Customized: Automobiles and Advertising Three Decades of Self-Made Automobiles

Widodo 1 George Widodo Kerri Steinberg History of Graphic Design April 28, 2012 Customized: Automobiles and Advertising Three Decades of Self-Made Automobiles The purpose of this essay is to examine the historical, cultural, racial and political significance of car modifications through the perspective of advertising in the golden age (1950s – 1970s). 1950s ! The fifties was a wonderful time as the United States led the world politics. Technological innovations made marketing more appealing, especially the rise of television commercials. The cultural upheaval of motorcars paralleled the development of modern jazz, the rise of rock and roll, and early appearance of Beat generation (DeWitt 5). America revisited the consumption ethic of the 1920s. The arrival of family car introduced a new seating grid to create a hierarchy from father to children. The postwar era boosted mass production and devised the “more is more” sensibility. General Motors debuted 1948 Cadillac Fleetwood with the all-time famous soaring tail fins. Engines got bigger, fins got larger as we follow the upsurge of high-class living. Fifties’ capitalism marked the peak of excessive embellishments in car manufacturing and the inception to car customizations. (DeWitt 7) On the contrary, the youth market was focusing on the growth in speed and specialty of “Hot Rodding”. Some claim that Henry Ford was the first hot-rodder during the roaring 20s and the outgrowth of the depression. His first assembly line, the Model T, was modified to set Widodo 2 numerous speed records and beat much more expensive cars in races and exhibitions (Ganahl 13). Buick 1958 (Ikuta 47). Illustrations were dominant in 50s advertising. Besides the iconic form and color, ads from this era are easily recognizable. In his essay, Thomas Frank stated that this is one of many examples of David Ogilvy’s scientism in advertising: a picture on the upper two-thirds of the page, “a headline beneath,” and three columns of serif type “packed with facts” (Frank 49) The ad are targeted towards middle-to- high class mothers. The Air Born Buick B-58 had many editions and was branded as a family car. 1958 was a Detroit’s underway to the golden age in automobile industry. Editors of Hot Rod Magazine described hot-rodders as people who modify his or her car to increase performance and improve appearance (Dianna 27). Ed Winfield was the first to realize that car modifiers were rare and marginalized. His impetus dictated a competitive spirit in the growth of performance equipment. In the beginning, Hot Rods were not art. (Ford 17) Sure, custom cars are about looks- the over exposed wheels, tunneled headlights, chopped channeled grills, and polished chrome interiors. However, they were also about engineering and pride of physical labor. Achievements Widodo 3 in manual work and its output assumed leisure in the young working-class society. Car modifiers have transformed consumption into practices and developed an intimate form of ownership The juxtaposition here is between 1948 Cadillac Fleetwood (left) and 1955 Brew 102 Hot Rod in El Mirage (right) taken by David Perry. This demonstrates the transition of hot rods in the realm of customization. According to Bob Peterson, a proponent writer for car customization, it was the West Coast gave us hot-rodding. California’s stretched landmarks had accommodated amateurs to settle for drag racing. (Dianna 42) The dry lakes and salt flats were dusty, thus accounted for zero accountability. The circumstances practically disallow women to participate in such masculine subculture, raising issues in femininity. The “unsafe” practices symbolize rebellion, power, and wealth- the pursuit of machismo. The postwar era paved ways for personal freedom and had led adolescences into escaping parental controls and stepped into independent auto-mobility- cultural rite of passage into manhood. (Bengry-Howell 375) Cars were symbolic extensions of themselves- a resemblance of an old-time cliché; “you are what you drive.” The Pierson Brothers’ coupe and at a Russetta Timing Association at El Mirage dry lake, October 1950. (Ganahl 15) Here is an example of West Coast drag racing, a battle to prove the fiercest. Widodo 4 1960s Customizations became ever-present with the understanding of modernism. Sixties was the decade of unprecedented experimentation, characterized with genuine craziness of the “Kustom Kulture”- a term coined primarily by emerging artists Von Dutch, Ed Roth, and Robert Williams (Dutch 9) and followed by Madison Avenue’s antinomianism. These artists have one goal, which is to make drop-dead beautiful cars to achieve “true” customizations. The practice of “Debadging”- a transformative process deconstructs the intrinsic qualities of a motorcar (Bengry-Howell 377); became popular. The notorious icons of Kustom Kulture gave racing hot rods a new visual dimension. “The viciously curled pinstripes, wheel- well licking flames, winged eyeballs, monster-driven hot rods and surrealistic drag races” (Kerr 25) constituted debadging by altering symbols and associations of the car. Chevrolet advertised the Nova for female demographic in 1962. Nova can legitimize masculinity by modifying its overall shape. Debadging had essentially de-feminized the “chick car” status. This radical transition raised many negative associations and skepticism for car enthusiasts. Sixties advertisements were no longer restrained with bureaucracies and placid with scientism. The attitudes of Kustom Kulture and Bill Bernbach’s “Creative Revolution” are now indistinguishable. Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) stated “rules are what the artist breaks; the memorable never emerged from a formula.”(Frank, Bernbach 57) These groups of dissenters and nonconformists are bridging the transition to postmodernism. The passion of art in custom cars advanced through the beauty and danger of the racing community. Before its appearance in high-dollar art galleries, this new art form is alienated. They see cars as blank canvases. Use of flames, intricate pin striping, and monster images depicted the use this “foreign language” of speed, danger and fun. Advertising in the sixties had bombarded countless status affiliations and symbolisms of American cars. In the means of transportation, Cadillacs were for businessmen, Buicks and Packards were for intellectuals, and Pontiacs were for teachers and professors. (Ikuta 20) As a prominent Kustom artist, Ed Roth detested the idea and instead embraced his ideas of Widodo 5 customizing the individualities of motorcars. His ability to fantasize helped him to engage with the “hand-made space” (Bengry-Howell 377) where the human body, tools and material object engage- a machinist pleasure. This “space” was compensatory for the lowbrow society as part of their leisure-based opportunity and later developed a privilege-based ownership. It diminished the significance of the consumption ethic. (left) Car Craft cover with the Beatnik Bandit, May 1961 (Dutch 67). The first publication of the avant-garde styling. Its predecessor, Outlaw, startled the rodding world with its free-form (right) The Beatnik Bandit (Ganahl, The American Custom Car 94)- Big Daddy’s most famous wild show cars. The adventure on aerodynamics and central-control steering was far in advance in American counterparts. (DeWitt 96) The famous bubble-top, was hand-built by Roth and Harry First by heating the fiberglass and blowing it, then painted by Larry Watson. The rod chassis was based off a 1950 Oldsmobile, It is later traded to Jim Brucker (Doeden 14) and eventually transported to the National Automobile Museum in Reno. The US Air Force commissioned Big Daddy Roth as a cartographer. He experimented with airbrush and eventually painted thousands of personalized T-shirts. (Dutch 27) Ed then revolutionized self-expressionism in re-styling his Beatnik Bandit (1960). Suddenly cars were being built from ground up in a garage by a single person rather than hundreds of industrialized crews. Many other groundbreaking artists like Bill Hines, Darryl Starbird and Gene Winfield Widodo 6 (Doeden 12) continued to outlaw Detroit’s materialism through countercultural experimentations. The exuberance of the Beatniks ascended after the economic recession when the Russians launched the space satellite Sputnik in 1958. (Ikuta 24) Simultaneously, GM’s over- designed cars gradually lost popularity. Year after year, European cars steadily expanded their market shares. Sixties VW Beetle’s genius campaigns mocked Detroit’s “annual re-styling sprees” (Frank, Bernbach, 64) and talked nothing on fancy budgets but all on the reliability of the car, stripped-down construction and ease of repair. For the first time ever, Advertising “talked to consumer as though he was a grown up instead of a baby” (Bernbach 63) - turning skepticism into brand loyalty. Think Small for Volkswagen Beetle (Ikuta, The ‘60s, 88). The idea behind such honesty was solely a reaction to a strategy known as “Stop the VW” (Ikuta 106) that was announced by the “Big Three” competitive companies-GM, Ford and Chrysler. DDB decided to place a one-page advertisement in the weekly Life magazines in black and white. The campaign dropped a huge bombshell at the competitor. The pictorials were totally opposite to those of the “Big Three.” It was photographically foreshortened instead of elongated (Bernbach 62) and tucked in on the corner of the page. The campaign was knowledgable to intellectual people and showed sales peak of 180,000 cars in 1961 Widodo 7 1970s Early seventies was a time of difficulty. Car customization raised many safety issues in racing. In drag racing, racers were concerned with the engine, weight distribution and had a tough time competing with modification rules. “Bracket Racing”-a race to test the driver’s performance rather than the raw speed of the car; came to be popular during the early seventies. Line up at a Los Angeles gas station in anticipation of rationing, 11 May 1979. 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. The appreciation of fuel efficient vehicles favored and suddenly people realized the “less is more” sensibility.

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