‘ARSHAM AUTO MOTIVE’
Whether looking at a collection of cool muscle cars, futuristic prototypes, electric rides or even antique historical machines, car enthusiasts are used to seeing shiny vehicles in pristine condition on display at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.
However, the museum’s latest exhibition is showcasing the effects of time and environmental elements on vehicles through sculpted pieces constructed, or deconstructed, by artist Daniel Arsham.
“For us, all of these cars are kind of cast in time and slowly decaying,” said Michael Bodell, chief operating officer of the museum, as he stood inside the new exhibition, dubbed “Arsham Auto Motive,” a few days before it opened to the public Saturday.
“And in museums you’re typically trying to preserve objects, but this is different,” he continued. “It’s celebrating that these objects are eroding and decaying.”
Running through Nov. 26, the exhibition, located in the museum’s first-floor Armand Hammer Foundation Gallery, features about a dozen pieces created by Arsham,
a New York-based interdisciplinary artist whose work has been displayed in The Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, The Athens Biennale in Greece, The New Museum in New York and others.
His exhibition at the Petersen features vehicles like a 1968 Ford Mustang GT Fastback, a 1975 Porsche 911 and a 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California plus other sculptural items. Using materials like selenite crystals, quartz, pyrite and plaster, Arsham turned these collector vehicles into decomposed-looking machines, creating the appearance of an apocalyptic parking lot inside the museum.
One of the most stunning pieces is the 1968 Mustang, the same model featured in the 1968 Steve McQueen film “Bullitt.”
Pieces of the exterior and interior of the matte gray Mustang have been scooped out by the artist, and in those spaces he embedded chunks of crystals along with quartz and pyrite to give the appearance of an organic growth of sorts on a long-abandoned and perhaps recently unearthed car.
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“The crystals are kind of a unique way to show that deconstruction,” Bodell said. “It’s an organic shape. Cars are nonorganic objects and it brings an organic element into the object.”
Accompanying this piece is a three-dimensional sculptural re-creation of a movie poster for the film, which sports the same crystals embedded into holes and cracks of the vehicle.
Arsham has also inserted the crystals and minerals into various places on the Porsche 911 and the Ferrari, except these cars are completely covered in a white, plasterlike material, adding a dramatic and almost ghostly feel.