My First Car

By ROBERT HUGHES

"Speed is our god, a new canon of beauty," wrote the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti in 1909. "A roaring motorcar, which runs like a machine gun, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace." Ever since then, the automobile has been present on the margins of Western art, though not, as the horse once was, at its center. There has never been a flow of car images to match the innumerable equestrian ones of the past, because the car is--as Marinetti implied--a work of art already, a mass-produced corporate sculpture, permeated with style. Logically, then, why not have an artist make a car and call it his work of art? In 1966 a California sculptor named Don Potts set out to do exactly that. The result of his six years of labor, entitled My First Car, is on view this week at New York's Whitney Museum. It is not a car, to be precise, but a set of four components -- a wooden mockup chassis, a chassis with engine, and two bodies, one of metal, the other of stretched glider cloth -- all of which could theoretically be fitted together.

The display teaches something about the myopia of the art world. For decades, hot-rodders in California have been chopping and chroming cars into peachy-candy Baroque monsters; these are not officially held to be art because they are made by grease monkeys, not artists. The difference is merely one of classification and context: if it's in the Whitney, it's art.

There are differences, however, between Potts' vehicle and the no less obsessive rods and dragsters of the West Coast. The chief one is that Potts' car barely functions at all. The spidery space-frame chassis, underslung be tween bicycle wheels and clearing the ground by less than two inches, has no place for a driver. Radio controlled, it can hit 10 m.p.h., trailing rhetorical howls and crackles from its methanol-fueled engine and wreathed exhausts. In short, Potts has made a perfectly use less machine, an exquisitely tooled piece of four-wheeled costume jewelry.

"In the old days," says Potts gnomically, "any sculptor who wanted to do his thing had to do it through the figure. Well, I just happen to be saying what I want to say through a car." A student of transcendental meditation, he describes the car as his mantra: a means to self-knowledge through prolonged application of craft to an unreal problem. It represents a process, not a solution. "Potts," says Art Critic Thomas Garver, in the catalogue introducing the car, "regards the true work of art to be the artist himself. The car is not a public object but a building way to probe more deeply into himself."

No doubt it was excellent therapy, but the result is somewhat inconclusive. It does, however, exemplify a cherished California delusion: that art and life are the same thing.

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