Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Art made of various parts and pieces, 1972, Don Potts, "My First Car"

It was shown in galleries, but it seems his agent got greedy, and Don wrote a long article about the process... but had his art crushed in a crusher instead of selling any of them. That cool motor? A McCullan drone engine. Yeah, I had to know!

http://www.ar-t.org/Salient_Words/In_Preparation/Last_Performance/last_performance.html for the story of the demise

Road and track magazine described the art this way :

THE FIRST CAR of Don Potts is actually an extraordinary assemblage—a concours d’elegance of one man’s work. The title itself has a sort of parallel to Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout and the objects themselves are resonant with the objects of a now—lost American boyhood—an American Flyer wagon, a soap box derby car, a first bicycle—but here raised to the Nth power of imagination.

The craftsmanship is literally stunning--but it is no more important to know that Potts’s spent six years on this creation than it is to know Michaelangelo’s back bothered him in painting Sistine Chapel. The Potts car is simply there in ultimate perfection.
http://www.ar-t.org/Artist_Resume/Road___Track_Mag/road___track_mag.html