Anthony Hawley traveled to Maine on Friday to buy a car. Not just any car. But a 1985 Nissan Pulsar NX -- the vehicle that will be the focus of “What Can a Tourist Do But Weep?” his yearlong, multifaceted art project.
“It had to be this car because my dad had this exact car, except it was white, and this one’s red,” Hawley said. “I remember being in it when my dad was my age now, and I was probably my oldest daughter’s age -- 8 or 9 -- driving at night, listening to Van Halen and going to the arcade.”
The memories, actual and misremembered, and the culture of the 1980s are key elements in the project.
Hawley, who draws, paints, writes and does performance art, initially planned to find a 1985 Pulsar, saw it in half vertically while listening to Van Halen’s “Panama,” exhibit one-half and create a ghostlike shell from papier-mache to stand in for the other half of the car.
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When he found the pristine, running model in Maine via the Internet, the project changed.
“I’ve been looking for this car for months,” Hawley said early Friday afternoon. “This was the one I had to get. This one is perfect. It kind of brings together everything of that time. It’s a little clunky, a little sci-fi, an '80s dream machine. It’s not an American muscle car. It’s a middle-class compromise.”
Now the project also is going to be about a journey.
Hawley will drive the Pulsar from Maine to his hometown, Newburyport, Mass., where he’ll officially begin the project with a 24-hour drive back to Lincoln. He hadn't quite determined what he’ll do on the drive, perhaps make a video or, testing his sanity, listen to the Billboard Top 25 hits of 1985 over and over until he gets to Nebraska.
From Lincoln, the car will go to Art Farm near Marquette, where Hawley will work on it as an artist-in-residence in October and again in May. There the car will undergo some type of transformation aimed at turning the interior into a new environment.
Hawley, who teaches painting at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, also has found a repair manual for the Pulsar and will be creating a series of large, diagrammatic drawings based on the book.
“What Can a Tourist Do But Weep?” might incorporate the Top 25 songs, perhaps in glitched-out, cut-up versions that skew the memory of the listener or video. There will be text and Web elements of the project, which takes its name from a line in the film “Hiroshima mon amour.”
In June/July of 2014, Hawley will drive the car, by then a rolling artwork, to New York City, where it will be the center of the exhibition of “What Can a Tourist Do But Weep?”
“The finished product will be the car in some form and a series of large drawings on mylar using the repair manual as the source,” Hawley said. “They’ll be hung away from the walls so people will walk through time. What else there will be and where the exhibition will be, I don’t know yet.
“I think everything comes back to drawing and mapping, and mapping psychological space as well as real space and memory and mismemory.”
That, however, can’t happen until Hawley gets the old Nissan to Lincoln.
“I have to teach on Wednesday, so I have to be back by Tuesday,” Hawley said. “It makes me a little nervous. The drive and the whole project makes me nervous. It's definitely the biggest thing and most all-encompassing thing I've done. But the truth is I need to be a little nervous. If I know exactly what’s going to happen, I don’t want to do it.”
More information and an opportunity to contribute to the project’s funding can be found on Hawley’s website: anthonyhawley.net.