Carhenge, America’s vehicular Stonehenge, celebrates 20 years
19 Jul 2007 Leave a Comment
in Creativity, Criticism, Life, MadSilence, Popular Culture, Public Art, Sculpture Tags: Art
In a recent post MadSilence discussed how artists use BMWs for their canvas. Now we celebrate the 20th anniversary of Carhenge, a whimsical monument arising from the Nebraska prairie.
Carhenge is a curious re-creation of Stonehenge constructed of old cars, with their placement copying the alignment of the original. It was the brainchild of Jim Reinders, who constructed it in a weekend during a reunion at his family farm. Carhenge has become a tourist destination, drawing as many as 80,000 visitors annually to the rural community of Alliance.
Apparently Carhenge has caught the American imagination, having been featured in award-winning photographs, national magazines, on album covers, in high- and low-budget motion pictures, and even as the setting for a Valiant Comic “Shadowman” story. There’s even a 30-minute documentary that examines how this peculiar monument challenged one community’s definition of art, freedom of expression and appropriate land use.
It’s easy to understand the popularity of the vehicular public sculpture, constructed as it was by an independent eccentric working outside of the establishment, with a peculiar and personal vision.
Art experts Dr. Gordon M. Church, former Albuquerque Public Art Project Manager, and Rian Kerrane, assistant professor of sculpture at the University of Colorado—Denver, comment in the video documentary on how Carhenge can be seen as a celebration of human ingenuity, produced as a ritual experience that bonded the individuals who constructed it.
Now I’ll concede that Reinder exercised a certain level of imagination and inventiveness when he thought up the thing. And I’m certain the process of construction bonded together those who did all that hard work…hopefully around a keg of beer. Once again I find myself returning to the concepts of high culture and low culture, of fine art and popular culture.
Can Carhenge ever achieve the stature of England’s Stonehenge, or the statutes on Easter Island, or America’s Mt. Rushmore? I realize that Carhenge’s creator never considered his creation to be great art, nor meant for it to compete with these monuments of human culture.
Carhenge is definitely not great art. But great fun? Definitely so.
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~TAB
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