Berkeley, Ca. filmmaker Harrod Blank has probably spent more time exploring the phenomenon of serious car art than anyone else in America.

The experience of driving his own aggressively embellished VW Bug Oh My God! led to the 1992 film Wild Wheels, in which Blank documents the work of more than 45 artists and their vehicles; a 1993 book by the same title followed. Five years ago he began work on the Camera Van, a 1972 Dodge covered with more than 2,000 discarded Nikons, Canons and Kodaks - three of which actually work - and outfitted with randomly activated flash devices. In an ongoing photography project, Blank uses the van to capture the curbside reactions that people who drive art cars see every day - delight, disbelief, astonishment, the moment of stunned silence, the delicious instant when a person forgets themself completely with amazement. You'll see the Camera Van in Roadside Attractions: The Artists Parade of Art Cars; its shutters will appear to be clicking away, but you won't know which ones are snapping your picture. Following are excerpts from RoadGuide's conversation with Blank about media, rebellion, the power of the camera and that magical split-second when an unsuspecting bystander sees an art car for the first time.

Tell me about your transformation from car artist to documentarian of car art to someone who documents people's reactions to car art.
It started with the first car, Oh My God! Like any other art car, it challenges the status quo, the value system of what an automobile should be. All art cars inherently do that. You put paint on your car, that's something you're not supposed to do. You make an art car and you are challenging the norm. When I did Oh My God! I saw all these amazing expressions when people looked at it. Some people say that car artists are just out to get attention but that's actually kind of insulting. Car art reflects many, many different levels and facets of a personality, of a person's values, their psychology. But art car people do have an audience, and that audience is everyone on the street. It's fun to see people react to what you've just created. It's actually kind of obnoxious, too, a way of turning things up. It's a form of rebellion, of questioning what a car should be.
So how did enjoying seeing people react move into photographing them while they did it?
For years, I tried documenting these reactions to show my friends, my parents, the Orange Show, to say "this is what it's like to drive around in an art car all the time. This how you can make people feel." I took pictures with Oh My God! but people would not react to the car once they saw the camera. It was a contrived reaction. I even hid in bushes sometimes to try and get pictures of people seeing art cars and I still couldn't. The real reaction is the first one, when they've never seen this thing before and all of a sudden they see it. It's very difficult to capture that.
Then I had a dream that I covered my car with cameras and drove around. I took pictures with these cameras, of people who didn't know which camera worked, and in the dream I saw the best reactions I'd ever seen in my life. I woke up and started to think for a half-second that maybe it was something I should do.
Because Wild Wheels was a financial failure, and because filmmaking is so difficult and there isn't much reward for independent films, I decided that instead of making another movie, I would make a camera van. What I thought was going to be a five or six-month project ended up taking two years, with friends helping me out, plus a lot of money. So it turned out that it was almost like making a movie.
On the other hand, the Camera Van took me on a trip that I wasn't anticipating. I'm still on it. The Camera Van became this tremendous media magnet. For me, it was a statement about the power of the camera in society and the obsessiveness of cameras in our society - Tonya Harding, O.J. Simpson. When I went to Burning Man [an annual Labor Day gathering of performance artists and latter-day pagans in the Nevada desert] last year there were almost more people with cameras than without them.
What do people want to talk about when they approach the van?
I get a lot of techincal questions. People ask if I know how to make a certain camera work, am I a camera repairman, can you tell me how to get this lens on?
Maybe when people see something that comes at them so visually they expect it to be advertising.
That happens with art cars in general. People think that if you're going to be this crazy, you must be selling something. They say to me "It's a Kodak moment.
How manipulated versus random are the shots? Do you stake people out?
No. You can tell if you've tried to set something up. To make a good photograph with the Camera Van is as much up to chance as anything else. You can't stage it or control it. you just get lucky.
It's hard for people to get past the sensational value of a van covered with 2,000 cameras. But what's really sensational to me is the pictures. The pictures are my reason for making the van. It's a means to an end.
Looking at your Camera Van photos, people seem to be completely disarmed for a moment.
That's what's motivated me for the last 15 years - the expressions I see on people's faces. Every art car gets these kinds of reactions; the Camera Van just documents them. These pictures are what everyone who drives an art car sees. The medium of art cars is powerful in how it affects people on the street. Unless you're in an art car for a long time, you can't imagine the depth and range of the experience.
Is car art a kind of guerilla approach to getting one's art seen?
In the context of the art world, a lot of critics probably don't take [car art] seriously as a medium because it's not displayed in galleries, it's usually not for sale; it's not a commercial endeavor. So, yeah. I guess it is.
What's up with the sequel to Wild Wheels?
Well, I'm actually working on a sort of Wild Wheels II-A, to get the money to make Wild Wheels II. I'm making a 26-minute film for National Geographic. It's about a few art car people, and what motivates them. The fact that National Geographic wants to do this says they think art cars are worth putting on TV. Wild Wheels II will have fewer characters than the first one but get more into their psychology and into social commentary.
What's the Camera Van's future?
I'd like to take it to other countries and see how people react. I think it would be quite different because the way that people see the automobile here is completely different from how they see it in, say, Mexico. Here it's more of a status symbol of who you are. I can testify that Los Angeles is the worst place to be with an art car. In L.A., the car as an image of where you stand in society is so important that art cars are just scorned upon. It might say a lot about Houston that people feel free to have an art car there.
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