It's hard to explain the perverse pleasure that comes from eating food served from a truck.  Perhaps it appeals to our nomadic origins or maybe it's nothing more than a worthy show of respect to anyone who can make a meal in a van. 

The splendidly orange Mud Truck, seen around Astor Place in New York, began in part as an eccentric challenge to the hegemony of a certain Seattle-based coffee empire that need not be named.  In this case, dissent costs a dollar a cup, and it turns out they make damn good coffee.

Taco trucks on the West Coast have devotees--as well as their dissenters, who call them roach coaches.  The LA-based blog Taco Hunt tacohunt.blogspot.com recommends La Oaxaquena.  The Mission in San Francisco hosts El Tonayense which has enough of a following that they've grown into a small fleet.  The Food Shark, in Marfa, Texas, is a favorite, with enough ambition to offer 'Mediterranean Salads.'   

But the Mud Truck achieved the goal that many mobile restaurants secretly covet: they were offered space in the Kiehl's store on Third Avenue, and now have a home that's more secure than a garage.

--David Coggins

James Bond wasn't really much of an environmentalist. He seemed more interested in drinking a bottle of Dom Perignon than recycling it. English artist Chris Gilmore has made a cardboard Aston Martin that any secret agent can appreciate.

Aston Martin is known for its hand-crafted excellence, but this is a new level of individuality. You don't have to be Q to know to keep it away from the carwash.

--David Coggins

If you happen to need a used school bus, you'd be advised to visit Fort Walton Beach, Florida, on the morning of November 3. That's when Clyde Jackson will auction off surplus school buses from the Okaloosa County District, with a few trailers and tractors thrown in for good measure. It's a motley collection of vehicles--many are often bought just for parts and more than a couple come without a key.  It's not uncommon for people to bring their own tow trucks to drag their purchases off the lot.

   
In school you're encouraged to stand behind your work; but what's best for term papers does not necessarily apply to old school buses. In fact, Jackson's terms of sale could not be any more clear: 'As is, where is, with no warranty or guarantee.' That's the spirit.

--David Coggins

With today's pimped out luxury vehicles (flat-screen TVs, voice command systems, etc.), it's easy to forget about the lowly tail light, the modest bit of plastic that, when illuminated, gently reminds the car behind you that you're slowing down--and that they should too. 

Yet designer Stuart Haygarth celebrates precisely that in his chandelier built from cars' rear reflectors.  A highlight of this year's London Design Festival (read more about the event here), it manages to elevate the utilitarian to the level of high concept design.

--David Coggins

In his retrospective, Spiritual America, now on view at the Guggenheim, Richard Prince treats Frank Lloyd Wright's rotunda like the world's largest muscle car garage.  His sculpture, American Prayer, built into a resin base, looks like a high school kid getting his ride ready for the summer cruising season.

American Prayer, 2007 from Richard Prince: Spiritual America, Guggenheim Museum 2007


Spanning work from the past three decades, Prince appropriates images from advertisements and popular culture--he's partial to the Marlboro Man, New Yorker cartoons and fetching nurses from pulp novels.  He also collects hoods from cars that he paints and hangs right on the wall, like vivid minimalist monuments.  Prince doesn't forget the ladies, however, witness the appropriated photograph, Girlfriend, of a biker chick in a leopard print outfit, sitting on a motorcycle like she means business.   

Point Courage, 1989

Untitled (girlfriend), 1993

--David Coggins

The intrepid Abby Clawson Low, who runs Hi + Low, discovered this vinyl sculpture of a VW bug by artist Margarita Cabrera. Referencing maquiladoro factories, where a company (say, Volkswagen) sends parts to a Mexican outpost to be assembled and exported, the work is more overtly political than Claes Oldenberg's, but still maintains a similar oversize appeal. This isn't the first time a Beetle has inspired art; Chris Burden, the eminent LA artist, in his 1974 piece Trans-fixed, was nailed to the hood of a Beetle for two minutes while the engine revved.

The Mexican-born Cabrera doesn't go in for anything quite that extreme. She shows at the New York gallery Sarah Meltzer, and currently lives in El Paso. Her other vinyl sculptures include a crumpling Hummer, and a bicycle and piano each meeting their end, like they're melting in the sun.

—David Coggins

The New York artist Duncan Hannah has spent his accomplished career painting rich historical scenes marked with desire. His subjects are often cinematic, ranging from Hitchcock starlet Nova Pilbeam to French gangsters to the finely mustached William Powell. He also has a fondness for literary portraits, English schoolboy life, and the odd bit of erotica.

His new exhibition at J. Graham and Sons, the venerable Madison Avenue gallery, is distinguished by paintings of another recurring passion: classic roadsters. The Wolseley is the subject of The Mystery Road, driving across a stone bridge with what seems like suspicious intention. That should come as no surprise, it's the same car that appears in early Hitchcock thrillers like The Thirty Nine Steps. The boxy black car is anonymous with a touch of menace—it looks like there may be an abducted heroine in the back seat. Hannah is a longtime devotee of mid-century British Grand Prix, when drivers raced around pastoral tracks in Vanwalls and Aston Martins. His portraits of racers show cars speeding by alone—there's a private joy of speed, a liberating sense of motion.

Hannah gets inspiration from old English racing magazines that he's subscribed to since he was a boy. For more immediate inspiration he attends the vintage car race in Lime Rock, near his home in Connecticut. Every Labor Day weekend beautiful cars race along the Housatonic River. 'If a landscape needs a protagonist,' he told me, 'what could be better than a Jaguar XKE?'

—David Coggins

Duncan Hannah's works are on view September 7 – October 9, 2007 at James Graham & Sons

Artist Charles Goldman—who once took all of his doors, interior and exterior, off their hinges and stacked them in a Chicago gallery—put a ready-to-fold replica of his plain white Toyota truck in Cabinet's recent Insect issue. The idea is that readers should build their own, decorate them (reminds me of Beck's latest DIY cd cover), and send it in for him to catalog on Cabinet's site.

It seems the basic white truck and an identical predecessor have taken on special meaning for him—criss crossing the country, surviving earthquakes, and the like. He also notes, "I had a group of friends that all had the same pickup, and it felt to us like some sort of northern California socialist standard-issue vehicle—a no-frills utility truck for proto-hippies, progressive suburban kids, and sculptors with left-wing leanings." Maybe someday it will be parked in a Marfa-like shrine to Goldman's work, much the way Donald Judd's Land Rover is. (Goldman's work is much less blocky). Anyways I'm all for it.

—O. Karpinsky

Chinese artist Cai Guo Qiang has long developed a reputation as a master of pyrotechnics. His best work derives meaning through the beauty and violence of explosions, such as in 2003's "Light Cycle" fireworks display over Central Park, inspired by the tragic events of 9/11. Lately, we can't take our eyes off the just-plain-awesome "Inopportune: Stage One" installation at the Seattle Art Museum. And we can't help but wonder whether the colorful display of tumbling Tauruses may have served as the inspiration for the explosive car crash scene in this summer's Live Free or Die Hard, starring Bruce Willis and our favorite Maggie Q.

--Will Reiter
"Inopportune: Stage One," at the Seattle Art Museum.

"Inopportune: Stage One," at the Seattle Art Museum.

Scene from Live Free or Die Hard

Consider the Bugatti Type 57. Built between 1934 and 1939, it's the perfect convergence of speed and performance. And, not incidentally, it's also hugely attractive--the car looks like it could have driven right off the set of Bertolucci's The Conformist. Now on view at the Allan Stone Gallery is a 1937 convertible in deep blue and cream. One of only 700 57s ever built, it's an absolute stunner.

Founded by the Milanese aesthete Ettore Bugatti in 1910, Bugatti created cars with extraordinary attention to form and function and little concern about cost. The Type 57 was designed by Ettore's son, Jean, whose training as an artist is evident in the car's remarkable sculptural contours. Seeing a model poised in a gallery better known for showing blue-chip work, like Wayne Thiebaud's exquisite cake paintings, only reinforces an appreciation of the car's beauty, of its standing as an art object.

Possessing a straight-8 engine, it was one of the most successful cars on the European racing circuit, notching repeated victories at Le Mans. But its success as a racing machine hardly means that the interior was neglected. With its gorgeous wooden dash and discreet Art Deco details, you are forgiven if you have an urge to climb in and tour the Amalfi Coast with, say, Stefania Sandrelli.

Also on display is the little one-seat Type 52, sometimes known as the Baby Bugatti. Conceived and built for Ettore's five-year old son, Roland, it ultimately spawned a fleet of 150 for lucky children on the Continent. It's the perfect car for the idealized Italian childhood that hardly any of us ever had. Sporting an electric motor that topped out at a cool 11 mph, it was (and remains) an elegant first step toward a lifelong obsession.

-- DAVID COGGINS

The Bugatti 57's luxe interior.

A show at the Corcoran Gallery in D.C. carrying the title Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939 is worth checking out simply because ... well, it's a show at the Corcoran, and the Corcoran, as everyone knows, is a splendid place to spend a few hours before heading over to Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial and crying your eyes out.

But aside from the Corcoran's overall, routine excellence, there's also one very immediate reason -- one tactile, three-dimensional, sexy, nicely shining reason -- for visiting the gallery this summer: namely, the presence in the Modernism show of one of the rarest of all Modernist cars, the wondrous, dorsal-finned Czech Tatra T77.

As Michael Mraz wrote in a previous MV Motoring blog entry, after spending a little time in a Tatra on the Louis Vuitton Boheme Run:

"Tatra, named after the mountain range that divides Poland and Slovakia, was founded in 1850 as a wagon manufacturer. Following Mercedes-Benz and Peugot, it's arguably the third oldest automaker in the world, producing Central Europe's first automobile in 1897. Today the company is synonymous with its boldly modern designs from the mid 20th century -- many of the earlier models, especially the 77 introduced in 1934, resemble prehistoric beasts you'd expect to find on the ocean floor.

The 603 is best known for its Communist origins. In 1948 all Czech companies, including Tatra, were nationalized. To meet the upper ranks's desires, Tatra introduced its first luxury car in 1957: The 603 was a 6-seater limousine reserved for Communist dignitaries and Eastern European party heads. (A great history of the 603 can be found at this aficionado's site.) Fidel Castro had, and allegedly still owns, a white 603."

Dorsal fins. Mountain ranges. Commie bigwigs. Fidel behind the wheel. How could you not go see this thing in person?

Modernism: Designing a New World runs through July 29, 2007.

--BEN COSGROVE

We like art. We like cars. We like it when artists do things with cars.

Take a look at French artist Vidya Gastaldon's wonderfully named Apparat / Dolly Rocker (dress for a 1983 black Porsche 911), 2004. As we often do when confronting any sort of artwork that's not a Hudson Valley landscape featuring a waterfall and sunlit clouds, we came, we saw, we scratched our heads.

A dress. On a car. With -- wait, what is that on the hood? A black sun with a smiley face? And a hot-air balloon? Or is it a diamond caught between two dark, menacing clouds?  And a sun rising above mountains. And a rainbow.

"Hey," we thought, "it's a landscape, after all!"

Then, as we always do, we made the mistake of going to the experts, and were thrown for yet another loop. According to the Kunstmuseum Thun, in Switzerland (and they should know), Apparat / Dolly Rocker is "a 'costume d'apparat' or magnificent costume for a Porsche, [and] occupies a special position in the artist's work. Gastaldon dresses up the luxury car as a medieval tournament horse. As a result of this intervention, the Porsche, that lifestyle icon, is robbed of its function as a sports car. After all, in this dignified outfit, a fast ride would be inconceivable. The gown is both protection and decoration, and the same time, a soft, sensual covering, individualised and adorned with signs and symbols."

We're now willing to concede that if a medieval tournament horse can be a car and a landscape and an icon and dignified and sensual, all at the same time, then that horse/car/symbol is also very likely a genuine work of art. Even if we continue to scratch our heads over it.

Here's hoping Vidya gets her hands on a Hummer one of these days. Now that would be something to see.

Fans of large-scale photographs might want to check out an exhibition of Andrew Moore's work at Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York. Shooting in lands as disparate as Russia, Vietnam, and North Dakota, Moore has captured astonishing images with an eye for color and composition that seems pretty much infallible.

But it's this shot, Rosa en la Tropical, Havana (2000)--with its heavy green foliage, a dreamlike, robin's-egg blue building, and a car of such deep, luscious red that it might be made of lipstick--that especially caught our eye.

They don't make rides like that anymore.

Moving from a town house on Spring Street in Manhattan to west Texas is bound to change one's perspective. In the town of Marfa (pop. 2,121), space is not a problem, but finding a bar that stays open past midnight is. (Try Ray's, open more often than not.) When the late, great sculptor Donald Judd decamped from New York to Marfa in 1972, he purchased some massive artillery sheds and the surrounding barracks and moved into two old factories in the center of a town that is, in essence, one short main street. While he was eager to leave Manhattan, there would be no sacrifice of his rigorous esthetics--he transported his severe sculptures and lived with them in radically spare surroundings. He also acquired a suitable ride: a 1969 Land Rover.

While not very practical when looking for a parking spot in SoHo, the famously functional vehicle--the grill is exactly that; it can be removed and used for cooking--was perfect for Judd's trips out into the desert where he collected rocks, spearheads, and snake skeletons. And yet it wasn't quite functional enough: Judd had a New Jersey company, Bernstein Brothers, customize a steel interior storage container installed between the front seats. The container continues through the back seats and into the rear of the Rover, like a sort of enormous air duct.

The most striking thing about this contrivance, however, is how much it resembles a Donald Judd sculpture. Indeed, Bernstein Brothers built many of Judd's industrial works. It's fitting, then, that the Rover's container echoes the aluminum boxes--Judd's legacy at Marfa, and his masterpiece--housed in two of his military sheds. There, one hundred boxes sit beside windows that look out over the forbidding Texas landscape, their appearance changing in the constantly shifting light. Judd's car (still owned by the Judd Foundation) is an example of his love of materials and an emblem of his search for the intersection of form and function, art and life.

--DAVID COGGINS

Seems that this Lee Stoetzel fellow--an artist who works often, but not exclusively, in wood--has a thing for cool rides. This chopper is only one of several tributes to classic modes of transport that he's created. He also built a life-sized Jeep and is working on a wooden VW Microbus (with seats, dashboard, etc.), which he'll be showing, along with the chopper, at a show in April 2007 at Mixed Greens Gallery in New York.