BMW M1 Art Car

Awell-known quote from Andy Warhol goes: “Paintings are way too hard. The things I want to show are mechanical. Machines have less problems. I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?” As is habitual for the king of pop-obfuscations—both populist and popular—Warhol only tells half the truth here. Yes, painting might have appeared hard and laborious to him, as did many creative expressions after an initial stylistic idea, so he would venture to find a mechanical, often industrialized method of production, which would involve the least amount of concrete labor by the artist. But painting was also the primary form of producing a hallmark for the artist. This is why the majority of Warhol’s works have subjective brushstrokes incorporated into them. The direct, demonstrative traces of the act of painting are still needed by the artist as evidence of his actual involvement in the serial production of art.

Warhol did intend to show things that are mechanical, and this produced a significant dialectic for his artistic production: Things that indicated the organic, like portraits or accounts of accidents or death, were rendered mechanical through a serialization of motifs (100 Marilyns, 1962) or by graphically reducing them to the point of abstraction (Green Car Crash, 1963). Whereas things that were mechanical like soup cans or Brillo boxes were subjectified through the rough-and-ready silkscreens that reproduced them: their surfaces turning from industrialized perfection to a quasi-organic individuality that subverts the superficial commodity. Like Marcel Duchamp before him, Warhol only claimed to have abandoned the personal production of art, of painting in particular, while his creative impulse and artistic aspirations actually guaranteed the continuation of new series of images on canvas that showed the artist’s hand. While the dominance of the mechanical as motif on canvas draws out the continuing significance of the organic basis (for art), the “organic” act of painting the canvas with a handheld brush is exposed as outdated for modern societies in which desire is best expressed through consuming industrially produced objects.

Within an economy that has to constantly produce new things and in which culture, too, is reduced to the ready availability of reproduc tions, machines appear indeed to offer a solution to the ever-increasing needs of consumers. So, after Warhol, it might be true that “machines have less problems.” But the very instant you anthropomorphize the machine, represent it as an organism that by virtue of replacing man becomes man-like itself (“I’d like to be a machine”), the problem arises as to how man can still recognize himself. How can he survive in a market that is saturated by industrialized artifacts? Warhol’s double bind was to proclaim the superiority of the mechanical surface and the industrialized contents while ensuring that everybody recognized his artistic output as “Warholian,” as imbued with the personal traits, personal gestures, and the creator’s signature, which ostensibly were all about portraying its very opposite, the machine.

The automobile is one machine that occupied Warhol from the very start of his work. His obsession with the emblematic potential of the car begins with drawings of models (fashion as well as automotive) in the 1950s (Female Fashion Figure (with 1959 Plymouth Sport Fury Con-

vertible), 1959) and reverts to parts of the Disaster series from 1962, which depicted the manner in which the machine creates problems for man rather than solving them: ending lives through accidents, bombs, electric chairs, etc. But at the same time he experimented with depictions of US car brands (Pontiac, Eight Buicks, and Seven Cadillacs, all 1962). Here, again, the dramatic narrative and pictorial for malism of the industrial object come together in Warhol’s work.

The serialized and the individual meet significantly indeed in Warhol’s Art Car of 1979. Hervé Poulain, the instigator of the series of commissions, first received a proposal for a 320 touring car in 1978, which Warhol had decorated in flowery mauve wallpaper on a black background that covered even windows and headlights (see p. 73). Since the Art Car still had to be raced at that time during the 24 Hours of Le Mans, a blackout design would have been impossible. Poulain accordingly suggested to Warhol that he should work on a prototype that had been occupying BMW for the past couple of years. This design turned out to be the only bona fide “supercar” of the Bavarian manufacturer: the M1, a sportive GT-type with a 277 bhp engine centrally mounted in the back of the chassis. This exceptional car, conceived by the BMW Motorsport GmbH that had been formed a few years previously, fused the latest technical developments with a design that was inspired by the BMW Turbo, which Paul Bracq (then head of design) had developed in 1972. BMW had collaborated with Giorgio Guigiaro and his company Italdesign on the look of the car, which was to be built in a small series by the Lamborghini factory in Sant’Agata Bolognese. Yet the Italian manufacturer went through a difficult patch at that time and it was decided to entrust Baur coachworks in Stuttgart with the production of some 460 cars of the series. The model suggested to Warhol and driven at Le Mans in June 1979, however, remained one of a kind, a 345 kW (= 470 bph) customized version for the endurance race.

Warhol’s first idea for the new M1 was a concept, which pre-figured a series of works, realized only just before his death: camouflage. For Warhol this met the challenge of finding something abstract that is not abstract, denoting an overall pattern that is still perceived both as functional and representative. But this very representation posed a problem. A German motorcar company racing in France with a car denoted as military— nigh on impossible! With certain trepidation Poulain explained his dilemma. Warhol’s response was straightforward: “Oh well, send me plane tickets and I’ll come and paint the car in Munich directly.”

This act and action of painting brings us back to the contrast of the mechanical and subjective that animates Warhol’s art, underlying its frequently professed machine-aesthetic in focusing

on industrial objects and commodities. The artist coveted the direct involvement with his hands, the immediate approach to the surface and the concrete expression through paint and brush. But, of course, this worked only on a mechanical thing. On canvas, Warhol’s gestural, Abstract-Expressionist painting style would have just appeared as rehashing the New York School of the 1950s, but on the synthetic coachwork of the M1 the smears and streaks of the Sikkens car finish fit perfectly with Warhol’s aim at pitching individualized surface treatment against industrially produced object. The car finish suggests also an estrangement from the habitual types of paint (oil, acrylic) used for canvases, as a gesture away from the traditional mode of the painter to that of the artist working with and within a technologically advanced society. The character of the polymer-based paint that disperses easily yet dries out rapidly and, thus, accommodates instant reworking generated for Warhol’s project a strong performative element. Him covering the M1 bordered on action painting, in the spirit of Georges Mathieu or Jackson Pollock, in which the very act of covering a surface in paint becomes part of the substance of the work.

For Warhol’s M1, this is documented not simply by tracing the strokes, the fingerprints, or scratches with brush handles across the coachwork, but also by the way in which he moved around the car while painting it. Poulain, who witnessed the process, spoke of “exaggerated movements like a dancer,”3 something quite unexpected for the normally so reserved and physically awkward Warhol. The artist’s uncharacteristically quick movements became a match for the M1 with its top speed of almost 200 miles per hour (over 300 km/h). Indeed, Warhol was so much caught up in the act of painting as performance around the designed object that he finished within half an hour, before the film crew that was meant to document the painting process could arrive. Always the consummate professional, Warhol posed for some takes after the actual performance—thus simply reproducing the event, in the spirit of his dedication to disposable consumer culture. And talking of the impact of speed: once the carbon rear spoiler was fitted to the car and it had been tested, the M1 recorded one of the most impressive performances of any Art Car across the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Driven through repeated downpours by Hervé Poulain, Manfred Winckelhock, and Marcel Mignot, it managed to come in sixth with 284 laps and a completed distance of 3,875 kilometers at an average speed of 161.45 km/h— a mere twenty-three laps behind the eventual winner. In its class (IMSA 2.5+, the group of the most powerful sports car prototypes), it posted second place, beaten only by the car with a certain Paul Newman at the wheel.

For Warhol, the car design marked a very significant exception to his body of work, showing a subjective, spontaneous, and performative side of the artist who had hidden himself habitually behind cameras, studio assistants, or screens: a liberation in movement and a coming together of industrial culture and contemporary, popular art.

Thank you to Ulrich Lehmann and BMW UK for their assistance with this article. Andy Warhol photos copyright of BMW.