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Hemmings Motor News Blog

Hemmings Motor News has been around since 1954. We're proud of our heritage, but we're also more than the Hemmings full of classifieds that your father subscribed to. Aside from new editorial content every month in Hemmings, we have three monthly magazines: Hemmings Muscle Machines, Hemmings Classic Car and Hemmings Sports and Exotic Car.

While our editors traverse the country to find the best content for those magazines, we find other oddities related to the old-car hobby that we really had no place for - until now. With this blog, we're giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what we see and what we do during the course of putting out some of the finest automotive magazines you'll ever read.

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The Reinvention of the American Gas Guzzler

Posted April 07, 2009 12:01 AM by dstrohl

Frankly, I just don't have the energy to point out everything that's misconstrued or just plain wrong with the moral message behind "OFF-ROADING: The Reinvention of the American Gas-Guzzler," an installation at the School of Visual Arts.

Maybe a little energy. The truck isn't a statement in and of itself, it was an answer to a question, one of tremendous utility, a design philosophy refined over a century until it becomes a clean, flawless object. It's like objecting in some way to the egregious use of porcelain in a toilet. Being large isn't the truck's raison d'être; fulfilling a need is. And it does its job perfectly.

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#1

Re: The Reinvention of the American Gas Guzzler

04/06/2009 1:40 PM

So let me get this straight. Some art students cut up a 1980 Chevy truck and used it to furnish a model home?

I guess the slide show says it all. Here's an example.

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#2

Re: The Reinvention of the American Gas Guzzler

04/07/2009 4:45 AM

I think it's quite fun(ky) but I bet the truck's owner got a shock when he got back to the parking lot.
It's good to look at things out of their usual context....drifts off in pseudo intellectual bullshit about conceptual art, thinking ouside the box, and juxtaposing this that and t'other....
It's all about the dichotomy of modern...<shut up Del>
Del

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#3

Re: The Reinvention of the American Gas Guzzler

04/07/2009 2:20 PM

My cue to say something profound about the post-modernist movement? Or maybe cubism?

Think I'll take Del's advice to Del.

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#4
In reply to #3

Re: The Reinvention of the American Gas Guzzler

04/07/2009 10:46 PM

i would rather call it Gas-Guzzism

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#5

Re: The Reinvention of the American Gas Guzzler

04/08/2009 12:24 AM

I don't know about the functionality of it, but the part of me that likes anything to do with cars (and trucks) admires it from an artistic standpoint. I do like the grill......

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#6

Re: The Reinvention of the American Gas Guzzler

04/08/2009 8:43 AM

If you cut up you off road truck to make furnature for your house........

You just might be a redneck.

Then again you might be an artist.

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#7

Re: The Reinvention of the American Gas Guzzler

04/08/2009 11:01 AM

Art my hairy rear end! Most every junk yard I have ever been to has a shack furnished the same way.

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