(first posted 2/2/2015) As a newish member of the CC Forum, I often stumble upon older posts that get my creative juices flowing. J.P. Cavanaugh’s 1955 Plymouth Makeover Contest from 2012 is one of them. Collectable Automobile ran a similar competition in the ‘90s, and I was too late to submit. Fortunately, Curbside Classic doesn’t traffic in deadlines, so here’s a late, late submission.
It came to me looking at the Paul’s Wolseley 6/110 Outtake piece. That Farina swash on the front fender looks a bit artificial to me, as it doesn’t particularly relate to the sheet metal. On the other hand, slap it on the 1955 Plymouth, with its hooded headlights, and, “Ayyyyyy!”… The next thought I had was, “What if some of the legendary artists submitted entries that reflected their renowned styles?”
Salvador Dali (speaking with a Catalan accent and the merest touch of French): I was throwing a pizza one day and I when I flipped it, it didn’t come down! Dios mio. Got stuck in the chandelier. It just hung there like a wet camisole on a motel showerhead. Mocking me. I saw it in my dreams, next to that calf’s eye. I became obsessed with droopy things. Droopy flowers, droopy flags… droopy watches… you name it, I wanted to see it droop. Now, if there was ever something that looks better drooping, it’s that godawful trim on the ‘55 Belvedere. Merci y Grazias to Monsieur Cavanaugh. I have now slain the Dragon of Droop. I will droop no more, for with the sag I have added to the Plymouth brightwork, the ultimate droop has been realized. and I am Free. Poof!
Piet Mondrian (speaking with a Dutch accent): When I was a kid, Mom used to make me help clean the shower stall. So, I always notice the tiles. You know when you have to excuse yourself from the bistro table to hit the restroom, and you’re standing in front of the urinal, and you let your eyes relax…know how the tiles start to float? I see that and I have to drop everything and draw a painting. Taking the Plymouth Challenge was easy. Change the grout to stainless, slap it on a fender, and you’re rockin’ the chromium grid, Brudder.
Alexander Calder (speaking with a touch of central PA accent, but mostly not noticeable): See the side trim on a ‘58 Fairlane? That chrome lasso shape? Those jerks at Ford stole the look from one of my mobiles! So I figured, just give me a car and I’ll do it right. This Plymouth had a nice, unmolested expanse on the side so I had plenty of room. If I woulda thought of using a car sooner, I coulda saved all that expensive wire and sheet metal, and avoided those lawsuits from passers-by getting bonked by half-ton windblown mobile sails. Anything with wheels is kinetic sculpture, right? And this way, you don’t have to go someplace to see my work. It comes to you.
Andy Warhol (low talking, with an artsy downtown/uptown accent): Repetition in form, novelty in color. See that little badge in the color break of the stock Plymouth? My design has seven of them on each side. Like seven little boarding school crests, or seven little royal coats-of-arms. Mass produced royalty. Very American. A king can own a Plymouth, and a factory worker can own a Plymouth. It’s the same Plymouth, it knows no class distinctions. Those are in the mind of the guy who drives the car, safe in the knowledge that he’s got a crest on the door.
Banksy (not talking, with a Bristol accent): Editor’s note: Mr. Bansky, the celebrated guerrilla graffiti artist/activist would not be interviewed. So we will interpret this piece, Planned Adolescence. The maid sits in the back seat, taking the place normally used by children. She lifts the Plymouth’s veil to reveal the unyielding monolith of Detroit underneath. The brickwork represents the smug self righteousness of 1950s American Industry. Anyway, we’re guessing that’s what it means. Looks awesome anyway, doesn’t it?
Calvin (speaking in a snide tone): That furball I’m always trying to smack with a water balloon inspired this. My creator, Bill Watterson never licensed me, so I took over on my own. Note the anodized golden arches; I have a deal going with Mickey D. Why am I peeing on a Chevy logo? They had the better logo to pee on, because there’s no typography to complicate the purity of the act. But you Ford people needn’t worry: whenever I come across a car with your logo on it, I pee on it, too. Guess you can forget that little brat in Brussels who’s been peeing for 300 years. Calvin rules the pools.
Like pretty much all the colors used, like many of the treatments, but a couple don’t seem to go far enough….as a for instance Banksy. And the Warhol treatment might work (at least for me) on a white or black car.
My mother’s aunt had a 56 Savoy 2 door hardtop, the “ritziest” car she would own….painted grey. And I had a 53 Plymouth that was my older sister’s 1st car. I like Plymouths but hated the 53 through 56 for being so dull bordering on ugly. IMHO these years were Plymouths lowest, style-wise.
Warhol was blue because I had made a blue layer and hadn’t used it, but I agree in retrospect that white would have been the best way to go, given his color palette and the fact that black would have lessened the impact of the areas it’s already in. Banksy… I could have invented an image that I think he might have used instead of co-opting one, but parody requires a bit of imitation. Besides, I understand the sweeping maid, which is an image I really like, got covered over by the gallery where he painted it, so I wanted memorialize it.
It’s interesting how you mention hating the 53-56 for its’ dullness. I can’t bring myself to feel that way about an old Plymouth or newish Toyota that’s only ever supposed to be plain, honest transportation. But the E30 BMW 3-series…gaah…that makes me want to go back in time, shake Claus Luthe by the shoulders and tell him “You are defining the upmarket, aspirational compact four-seater for the next twenty years. At least TRY to make. It. Look. Like. SOMETHING!!!”
Great read! Love the Calder…
Thanks This is great fun Hope to see more from you
Absolute genius.
CC really needs to stop here. Impossible to follow this act!
(But I hope it doesn’t stop.)
Agreed. We’ll just call this the CC Grand Finale, and get on with the other things in our life 🙂
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! Have to have my CC! (Thanks for the props, though!)
lol – that cold turkey will plunge a number of folks into a kind of depression and despair as their online brain cells search desperately for a replacement source of automotive dopamine 🙂
Fabulous! Suddenly I see how little imagination I possess (though perhaps some of you discovered this sooner). 🙂
The last one made me laugh the hardest. Of course, Chrysler would not likely have been able to license this kind of use for the Chevy logo on its cars. Probably could have used the DeSoto emblem, as all of the other Chrysler Divisions had been pissing on it for years.
The ’55 Plymouth is such a blank canvas, the possibilities seem almost endless. These proposals are total cool. What next? ’55 Plymouth designer editions? Product advertising editions? Hipster editions? This could become an entire CC franchise. And with our vastly increased readership, should anyone feel moved to submit additional proposals for the original contest, jpccurbside@gmail.com is still there, so maybe we could fudge the original deadline just a bit.
What? No Jackson Pollock Plymouth. That Banksy one is just fugly. Would have loved to see a Kinkade , the kitschy “painter of light” version-just for laughs, of course.
+1. I was also looking for a Jackson Pollock version!
A+. The only thing missing is the Farina badge on the front fender between the wheel and the door of the first one.
Used a BMC badge…..it fell off 😉
I approve. That “Banksy” is a lot more interesting than his actual work, to my bourgeois sensibility.
Who was it that said “art is anything you can get away with”?
It’s often attributed to Andy Warhol, but actually comes from Canadian media philosopher Marshall (“The medium is the message”) McLuhan.
Warhol did say it, later, and without attribution — probably because he thought he could get away with it.
Sigh .
I’m getting too old I think .
They’re all nice but only the first one makes the final cut for me .
-Nate
I gotta know…how much time did it take to create these? Awesome.
Maybe we should really twist time and reality and create Bruegel and Botticelli editions…Birth of Venus, anyone? The Peasant Dance? 🙂
Or go totally crazy and do Heironymus Bosch`s “Garden of Earthly Delights” on one.And speaking of Dali, how about a “Persistence of Memory” version, you know, that surrealistic one with the “melting watches”? That would be as cool as hell!
It would have been fun to listen to Bosch’s thoughts for just an hour or two, just to see what it was like.
Agree! “Garden” was hundreds of years ahead of its time. Can anybody deny the impact it had on the surrealist movement?
Just in case anybody wants to see it…
To do renaissance painters, egg tempera might be in order. I’ve had my car egged at Halloween time, and it eats the paint. Paint that eats paint. Oy.
I got a start on it last week, but did a marathon on Thursday through Saturday when I wasn’t eating, sleeping or working. maybe 15 hours with the writing. Gotta take a break and go back to re-edit, ya know.
Dalí was a Cadillac man 🙂
https://www.salvador-dali.org/recerca/arxiu-online/download-documents/4/the-importance-of-the-car-in-the-work-of-salvador-dali-the-dressed-car
But it is a good idea!
Here’s a second pic http://www.nachtkabarett.com/ihvh/img/dalisupercharger.jpg
(this is the one I’ve seen personally in the Figueres museum)
Dali out Dali-ed me and out Banksy-ed me!
Don’t forget Dali’s Datsun ad.
According to Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, Picasso was also a Cadillac man; driving an Eldorado that would make girls turn the color of an avocado:
Had this been a ’57 Plymouth instead of a ’55, I’d suggest calling it Merda di strada Lynch. A piece (no pun intended) inspired by the most famous and valuable work of Italian avant-garde artist Piero Manzoni, Merda d’artista ….
Yeah, you were better off with one of those than one called, “Artist’s Breath”.
These ideas are less farfetched than you might think. BMW commissioned Roy Lichtenstein to make art cars out of several of its 3-Series racers back in the 1980s, such as the one shown (sadly, without any “Vroom! Roar!” word bubbles). Maybe Cadillac should put the art into “Art & Science” with some of your concepts!
I thought about the Lichtenstein BMWs, too…there’s a Lichtenstein sculpture (“Standing Explosion (Red)”) at an art museum a few miles from my home. Until I saw that a few years ago, I always thought that – other than the BMWs – he limited his work to two dimensional art.
Love your work. Really good job…
Incidentally, Alexander Calder did one of those BMW art cars:
Warhol did one too, in fact I think his may have been the original:
This is completely O/T but it’s been bugging me forever and I bet one of you guys knows the answer…
I’m not sure if it was an Art Car I’m thinking of, but wasn’t there a BMW race car at one time with an “x-ray” paint job? Overhead view of the engine painted on the hood and whatnot? When I first saw the BMW ActiveE with its “Tron” paintjob, I thought “oh that’s a cool throwback to the ‘x-ray’ paint”… and then tried looking it up and couldn’t find anything. Does anybody know what that car was?
The see through BMW was a 6 series to promote parts sales. I remember a poster but can’t recall if there was an actual car.
Found it!
Side View
Rear view
Barko, this is some funny stuff. The Dali edition should have some sort of droopy hood ornament and an interior featuring droopy gauges and a droopy headliner. I’m also wondering what sort of customized car a Cubist would have come up with.
The parameters were to only change the trim, or I might have done things similar to what you envisioned, Mike. In a way, I’m glad of it, because once you open up that can of worms…
Cubist? Easy. A Volvo 740.
Love the bodystyle of the original, but can’t say I care for any of those makeovers. The ’55 Plymouth has a nice clean bodystyle that to me would look better painted in one color, and with as little added on trim as possible.
Great stuff… so many possibilities….
Very funny stuff, and excellent work. BTW, I think the Picasso statue at Daley Plaza in Chicago would make a fantastic hood ornament (shrunken to an appropriate size, of course).
Having an immortal car-related moment in the Blues Brothers, in the dialogue between Jake and Elwood at the end of the final car chase, this Picasso is especially deserving of such treatment.
Yes, It would be perfect on a 1967 Winged Mandrill or its successor, the Monkey Buzzard GT.
I’ve been “building” a digital model of a ’52 Crosley. Just for fun, tried replacing its eagle hood ornament with the Picasso version.
I’m not qualified to talk about the art but it looks fun, and time-consuming.
Thanks!
That it is.
Nice work Barry, thanks for sharing them!
Great job Barry! Made me recognize the pure lines of the ’55….
Funny stuff indeed, maybe you should post here: http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/the-photoshop-thread-to-end-all-photoshop-threads.300531/ There are guys on that forum who have the skills to make those into reality.
I love this, Barko – incredible work!!! They’re all great but the “Calvin pissing on bowtie” one is my favorite. That’s really clever, I actually LOLed when I saw it.
My high-school principal, Mr. Rutherford, had a bright turquoise and white (inside and out) 1956 Plymouth 4-door hardtop, which seemed totally out of step with his brown suits and colorless personality. That’s the car I think of whenever 1955 or 1956 Plymouths come to mind, not the relatively plain 1955 Savoys most of which were not all that different from their earlier brethren with their three-speed transmissions and flathead six-cylinder engines.
I suppose that the Plymouth stylists also saw them as a canvas, judging by the color and trim variations that actually showed up in 1955 and 1956, many of which were nearly as improbable as some of the variations brilliantly shown here.
I dig the Dali hubcaps.
Barry, you’re on the Hemmings Blog “Four-Links” this week! Congratulations!
Only the first photo makes the cut. Period.
That’s one clean, beautiful car, perfectly trimmed. Now, try to imagine a sedan that looks like that if it were made today? I’d be among the first in line to buy one.
I must have missed this first time around. I like’em all, but the interpretation is almost better than the art. “Wet camisole on a motel shower head”. Lifting “the veil to reveal the unyielding monolith of Detroit”. Brilliant!
With vinyl wraps (and dips) now added to the repertoire of possible car exteriors, we are no longer limited to paint. There’s no reason any of these couldn’t be executed IRL. It’s probably just a matter of time before one of the option boxes a new-car buyer can tick off will be: “Design whatever-the-hell crazy wrap you want, $____.__.” I’d expect either VW or MINI to be the first to market with this.
Personalized vinyl-wrapped bodies — with or without the help of Dali, Mondrian, et al. — could be the 21st C. equivalent of the cheesy “dealership add-ons” like tape stripes; or decals of the words “Sport” or “Special Edition.” Our growing culture of Radical Individualism suggests that highly personalized vehicles like the attached Porsche could one day be the norm rather than the exception. Hey, it’s a lot less drastic or irreversible than getting huge tattoos, and MILLIONS of people have done that.
Ah, the ubiquitous “Calvin pissing on [INSERT CAR LOGO HERE]” gag. The one thing in 25 seasons of The Simpsons that Dr. Hibbert has NOT chuckled over:
Dr. Hibbert: Hmm, a Ford urinating on a Chevrolet.
Bernice Hibbert: Don’t you usually laugh at everything?
Dr. Hibbert: Yes. Yes, I do.
And, in the name of “equal time”, here’s the equally-mindless “Chevrolet urinating on a Ford”….
Alexander, I think you are right on with this one. Of course, censorship would rear its head when you are talking about picking up the car at a dealer. Likely, they would give you a range of graphics you could cherry pick a design from, but if you wanted to do your own, it would have to pass The Commissioner’s Office.
You just gave me an idea for my next post….
Yes, some sort of restrictions on obscenity, offensiveness, etc, would have to apply. Just as they do for vanity license plates. If, for instance, the Porsche in that pic I posted were to be offered in that “deep space” wrap it would first need a ,,Zulässig” (“Approved”) rubberstamping from Stuttgart.
The personalizing of autos has come a long way in the last 20-25 years. Not just body-wraps but also the proliferation of art-cars, and even things like (lots and lots of) bumper-stickers. When I was a kid, a passenger car with writing, decorations, or more than one sticker on it (OK, maybe two during an election year), was an extremely unusual sight. And the driver would usually be regarded as the local weirdo. Now such idiosyncratic vehicles are all over the place.
Glad to hear this will not be your last article here on this subject. Here’s an 11m video of an art-car outburst in San Francisco in 1997:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6V-iUWm8Hgc
Some of these cars are also in Harrod Blank’s Wild Wheels feature doc from ’92. The complete film doesn’t seem to be on Youtube but here’s a 2m trailer:
Hadn’t seen this before. Very enjoyable. Thank you.
+1
I’d love to see M. C. Escher have a go at this!
Where one enters through the driver’s door only to find oneself immediately exiting the exhaust tip.
This is a fun post.
This is a bit off-topic, but about 10 years ago I was working in Amersfoort in the Netherlands. It is the birthplace of Piet Mondrian, and in lobby area of one of the client’s buildings, there was this great built in chair to sit on while waiting. To me it is Mondrian interpreted by Dali, but in any case I love it. It is great to see a corporate office with a bit of whimsy.
I rotated the photo before posting, but it seems to want to undo it.
As posted, it’s so surreal as to be unusable (it’s all good when clicked on).
It is quite wonderful.
What a great post!
Finest compliments to Barry Koch, from the future.
My Dad’s first car was a ’56 Plymouth, no options (flathead 6/ manual/no radio, not sure about heater) in which I was brought home from the hospital. It was kind of a pinkish rusty colored car. He drove it 1 way from Pennsylvania (where my Grandparents lived) to California shortly after my (twin) sister and I were born (we followed later via propeller plane), as he was carrying some dangerous chemicals he needed for his job (Hoffman Electronics in El Monte..he was working on solar cells. He bought a cooler specifically to carry them, but ran out of dry ice they were in near some military base in Arizona fortunately he was able to convince the guard to get him some when he found out what he was carrying (not sure what it was, I’m no chemist). When we moved back to Pennsylvania about 2 years later it was in a ’61 Rambler Classic Wagon (partly bought because of the wagon, partly due to the automatic transmission it had, my mother learned on semi-automatic but has never been comfortable with standard). The Rambler was green, as were all the wagons my Dad was to buy in the 60’s..only his 2nd car he bought in 1966 and 1968 were red and grey respectively.
I own a Golf now, never intentionally a “Harlequin” but my ’86 GTi had different color hood and fender once I fixed it up with junkyard parts and never got around to painting them to match the silver the rest of the car was.