Assemblage, Baby!

DRIVER: Jan Elftmann
WHEELS: 1995 Honda Civic

Despite the model’s exemplary service record, Jan Elftmann is constantly working on her 1995 Honda Civic. It has only 145,000 miles on it (for a Civic, that’s practically under warranty), but she’s actually forced to carry around masking tape and silicon glue.

In fact, it’s a bright blue day in early autumn—driving weather—but Elftmann is feeling guilty that she’s not working on the Civic right now. “It’s a gorgeous day for gluing,” she says looking up at the sky. She’s got a backlog of buttons in the trunk, and somebody snapped off the top of the pink ceramic Statue of Liberty miniature in Salina, Kansas.

Obviously, Elftmann’s Civic isn’t your average one-of-a-billion Civics. Hers is a bona fide “art car,” covered in hundreds of buttons and decorative plates, interior and exterior. There’s a Joe Cool Snoopy plate, a Niagara Falls plate, an Obama button, and a Muskie in ’72 button. Fifty-one-year-old Elftmann has an MCAD degree in the art of assemblage, a French term meaning “cover your sensible little four-door vehicle with mounds of junk.”

This is Elftmann’s fourth art car. She calls it The Holey Circle. (“H-O-L-E-Y,” she spells out carefully. “I don’t want to offend the religious.”) She’s been doing car art for fifteen years, since going to her first art car parade in Houston, Texas. (“That’s the granddaddy of them all.”) Her first work of auto art was an ’87 Mazda pickup covered with more than 10,000 wine and champagne corks. (“I worked at an Italian restaurant called Alfredo’s.”) Cork Truck still runs, but each of her last two art cars crapped out after a year or two. So when Elftmann was looking for the vehicle that would become The Holey Circle, aesthetics ceased to be the sole consideration. Hondas—you can’t kill ’em.

She has no hopes of getting rich off this art car thing. “It’s an exercise in antimaterialism,” she says. “I’m devaluing both the objects and the car.” Elftmann does get paid to participate in art car parades from Houston to Salina, but usually only gas and food are provided so she stays with friends. (She runs Minneapolis’s parade too, but it was cancelled this summer due to a lack of funding.) She has a good gig as an artist-in-residence, teaching kids assemblage and the history of the art car and the art bike. And she saves herself some money avoiding moving violations: “When cops pull me over,” she says, “all they want is a picture.”