Tex spirited this spontaneous visit. Referencing that recent Juxtapose Mag article that I was bitching about not being in, Tex looked up Robert in the Butte phone book and on over we went.

Bob, as I now know him, is one cool art cat. Living large in an old zinc mill high atop Butte, Bob is much more than the guy who built the Shiniest Oldsmobile on Earth, he's an architect, a custom car builder, a designer of affordable housing, and founder of the OXO Foundation. What does Bob call his house? Why the OXO Foundation, of course. Literally the foundation of the Foundation, his one-time zinc mill dwelling is constructed of so much concrete that professional estimates for the structures life span run between two and five thousand years. It will be at least 1,500 years before the building shows any signs of problems in structural integrity, so the experts say.

Wow. Another great footnote in the annals of ART, The American Road Trip, or our slice of it anyway. Seven and Tex and me. Oh, and Baby, too. We're surprised to find that Ned and Ramon and the rest haven't stopped here to see Bob. We'd heard rumors that they seen in Montana, so we figured they must have come this route.

Bob was the subject of a few seconds of film in Harrod Blank's first art car documentary, "Wild Wheels." Bob says he had just built the car a few weeks before, doing the whole thing with artist friend Rene Sherrer in just 3 days, when Harrod phoned him up to come out and film him.

I'm glad Bob liked Duke. For one, I felt an immediate affinity and respect for this man with the concrete monolith house on the hill. And two, because Duke has taken me so long to craft, slowly of course, and to hear that others have built their cars in a few weeks or months or damn! days, well.. it kinda knocks the wind outa me.

Duke is beastly, road dirty and beaten. Every day with every slamming of the trunk or the hood or a door, a few toys fall off. We often have to take dirt roads here or there and the dirt seems to stay no matter what I do. The engine presently leaks oil so badly that it's squirting out and onto the artwork on the fenders on either side of the hood. When I arrive in Portland for the parade, Duke will have traveled some 4500 miles in one month, appeared on television 6 or 7 times and been photographed an average of 50 times a day. All this, all the miles and the dirt and the mud and the rain and clutching fingers of little children. Duke will be due for a major sprucing, but will I even have time?

All this is the undercurrent of a certain distaste I have for the prize structure of these art car gigs. I applaud Minnesota for not awarding cash prizes, even if there only reason for not doing so is financial. All the moneys given out at these events should go into mileage compensation both to get more new artists to the events and to keep the old guard coming. The road is killer. Anyone driving their car a long distance to get to an event deserves extra compensation in the form of gas money. Besides, cash awards wrongly pit artists against one another.

What does all this have to do with Bob and his mirror-coated car? Nothing. Only I guess that if Bob were to drive that baby 4500 miles to an event and back, he would deserve, and need, a lot of compensation both in gas money and in-transit damage to the art. It is no wonder then that I've never seen Bob at any art car gig. Despite the fact that he's a busy man.

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Last update April 1, 2004