Fat Porsche 911 Carrera

Nope, I wasn’t going after the slang version of the word to show you how up on youth culture I was 5 years ago. I meant literally FAT. I’m not sure where this car is on display at the moment, but it turns out to be one that’s made the rounds to various museums and art shows world wide. The Fat Convertible is the creation of Austrian sculptor Erwin Wurm and just one of a number of “fat” pieces he’s done over the last decade.

It’s an actual Porsche 911 Carrera Cabriolet that was sculpted to represent a melding of human obesity with machine. Here’s an interesting little snippet from an interview with Wurm:

Peter Zuspan: One of the things that first brought me to your work a few years ago was your use of fat. Your first Fat Car (2001) is a kind of drag show in which the fat hangs off of an otherwise untouched original. Your later Fat Convertible (2004) and Fat House (2003) start to have a swelling of the interior as well, a kind of post-operative version in which the transformation is not just clothing or cladding, but a change that effects the entire anatomy. What caused the fat to turn inside?

Erwin Wurm: With the first car, I didn’t think about it. But if I had thought about it carefully enough the first time, I would have also made it fat inside because the idea was to combine a technical system (the car) and a biological system (the human being or animal or whatever). And I thought that if I looked at the car from this point of view, I would have to decide where the bones would be. What are those parts of the body that don’t grow even when you’re really fat?—like the eyes, the teeth, the navel, the knees, and maybe the elbows. So, I decided that several parts of the car are related to the body, equatable with bones, eyes, and so on. And then, I realized that fat not only grows outside, but it also grows inside of us. Fat also destroys the inside of the biological organism. [Source MuseoMagazine.com]

I’m not sure what to say. I suppose if I were more into art, I would have some comment. To me it looks something out of Cars cartoon movie. Any art critics want to comment?