Donuts

Photo: Juan Giraldo

Once the car was running again and settled into the staging area the next step was to kill the car. I did this by doing donuts with the car until it's engine siezed. I considered this the first actual work of art for the project. I consider this work a performance piece in the sense that I was performing a specific action and documenting it.

It was a rather risky performance in my oppinion. Not in the sense that I might be injured or killed but in the sense that what I was doing was quite illegal. Aside from the obvious wreckless driving, the Lumina was not registered or insured (as was mentioned in the post "The Beginning." This being the case, had a police officer encountered me in the midst of my performance, it would have been his duty to arrest me. Knowing this, I had placed a watcher (Adam) near the main road to call me should a police presence become iminant.

When I started the performance I felt a rush of excitement. I had the pedal to the floor and the car whipping around in circles as fast as I could. The tires were screeching like mad. It was so loud that I was sure the cops would hear it and come running. Adam said that he heard the screeching from where he was and it was still loud.

Fortunately they did not arrive....unfortunately, after more than five minutes of donuts, the car was still running. Rather than push it, I decided to call it off for the day and come back to the performance again later.

When I did return to the performance about a week later, I was successful. The car died after only a couple of minutes of the donuts. The photo above is from this second performance. My friend Juan got some good vido of it dying and then the crew of people I recruited to push the car back to the staging area.

You can view the videos of this performance at my Vimeo account here:

http://www.vimeo.com/album/104807

Jump Start

The Next step after getting the car to New Jersey and getting it out of the impound was to move it to its staging area Behind the Power Arts Facility. This required a ritual popularly known as the "Jump Start."

The Jump Start is not a very complicated procedure. You simply connect the jumper cables to the batteries of both cars and wait. The working car should be running...you wait around five minutes and start the non-working car...it should start right up if you have done everything right. If you have done everything right and the car doesn't start, then the problem is not with the battery.

During this project I had to jump start the Lumina so many times that I eventually stopped counting. The Image above is of the jump start at the Power Arts Facility.