It’s not the first time Saab cars have been part of, or even the main element of, an art installationa. Let’s remember projects like: Saab 900 as Cute Cartoon Car, or or a project that converted a Saab 900 into two bikes, or Saab project of Cranbrook Academy of Art, or Octopus Saab 900 Turbo Art Car, and you certainly remember the art project of the most expensive Saab ever – $1,2 Million Saab.
The latest in a series of art projects is Detroit’s Heidelberg Project, which has recently been shortlisted for a major prize to be announced in Berlin in early March. The Heidelberg Project (“HP”) is an outdoor art environment in the heart of an urban area and a Detroit based community organization with a mission to improve the lives of people and neighborhoods through art.
At the moment, The Heidelberg Project is undergoing a major transformation as it shifts from an installation created by one man, Tyree Guyton, into a larger community-activated arts village led by many. This is what they call Heidelberg 3.0, an idea that can foster an expansive new future for the HP that builds new alliances with artists, residents, and community stakeholders, all of whom can assist in building a new community based on the core principles of ART, EQUITY, and DIVERSITY.
The installation has since encompassed two city blocks, incorporating found objects, houses, vacant lots, and cars. Part of this installation also includes a specially re-designed Saab 96. Interesting, if you dive into the scene a little, you can see that this paint scheme “colored dots” almost makes the Saab less quirky. In the case of Tyree Guyton, one gets the sense that the artist might see time as a flat circle. The exhibition is broken up into sections offering a trip through Guyton’s various styles and bodies of work, painted in his signature childlike manner. One section has car hoods painted with bright, smiling faces. Another features clock faces painted on boards, some with more than two hands. A large lavender polka dot is painted on the white walls of MOCAD’s otherwise stark white gallery wall. On Guyton’s right forearm is a faded polka dot tattoo.
The project was started as a sort of political protest. The street is now something of an outdoor museum of the weird. Which is where our Saab 96 comes in. Covered in copper, both in sheet and penny form, the Saab has been an installment at Heidelberg for quite a while now. With pennies glued to the outside panels, it looks like a polka dotted oddity from a distance, but up close, those panels are where the real weirdness is. They’re embossed with an array of scenes and geometric pattern which defy categorization as well as logic.
Great artistic project, Next week they are traveling to Berlin to find out if they’ve won at what’s being called the ‘Academy Awards of Culture.’
