If the objective of art is to evoke an emotional response, then artist Maurizio Cattelan and photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari have created a BMW i3-based piece of… art. Despite Cattelan's claiming that it is neither art nor an art car, the i3 was presented at the 2016 Recontres d'Arles Festival of Photography in Arles, France. The festival is sponsored by BMW and a publication called Toilet Paper. It's a bi-annual avant-garde, picture-based publication; even if nobody can read or write anymore, you can always look at the pictures.
The i3 in question is wrapped in a photograph of spaghetti. Not only is it not a BMW art car, but it won’t even be around for long. After the Recontres d’Arles, the spaghetti rendering will be destroyed per Cattelan’s instructions, and the i3 will become a normal BMW electric car once again.
The last BMW Art Car was a BMW M6 GT3 created by Jeff Koons in 2010. The next two BMW Art Cars also will be based on M6s and produced by U.S. artist John Baldessari and Chinese multimedia artist Cao Fei. We expect to see these latest works of art later this year or early in 2017.
Maurizio Cattelan officially retired from “art” after a 2011 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. That didn’t prevent him from creating a solid gold toilet bowl sculpture for the Guggenheim, nor has it stopped his art from selling at auction, with proceeds totaling in the tens of millions of dollars.
The “Spaghetti Car” is part of Toilet Paper’s “Hors Cadre/Out of context” exhibit.
BMW provided the i3 to Cattelan for the project. The artist and BMW had teamed up previously for the Berlin Biennial in 2006. BMW France has been a partner in Les Recontres d’Arles since 2010.
So is the Toilet Paper/BMW Cattelan-designed i3 art? We certainly have an emotional response when we see it. About the same emotional response as when we see a semi-trailer for a grocery chain decorated with a full-length wrap of food products.—Scott Blazey
[Photos courtesy of BMW AG.]
