The need for art, creativity, absurdity, and cool locations, in an era of chaos...

The world has gone crazy, it's not going to mellow out any time soon, so how do we live WELL in the midst of the chaos?

The Cadillac Ranch outside of Amarillo Texas. In 1974, three guys from an art group called Ant Farm did an art installation of ten old Cadillac cars, ranging from 1949 to 1963, all in the big tail fin era. The ten cars were buried nose down, reportedly at the same angle of the Egyptian pyramids. Originally it was in a wheat field, and later they were moved to a cow pasture close to Interstate 40, outside of Amarillo, Texas. The cars have been repeatedly graffitied ever since. Public domain photo.

My whole life, I’ve said that I don’t know what art is. There’s a ton of stuff called art that I just don’t get. I don’t get Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans. Yeah, they’re cool looking silk screens, but they didn’t do anything for me in particular. The same is true of many things in galleries, or installations I’ve seen in person or in the media. But I understand that not every thing called “art” needs to speak to me, or anyone else, for that matter.

On the other hand, there are all kinds of things, from bathroom wall graffiti back in the 1970’s, to books, to paintings, to music, to graffiti, to street art, to public art installations, that really made an impact on me. The Call of the Wild, and White Fang, by Jack London, when I was a kid. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien. Michael Crichton’s Sphere, the novel, not the movie. The album Tommy by The Who. Queen’s News of the World Album. The movies Edward Scissorhands, Good Will Hunting, Tank Girl, Clerks, and Bad Santa. The Kansas song “Carry on Wayward Son.” Most of Social Distortion’s music. Shephard Fairey’s first “Andre’ the Giant has a posse” stickers, and then his early Obey street art campaign. That really fucked with my head. Vladimir Kush’s painting “Nero,” which I found tucked behind some other paintings, in a small gallery in Newport Beach, in about 1996, while on a lunch break as a furniture mover. Those are some of my favorites, for many different reasons. We all have our personal lists.

I’m sure the same is true of most, if not all, of you reading this. Because of this, I’ve always had trouble defining what art is. I’ve seen a lot of “art” that did nothing for me, and a lot of things that were generally considered “not art,” that had a profound, meaningful effect on me.

The cool thing is, this never really bothered me. I’ve been drawn to do creative things my whole life, in many different ways. The struggle for most of my life has been justifying why I want to spend so much time doing creative work, when I grew up in a world that told me, “just do your job, pay your bills, and live the life everyone expects of you.” That was what was ingrained into us Midwest kids, in rural and small town Ohio in the 1970’s. That was true of most places in the U.S. then.

Making a living doing fun, interesting, creative work was simply not an option in my childhood world. That was the world where the factories of small town America were thriving, and family owned farms were the norm. Everyone adult I knew hated their job, or at least hated their boss, yet encouraged me to find a job I hated, “with good benefits,” when I grew up. Then the world began to change. And it kept changing. And now, the world is changing more, and faster, than ever, and we’re all just hanging on, trying not to get left behind by it all.

Bunnyhenge, an art installation of 14 desert cottontail rabbits, each about 3 1/2 or 4 feet tall, made out of concrete, and painted white, arranged in a circle. Newport Beach art park, just above the city hall complex, Newport Beach, California. Bunnyhenge, like the Cadillac Ranch, just makes me laugh when I see it. #steveemigphotos

In the mid 1990’s, my sister Cheri, graduated from college in North Carolina. Our parents moved nearly every year, during our childhoods. I went to all three years of high school in Boise, Idaho. Then we moved to San Jose, California. Cheri, a bit younger, spent her high school years, and early college there, in the mage metro of San Jose and the San Francisco Bay area. When she was just entering college, my parents moved east, when my dad got a job in North Carolina. When finances got tight, Cheri wound up moving to NC to live with them, and then finished college there, leaving her tight group of high school friends behind. After graduating and getting credentialed to be a teacher, and starting her career there, she decided to move back to San Jose, close to her high school friends, in the late 90’s.

As big brother, I was asked to take a bus from Southern California to NC, then turn around and drive back cross country with Cheri, in her car, packed with all her stuff. My parents didn’t want her driving cross country as a young woman, solo, which is smart. I like cross country trips, and it wasn’t going to cost me much money, just some time, they were paying the expenses, so I said I’d do it.

On my end, it started with a city bus ride to the Santa Ana bus/train station from Huntington Beach. There, I hopped on a Greyhound for the 85 hour ordeal that is a cross-country bus ride. I won’t go into details, except to say that if you ever want to have a near death experience, without actually dying, take a bus trip straight across the U.S.. The “72 hour trip” always takes about 85 hours, with bad food and short fits of restless sleep. You hit the other side of the country as a kind of zombie, with shards of memories of different landscapes, and some really weird people on the bus.

My parents and sister picked my zombie self up at the Greensboro, North Carolina bus station. I spent one or two nights at my parents’ house, and then hopped in Cheri’s car, a typical 4 door sedan of that era. We left early one morning, taking turns driving, 3 or 4 hours each in a stretch, heading back out west.

U.S. Interstate 40 starts in Wilmington, NC, right on the coast, goes through Greensboro, and heads pretty much straight west, ending in Bartow, in the California desert. The plan was a straight shot for most of the length of I-40, then to my apartment in Huntington Beach, over about three or four days. Then Cheri would crash on my couch for a night, and head solo up to San Jose the next day.

We weren’t planning on doing much, if any sight seeing, with the possible exception of checking out the Grand Canyon for an hour or so. It was just a drive west, a commute practically, a long three or four days of driving, stopping at the most convenient motels at night to sleep. Day one got us across the Mississippi River, into Arkansas, where we hit a big thunderstorm. Shortly after the storm, we found a motel of the night.

My mom, and I, had a really strained relationship my whole life. But this particular day was one where we got along well. Kathy Emig in front of a really cool, old, Shell gas station, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 2017. #steveemigphotos.

Day two saw Cheri and I driving across Arkansas, the width of Oklahoma, and the Texas panhandle. We expected to end day two somewhere near the Texas panhandle and New Mexico border. The first day we talked a lot, caught up on each other’s lives from the previous few years, and were in a good mood. Day two was just a lot of driving, less talking, and more listening to music, as the miles passed by. By early evening, we were both kind of tired, and a bit cranky. We weren’t fighting, but just tired and a bit more agitated in general. I think we had been arguing about something. Not anything all that important, but enough to where we were just silent, in our own heads, as she drove.

A hour or so before dusk, we drove through Amarillo, Texas. Coming out of the west side of the city, with Cheri driving. I saw something off to the left. I saw the Cadillac Ranch, the ten old, graffitied, Cadillacs that I had seen postcards of since I was a kid. “We have to stop!” I screamed, startling my sister. I’d always wanted to go there when we lived in New Mexico, 17 or 18 years earlier but we never made it on a family trip. Suddenly, just out in an empty field, there were those old cars, nose down in the dirt, ten of them.

So Cheri pulled off at the next exit, not too excited about the idea, and we looped back to the opposite frontage road, and pulled off into the little gravel parking area. There was no big neon sign. There was no gate, and no fee to go see the cars. There was no gift shop to suck money out of our tourist wallets. There was nothing. There was just the back ends of ten really old Cadillac cars, sticking out of the ground at an angle, maybe 150 or 200 yards out in the field. A wide, well worn path from the tiny gravel parking area, led to the cars. We got out of Cheri’s car, and she grabbed her camera. We were the only ones there. We were smiling.

Walking past the outer fence, and along the long path I just kept smiling. The whole thing was just so ridiculous, we couldn’t help but smile. Our angst and agitation from two long days of driving was already gone, and we weren’t even out to the cars yet. When we got to the Cadillacs, covered in a myriad of colors of tags and graffiti, we each wandered around, reading the graffiti, looking into the rusting corpses of the old cars… and smiling. After a few minutes of just checking them out, I said, “This is the greatest work of art in the world.” My college educated sister just shook her head, but she was laughing, too.

There was no intense political message being expressed at the Cadillac Ranch. There was no great cultural insight being obviously expressed. There were just ten old cars, half buried in the ground, and covered in decades worth of graffiti. Was it a practical joke? Was it really “art?” Was it the work of some rich oil man fucking with people in town? The place was absurd. The place made us laugh. It didn’t make any sense at all. It didn’t make any dollars at all, either, it wasn’t just there to make money from travelers, which I loved. It wasn’t a weird roadside attraction to draw us into a certain store, motel, or amusement park.

Whatever the Cadillac Ranch was, and still is, it evoked a reaction. It made us smile. It made us laugh. A young couple from Germany walked up… smiling. Cheri and I talked to them, and we all laughed at the crazy Texans who thought this thing up, and made it happen. We all wandered around, smiling, shooting photos, and posing next to the cars. And that was enough. Cheri and I walked around the Cadillac Ranch for probably half an hour. Two or three other small groups of people walked up as we were leaving. We had taken a bunch of photos, and we walked back to her car, still smiling.

Really cool graffiti piece, just off of Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California, 2020. Artist unknown. #steveemigphotos.

My point here is that this weird art installation, the Cadillac Ranch, originally pretty expensive to construct, back in 1974, didn’t seem to have a serious point. And that’s great. We need some absurdity in life every once in a while. We need a little whimsy, and we always need reasons to laugh. Life can be a real pain in the ass. We all struggle with it at times. Creating pieces of art that don’t have major and serious themes, things just to make people laugh, to question the sanity of the creator, to just fuck with people’s heads a bit, have purpose in the world. We need art, in all its forms, and in all kinds of themes and mediums, and styles. If something called “art” doesn’t do anything for you, then just move on with your life. Every act of artistic expression doesn’t have to speak to everyone.

Some pieces of creative work will appeal to masses of people. That’s fine. Some works of art will only connect with a small number of people, and that’s fine, too. Those pieces may have a really profound and inspiring effect on that handful of people. But those effects may ripple out, years later, in more works by the people who were inspired.

If you’re are a person drawn to create one thing or another, there’s a reason for that. The work you do may, or may not, make you a bunch of money. It may, or may not, be praised by the critics in your genre’, and in your lifetime. It may, or may not, seem worthwhile when you finish. But I’ve realized that if you are called to do some kind of creative work, and you put in the time and effort, and do it well, it will have a needed effect on someone, somewhere. The Universe wants you to create stuff, that’s why we get sparks of inspiration to do one project or another. Creativity, art, and even some absurdity, are needed, particularly in times of great chaos, like now.

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