Word: autos
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...exhibition's auto-eroticism sector does, however, include one triumphal fetish--Larry Fuente's Derby Racer, 1975. Like some pious Latino decorating a shrine, Fuente glorified a convertible jalopy with an undulating crust of shards, beads, mirror fragments and pearly gewgaws. It is still a convincing, near folk object--an automotive equivalent, perhaps, to Simon Rodia's towers in the Watts neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles...
...course, by the '60s the car had moved near the center of California art in more ways than one, because California life is hardly imaginable without autos and thruways (nor is American life in general, but California is less so). The very perception of landscape and townscape was locked into auto experience. Even conventional views of buildings in the street, like Ed Ruscha's gas stations, give the impression that they're glimpsed vividly and briefly from a passing vehicle. And an essentially traditional modernist like Richard Diebenkorn, during the figurative-landscape phase of his work...
...stuff of which cars were made also became the stuff of art. Only in '60s California would artists adopt the artificial seductions of auto finishes, the glittering sprayed enamels and fiercely inorganic colors of glaze that made Ken Price's little ceramic sculptures so immediate and memorable. They manage to look luscious and poisonous at the same time, and in terms of what curator Barron and her team have set out to show--the weird confluence of vectors in a flawed and contradictory ex-paradise--they are perhaps the most "Californian" objects in this whole enormous show...
...venture capitalists, however, weren't buying into Dash's new vision, leading him to seek his capital elsewhere. In June of last year, DME acquired an ailing auto-leasing company called Pride Automotive, which gave him some old-economy collateral--good enough to raise $1 million through an investment bank...
...mile race across Australia, finishing two days ahead of its nearest competitor. It too became part of the Smithsonian's collection and was the forerunner of the AeroVironment-designed Impact, an experimental GM battery-powered electric car that in turn evolved into the electric EV-1 auto, which GM is leasing to customers in California and Arizona...