeing something other than a car. But other than that, when it comes to glues, paints, rivets ... I've got a lot of experience building these things. There's actually a lot of knowledge involved, say in how big an object you can attach to a car, and how well you have to attach it before it blows off. There's a lot to keep track of.

John: When these art car artists get together do they wind up talking technical shop, like glue comparisons and how they got certain effects?

Harrod: Oh totally. One of the paints that Jeff Lockheed started using in St. Louis called One Shot, a lead based sign painter's paint, he did a couple of art cars and they became so popular that One Shot is now the choice paint for art cars. It really does hold the colour for a much longer time than other paints. Myself included, I said, damn how did you get that thing to look so good, and so colourful? So I used it for my car.

John: I'm inspired. I'm going to get some One Shot!

Harrod: Wear a respirator though cuz it is lead based, and is probably worse for you than it seems. Wear a gas mask, even if you're working outside.

John: The one car that I can't get over is the mirror mobile (by Bob Corbett). It is so beautiful.

Harrod: I feel the same. What's amazing about that car is that it reflects everything around it so it actually disappears into the landscape. When you see it going down the highway it becomes the highway. It really is amazing, and it's so shiny. It looks good from every angle. That car is very easy to maintain, because mirror pieces are easy to replace. It's a picture that's always changing as it moves, and that's probably my favourite part about it.

John: Can you rent some of these cars for certain functions?

Harrod: Oh yeah, people have rented art cars for pick ups at the airport, weddings, their daughter's 16th birthday party. I've had a lot of parents wanting to bring art cars into schools to inspire the students. Obviously there's not a lot of money in it, but it's a different kind of value for the artists.

John: So if I wanted to rent the mirror car for the weekend...

Harrod: That would be a problem cuz it's in Montana, and you'd have to get it shipped up there to Canada. The key is to find an art car in your area that you like. We get some strange requests, like Oracle laying out a budget of $20,000 to bring in as many art cars for their employees as possible. We're kind of like the contemporary jesters, here to entertain the aristocracy. It's very bizarre. I've made a flash cube suit to go along with the Camera Van and I've been hired to be an official greeter at some fancy events, and it feels like the Twilight Zone. I never could have dreamed up this type of life. I got a job as a keynote speaker at a wellwater convention. The reason they hired me is they wanted to show people who drill for water to look for it in unconventional ways. You have to be creative. Art cars will take you on a ride. I can never anticipate where I'm going to be next, and why. Art cars are like magic lamps.

John: Is it possible to go back to a regular car after being an art car driver?

Harrod: Yes it is, because sometimes I need to get where I want to go, so reliability is important, and so is gas mileage. I can go places and I don't have to be "on." If you're in an art car you are always on, part of the performance whether you like it or not.


More art car resources:
www.cameravan.com
www.harrodblank.com
www.artcaragency.com

Harrod Blank's books and videos are available HERE!

all images © Harrod Blank (bless his photographic soul)

....tape hiss...(you can stop reading now - whew!)

(C) 2003 - John Sekerka