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"Richard Phillips got into cars and sex around the same time. As a boy, hearing muscle cars rumbling through his suburban Massachusetts neighborhood inspired fantasies about racing, while Playboy was his entr\u00E9e into grown-up desire. \u201CI\u2019m of a generation where you found the magazine hidden in the household,\u201D he told ARTINFO about the venerable lads mag. \u201CThey were highly coveted and heavily traded amongst friends of mine way back when.\u201D It makes some sense, then, that the artist was tapped by Playboy\u2019s creative director for special projects Neville Wakefield to create the brand\u2019s latest project, Playboy Marfa.Playboy Marfa is a two-part work, and the company's biggest push to date since it began making moves to reinvent the brand via contemporary art back in 2012. The first part is an installation, sited along a highway in Marfa, of a 1972 Dodge Charger painted matte black and perched on a concrete plinth, tilted at 18 degrees \u2014 the angle of the bank at Daytona \u2014 in homage to former NASCAR racer Richard Petty. A neon Playboy bunny symbol towers over it.The second part of the program, which will unfold over the coming months, involves the re-working of a functioning car, the same model vehicle currently on the plinth in Marfa.&amp;nbsp;\u201CThe charger has been gutted to the chasse, and completely rethought, from its core to the outer limits of its classic lines,\u201D Phillips explained. \u201CIt\u2019s functionally empowered with a contemporary suspension geometry. And all the component parts that would give it the capability to be driven today.\u201DFor Phillips, the gesture of remaking the car parallels Playboy's rebranding enterprise.&amp;nbsp;At the height of its popularity, in the early '70s, Playboy was publishing stories by Norman Mailer and&amp;nbsp;Margaret Atwood, featuring interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and commissioning original artwork by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Helmut Newton. (There are 4,000 works of art in Playboy\u2019s private collection, according to Landis Smithers, the creative director at Playboy Enterprises). The Playboy empire included clubs and resorts across the country. At its peak, in 1972, Playboy\u2019s circulation was 7 million. Today it\u2019s closer to 1.5.\u201CJust as playboy became a kind of global brand disassociated from its own beginning,\u201D said Phillips, \u201Cthe idea of a muscle car and how they\u2019re traded throughout the world, they\u2019ve become fetishized and coveted, kind of gets away from that raw sense of what they were actually meant for, which was kind of an accessible, luxurious, way of blasting across space.\u201DPlayboy is hoping to get back to its roots while burnishing a high art feel.&amp;nbsp;It has pursued this through a bevy of art sponsorships \u2014 including the \u201CGiverny\u201D show at the Hole gallery in New York last year, as well as extravagant parties during Art Basel Miami Beach \u2014 and connecting with curators, artists, and art world personalities like Wakefield and Phillips.&amp;nbsp;\u201CI\u2019m interested in the idea that the magazine in its heyday was a cross-pollinating platform where these different conversations, art, sex, politics, culture, would all take place,\u201D explained Wakefield, who has already curated a show in Marfa related to cars called \u201CAutobody\u201D at Ballroom Marfa.Wakefield contends that the work is not just arty branding, but an exploration of issues of art and commerce. Richard Phillips is a clever choice of artist to mediate this tension: The painter has always prodded the condition of art\u2019s relation to luxury goods sponsorship. His 2010 series&amp;nbsp;\u201CMost Wanted\u201D&amp;nbsp;paired portraits of young actors with red-carpet backdrops of luxury fashion brands. He\u2019s also done films and paintings of fallen child star&amp;nbsp;Lindsay Lohan and adult actress&amp;nbsp;Sasha Grey, two women who have transformed themselves through the media into brands.He contends that the Playboy project fits squarely into his practice as an artist. \u201CIn this case, the brand steps forward and the brand becomes the palette. The project of a relaunch,\u201D he said, referring to Playboy\u2019s effort to rebrand itself, \u201Cbecomes a verifiable subject. How does one articulate that? There\u2019s enormous kinetic potential, and make no mistake, this will have that.\u201DFor Marfa, however, the work is bound to provoke, particularly with the sculpture\u2019s apparent riff on local hero&amp;nbsp;Donald Judd\u2019s iconic work at the Chinati foundation, \u201C15 Untitled Works in Concrete, 1980-1984,\u201D a series of hollow box-like structures made from slabs of concrete. (Marella Consolini, the COO&amp;nbsp;of the&amp;nbsp;Chinati Foundation, where Judd\u2019s concrete boxes are installed,&amp;nbsp;told ARTINFO that the foundation has no association with Playboy Marfa.)At least one Marfa resident we talked to \u2014 albeit one who wished to remain anonymous \u2014 considered the Playboy project a slap in the face, little more than an attempt to ransack Marfa's symbolism for its cachet without interfacing meaningfully with the surrounding community.&amp;nbsp;\u201CThe Playboy sculpture is a PR stunt masquerading as 'art' in order to capitalize on this moment that Marfa is having in the news, which is problematic for the community: it\u2019s exploitative.\u201D\u201CWhen I first moved here, 13 years ago,\u201D said Douglas Humble, the residency manager of the Lannan Foundation, \u201Csome old timers told me about some changes they\u2019d witnessed with the army coming and going and the air force coming and going. Now, with the art scene in Marfa, their response to it was that it\u2019s kind of like a movie that everybody sits back and watches.\u201D\u201CThere's no way of doing anything in Marfa without referencing Judd,\u201D Wakefield said, defending Phillips' riff on the great Minimalist.&amp;nbsp;\u201CHe's such a monolithic presence there.\u201DSince the sculpture is only temporary, set to last approximately a year, it will pass. But for now, at least before the vandals get to it, the Playboy neon sign gleams brightly on the flat West Texas horizon.&amp;nbsp;\u201CIt\u2019s kind of like working into the void,\u201D mused Phillips. \u201CYves Klein may have symbolized that. But he didn\u2019t do that at 180 miles per hour.\u201D"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/916661/richard-phillips-opens-playboy-marfa-but-will-the-locals>