Robert Irwin once stranded an East Coast art critic alongside a southern California roadway for obstinately refusing to consider hot rod building an art form. Irwin, a custom car builder in his youth, considers the Go & Show hot rod the apex of car customization art. The Go & Show is a category of modified car with a rigorous aesthetic typified by ornamental reduction and a devotedly clean finish. Like the Go & Show auto, the immaculate aerodynamic carapaces of Phil Price’s kinetic sculptures conceal flawless performance engineering. Underneath the hood, so to speak, at the functioning heart of these wind machines are a number of engineering and fabrication innovations applied, for the first time, to the genre of kinetic sculpture.
