Visiting Cadillac Ranch just outside Amarillo, Texas is supposed to be a celebration of the American roadways, highways, drive-all-night ways. But it is also an art installation created by the Ant Farm Collective as a tongue-in-cheek pawn to consumerism and kitsch. And there are other things it can't help having become...
Barbed wire keeps us from arriving in clumps, spilling through the metal gate in torrents.
And fake plastic flowers remind us that wildflowers grow in muted shades here- the cost of brilliance being early death and dessication. It takes a few prickles to survive the Texas winds.
We walk but the kids can't help running towards the Caddies. There is something moving about the ten minute walk up to the installation. Something like standing in line on Sunday, waiting for communion.
The way in which one woman sidled slowly up to the cars, staring at them as if grieving, changed the way I looked at the ranch itself. It is not a landmark or a pit-stop so much as it is a pilgrimage, with all the religious connotations and all the attendant devotions.
The devout bring their own cans of spray paint and paint pens, leaving their mark, knowing better than the hope of being remembered.
The littered cans clench the artistic value for me. Cadillac Ranch would be so much less powerful without the piles of waste and refuse, the leftover costs of religious pilgrimage, the way we subvert the earth in the name of one god or another.
I tell the kids how much I love it. Prophet scowls for a second, then says she doesn't understand how "those cars fell like that on their noses".
I marvel at the way in which the neon aesthetic is simultaneously soothing and jarring.
We are pilgrims of Cadillac Ranch. Unlike other religions, this one leaves us free of shame and brimming with hot pink.
