An American Laic Cathedral

After twenty minutes from Downtown Amarillo, Texas, driving thru I-40 West for over 10 miles, you reach the exit between 60 and 62, you slide into a side road called Frontage I-40, and not before a U-turn, you stop your car in front of a gate similar to a turnstile. In 1973 a man named Stanley Marsh, defined in most press accounts "eccentric billionaire”, called San Francisco Collective Ant Farm and with three of its leading members - Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez and Doug Michels, decided to buy ten Cadillac produced from 1948 to 1963 and to stick them with their metallic nose deep into the ground. The Cadillacs are aligned and arranged according to the precise angle of the Pyramid of Cheops, Giza, Egypt. The cars lie idle about fifty meters from the entry, and the short path to them, surrounded by low crops, serves as a meditative approach to the installation place. Once you are in front, once that you put yourself in the right distance, you have the complete picture and you can contemplate this authentic American Laic Cathedral. In the United States there are at least a couple of other places like that, places that have this unique, unrepeatable specificity (Heidelberg Project, Detroit and Outdoor Desert Art Museum, Joshua Tree), but the Cadillac Ranch for its historical, geographical and social context, can push the boundaries - even it’s passed more than four decades, the site is no longer the original one, the relic-cars changed several times painting and shade - the boundaries of what was called American Dream and what I would like to call today, American Way of Life, or American Way of Thinking. The fact that they arranged the cars in the same angle of the Pyramid of Giza was not arbitrary: if the pyramids were colossal monuments, erected-tombs for eternals god-men, with the aim to last for thousands of years, the Ranch is the abstract result of the dominant civilization in the world during the last century, and particularly in the Western World Century. It’s no coincidence that such open-air art installations like the two examples of Detroit and Joshua Tree (and the Street Art with its graffiti in New York and Los Angeles etc.?), are present on US soil and not in Europe or maybe even elsewhere. Cadillac Ranch goes further. Its metaphysical coincides with Houston Rothko Chapel’s, a nonconfessional chapel open to all religions till to the prayers of those who are devoid of any religious sense. Simplistically, someone might even say it is a non-place. I think it's just the opposite, even something more than the opposite. With these ten Cadillac buried into the ground for a third of their bodies, you're in front of an ecstatic representation of American Life. Its founding and essential characteristics, its crucial elements: the land of opportunity with the extension, the power and the cruelty of the territories on which you can trace an imaginary border, push it further and further toward an horizon that you will never see, that does not end and therefore does not exist, that can’t have a fixed point of destination but only of transition; the constant and uncontrollable propagation, affirmation and permeation of capitalism with its distractions, disparities, contradictions that fall in inequality and injustice; the freedom of expression, the propensity to discussion and the belief that a more open and free system for the individual will always be better than another in which there are severe limitations in the field of rights and economic opportunities; the idea, true or not, that it is a Nation (and a People - We the People) Under God; finally, the state of criticism, the talent and the inclination for a deep self-criticism as a mean of regeneration and rebirth of the society itself. Cadillac Ranch, 1974. Amarillo, Texas, USA.