With The Arrival Of Drive-By Art The Car Culture Of Los Angeles Is Getting A Cultural Boost In The Age Of COVID-19

Drive-by birthdays. Drive-by weddings. Drive-by graduation ceremonies. In this time of social distancing, the car has become a protective skin for offline human interaction. Now it's also becoming a vehicle for experiencing art.

This weekend in Los Angeles, aficionados deprived of gallery openings and museum exhibitions will have an opportunity to see dozens of artworks while driving. All of the art will be outdoors, much of it site-specific and timely in terms of subject. Genres range from painting and sculpture to projection and performance. There is no admission fee. A map is your ticket.

Drive-By Art was conceived by the artist Warren Neidich, who curated the first run along Long Island's Route 27 earlier this month. The Los Angeles edition, which involves a team of curatorial collaborators, is considerably more extensive. (The first half took place last weekend.) The expansiveness is appropriate, given the city's notorious automotive culture. It also facilitates diversity, leveraging the demographic differences of different neighborhoods.

Given that a Los Angeles address is the only criterion for inclusion, quality varies considerably. At one extreme, there are works by well-established artists with significant financial resources who happen already to be creating installation works visible from the street. For example, Kenny Scharf has been suspending discarded plastic toys from his roof for the past year, creating an eye-catching assemblage that would not look out of place at LACMA. At the other extreme is an abundance of well-meaning amateur (or amateurish) painting, not quite suitable for a street fair.

Even amongst artists responding to the moment, you'll find a broad range of approaches and levels of accomplishment. The six-foot span of social distancing is a popular theme (as it was on Long Island), most often instantiated in awkward seating arrangements that do little more than illustrate the obvious. Far more interesting are the few artists who address the pandemic proactively, defining new modes of interaction through art.    

Nicole Rademacher is notable in this respect. Her work invites families to draw their experiences in quarantine on the sidewalk using colored chalk. In order to enforce social distancing, she has posted a sign-up sheet, and the chalk comes prepackaged in sanitized plastic bags. The simplicity of Rademacher's project is what makes it so effective: Transforming the street into a place where experiences of isolation can meet, she provides a space for the psychological transition from lockdown to civic life.

Of course, Rademacher's work breaks the rule implied by the title of the exhibition. The work will be visible from moving vehicles, but the essence of it will happen on the pavement. A drive-by art exhibition, like a drive-by birthday, is sterile by design, and that sterility is not only literal. Getting out of the house is important, but one has to ask how much difference there is between a computer screen and a vehicle's windscreen. The risk of drive-by events, including exhibitions, is that they further reinforce the new normal of Zoom as a substitute for physical connection.

However, as with so much that has emerged in the age of COVID-19, drive-by art has the potential to benefit society long after there's a coronavirus vaccine. The act of putting art out on the street, where it can be freely viewed without institutional oversight, can only enrich urban environments.

If drive-by culture is to persist after the pandemic, let it endure in the form of drive-by art.

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