A snake slithers through OMR. Pedestrians don’t panic. They just stop in their tracks and watch the moving reptile, enthralled. Teeming with sharks, the sea wades into Besant Nagar, freezing people in surprise not fear. A battalion of skulls goes down Mount Road, drawing gasps of appreciation.
Art cars are cool, aren’t they? They surprise us. They entertain us. They engage us. A compulsive attention-seeker cannot imagine having a more reliable ally. At the wheel of an art car, he knows he can draw in an hour as many pairs of admiring eyes as the killingly handsome Narcissus drew in his lifetime.
As with every other good thing under the sun, art cars come with a price. Not just the cost of finding a masterly artist who can deftly imprint images and impressions on a sophisticated piece of metal. Art cars can rob their owners of peace too. Just watch someone driving such a car on a crowded road, where only millimeters of space help vehicles retain their privacy, and you’ll know what I mean. And then, when he parks this car in a public place, he won’t be breathing easy until he returns to it. The invention of the automobile made commerce quicker and cultural exchanges easier. It also gave rise to the ‘petty-minded pastime’ of scratching other people’s vehicles, often with a coin.
Arts cars are sitting ducks. Their beauty is their bane. They draw such petty-minded people. Anyone who has had an elaborately embellished art car scratched or dented would tell you undoing the damage can rack up huge costs in money and time. The more intricate the design, the more challenging the restoration work.
Ironically, being a victim of a car-scratching incident was what got me interested in automotive art. Automotive art of a twisted variety, though. It was a time when I was driving a black-coloured hatchback. The paint on this car had dimmed to a point where blotches of white began to appear across its body. The top of the bonnet was the worst, resembling the X-ray film of lungs overrun with infection.
One day, it was this unprepossessing car that I parked on a road, somewhere close to Egmore. This interior stretch was lined with cars and I found a space. When I returned to the car a couple of hours later, I found it defiled. Someone had used his keys and tried abstract sketching on the car. Going by the depth of the scratches and the nature of the squiggles, I could say his face was contorted with anger and diabolical intent as he went about this uncommissioned art work. A passer-by told me it could have been done by someone who parked his car regularly there and was disappointed at not finding a space for himself.
Even before the incident, the car was clearly due for painting. My family had refused to travel by it. Therefore, I had persuaded myself to loosen my purse strings and have it painted. After the incident, I had second thoughts. In the wild and mad scratches, I could see a form of beauty. I thought, “Why not keep the car as it is? This is what the world has done to the car and why not display it?”
I did not feel one bit queasy about driving around in the car. Of course, my family distanced itself further from my car.
However, for the rest of the period that I used the car, I was happy making my own statement about art, aesthetics and life through it. I was overjoyed when an acquaintance told me the car had a nice grunge look. He suggested I try grunge art on it. He thought I was a cool guy to drive such a car.
