When Berlin Touches a Car
The tradition of treating car customization as genuine art is older than Xzibit and considerably less embarrassing. Pimp My Ride made the whole enterprise look like it was conducted by people who had never encountered a tasteful object in their lives—hydraulics, plasma screens in the trunk, spray-painted dragons, the inexhaustible vulgarity of American television convinced that more is always more. What Mazda and Vice put together in Berlin in 2011 was more interesting than that, even accounting for the fact that it was, undeniably, a marketing exercise.
The setup pitted two teams of actual designers against each other. Team one: Starstyling, the Berlin fashion collective with a bold, graphic, street-inflected sensibility, paired with Nik Nowak, who at the time was best known for mounting enormous mobile speaker installations onto armored vehicles and blasting them at unsuspecting neighborhoods. Team two: Bongout, the Berlin illustration studio with a taste for the dark and surreal, alongside Jakob Hinrichs, whose dense, intricate work rewards more sustained attention than advertising-adjacent art usually gets. Peaches—the Canadian-German electro artist who has been doing things onstage that polite society would rather not discuss since the late nineties—served as patron alongside Intersection editor Götz Offergeld.
What resulted was urban 3D design, silhouette work, color experimentation—the document of what happens when people who think seriously about visual culture are handed an ordinary car and told to fight over it. I’ve always found customization culture compelling precisely because of the tension it contains: the car is functional, mass-produced, anonymous, and yet people pour identity into it the way they pour identity into clothes or music. Give that instinct to artists rather than television producers and you occasionally get something worth looking at. Give it to these particular artists and you get a genuine argument.