Guy Overfelt operating from San Francisco, California, USA
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY : REVIEWS / PRESS / INTERVIEWS / CATALOGSBold Stokes In 1953 Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage collaborated on an "Automobile Tire Print." Rauschenberg inked a tire on Cage's Model A Ford, and the composer drove it over a 22-foot-long roll of paper. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired the monoprint from Rauschenberg in 1998. Visitors who have seen the "Automobile Tire Print" will think of it the moment they enter Guy Overfelt's show at Linc Real Art. Using his '77 Pontiac Trans-Am, Overfelt made his own tire prints, relying more on acceleration and friction than Rauschenberg and Cage did. Overfelt's scuffed tire prints are like expressionist versions of theirs, street art to their gallery art. Overfelt's tread pieces have a forensic air, underlined here by the proximity of drawings of him that he commissioned from celebrated sketch artists Walt Stewart and Vicki Behringer. Overfelt was arrested in 1998 for a "criminal misdemeanor, speed contest," when police happened by just as he finished a street performance. With the Trans-Am parked in a pool of water and bleach, he gunned it with the brakes locked to produce a blinding cloud of white smoke, behind which he then vanished from onlookers' view. The authorities took the charge seriously, even though the traffic citation -- on display in the show -- noted his speed as "0." Overfelt decided to go to trial on the matter and managed to persuade Tony Serra, celebrated lawyer brother of celebrated sculptor Richard Serra, to take his case pro bono. The presiding judge took a close look at the circumstances and personalities invo lved and threw the case out, but not before Overfelt got from Stewart and Behringer some nifty portraits of himself as the accused. Can the mythic figure of the artist as outlaw be revived without nostalgia? If so, Overfelt will probably be the one to do it. |
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