MOTORIST
(Special outdoor screening starting at SUNSET (6pm) at EV OASIS 1333 N. 4th Ave -enter on Drachman)
Event by donation, Swimming & BYBO!!!
A 1989 video by Chip Lord which follows the driver of a 1962 Thunderbird as he crosses the Southwest to deliver the classic car to be sold in Los Angeles to a Japanese collector. The video is an travelogue/essay on the automobile as the symbol and vehicle of American freedom and identity.
Echoing this trip in 2016 is artist Bill Daniel as he drives his classic 1965 Chevy Van from Houston to sell in Los Angeles. Along Daniel’s trip west, following the route of Lord’s driver/protagonist, the 1965 van will be used as an outdoor projection site for screenings of MOTORIST.
Daniel has owed and driven the 1965 Chevy on multiple cross country exhibition tours since 1992. The van has variously functioned as a mobile installation piece, a graffiti wall, a home, and an icon in much of Daniel’s art. In deciding to sell the van it was appealing to bring the van back to it’s original home in California the parallel between this trip and the narrative in Chip Lord’s video MOTORIST came to mind, and it became apparent that this last trip in the Orange Van would need to be an exhibition tour as well. MOTORIST will be projected from/onto Daniel’s van a various outdoor sites between Houston and Los Angeles, in San Antonio, Marfa, Albuquerque, Tucson, Slab City, and other spots as yet unknown…
Since his early days in Ant Farm, Lord’s evocation of the automobile has been the car as avatar, as the spirit of America—that consummate combination of superior organized corporate technology and the pioneering triumph of the willful individual driver. Motorist is a 69-minute road picture in which the camera rides shotgun with TV actor Richard Marcus as he plays a drifting driver. Intercutting scenes of Marcus with clips of industrial films and commercials of the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s,Motorist pinpoints the patriotic heroics and futuristic fantasies of Ford and General Motors, unleashing the pure romanticism of American automophilia at its most ecstatic heights.