Liz Cohen
Salon 94 Bowery, New York, USA
The newly refurbished Salon 94 space on Bowery – just a few doors up from the New Museum and a few down from the new Sperone Westwater space – recently doubled as a car showroom for a meticulously constructed automobile, courtesy of Detroit-based artist Liz Cohen. Combining an East German Trabant with an American Chevy El Camino, Cohen’s Trabantimino (2002–ongoing) is an East-meets-West mash-up, a juxtaposition of Eastern utilitarian qualities and pure American hubris.
The hybrid is a sophisticated relic of the warring ideologies of the Cold War. But it’s also a fantasy object, a kind of fairground automobile ride. Trabantimino stretches from the modest dimensions of the Trabant to the ostentatious lengths of the El Camino, jolting outward and upward as it does so. It effortlessly taps into the collective fantasy of low rides and wide-open spaces. And despite the use of the Trabant, Cohen’s project is one of immersion into the distinctly American culture of the car.
In order to produce the work, Cohen spent eight years training as a mechanic, in garages in Oakland, Scottsdale and Detroit, working alongside ‘mechanic mentors’ and documenting her immersion into the culture in a series of pin-up-inspired self-portraits, as well as a more sombre black-and-white work titled ‘5 P’s (Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance)’ (2005), a series of Walker Evans-inspired photographs documenting the tools of Bill Cherry, one of Cohen’s mentor.
The performance and immersion element of Trabantimino is reminiscent of the works of Nikki S. Lee, who in Projects (1997–2001) infiltrated multiple social groups and subcultures, photographing herself in situ and in character. Cohen’s bikini-clad poses have a similar multiplicity, albeit confined to a single milieu, and put her in the position of mechanic, model and customer. The literal split in the car – as well as its beautifully executed representation of the pull and tug between two cultures – loosely echoes Cohen’s schizoid fulfillment of multiple roles within the ecology of the car shop.
But the car itself is unified by its elegiac quality – it references a kind of car culture that is, at least in America, on the decline, and recollects fantasies that were part of the libidinal excess and excitement of that culture (not to mention the more modest, but no less poignant, current fantasy of employment). Trabantimino is also about the dream of escaping yourself, of acting out another alternative self – maybe as a car mechanic, or maybe as a bikini-clad superhero, settling in to ride in a sleek car of your own dreaming.
Katie Kitamura
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