A set of ritual markings tattoo the asphalt of an expansive parking lot that teeters on the top of the north face of Burnaby Mountain, at the easternmost edge of the City of Vancouver.
It’s a flat bit of land carved out of steep slopes populated with warning signs about the dangers of stepping out of bounds, of falling over the edge, of ending up dead and making your Mamma cry. It’s a raw and visceral place.
In good weather, like tonight, it is heaven for those with their blankets and people beside them. When the rain clouds descend – dense and persistent – its mood plummets. When the big winds blow, it’s time to clear out now.
While it’s possible to hike the trails from bottom to top, most who are here for sunset have driven up the winding curves of the Parkway and Gaglardi Way and through the new developments of UniverCity that encircle Simon Fraser University. They are parking in the lot, blocking access to the full range of visual expressions that lie beneath their tires. But few look down when there’s so much to see at eye-level and above.
The parking lot lies adjacent to Kamui Mintara, Playground of the Gods, a mystical, man-made intervention that rivals the astonishing views down Burrard Inlet, into the Coast Mountains, Indian Arm and west to the Pacific Ocean.
But not everyone comes for the view.
The parking lot is a vast abstract canvas, a mass configuration of looping and intersecting calligraphic lines, the code-map left behind by the tire treads of drivers doing brakestands, burnouts, and doughnuts after dark. It is the place – literally – where rubber hits the road.
On nights like tonight, cars and drivers and fans of stunt driving will jam the lot, leaving scant room for the vast unpredictability of the drama about to unfold. Under flood lights, young men with high-performance cars will posture and prepare for their turn in the ring. They will be judged by the crowd on their style and attitude and rewarded or punished with shouts and whistles. There will be plenty of smoke and likely some fire.
WARNING: foul language (below)
However they fare, they’ll have left a mark on the place. These tire imprints are art in the form of asemic messages, their meaning parsed as one would decode a Krasner or any of the American Action Painters like Pollock, de Kooning and Kline.
Rather than approaching painting as image-making, these painters were using the act of painting to record the results of personal, intuitive, subconscious dramas they were acting out in front of the camera. They were using the canvas as a stage…paint was the method of recording the evidence of the event.
Harold Rosenberg
Here, a layer of super-heated rubber impasto – and cellphones – record the action. And it is very nearly perfect public art: intentional, accessible, unexpected, unauthorized and free, and part of a larger social spectacle that propels its participants forward.
It is human-designed and machine-made, an alchemical transference from the driver’s energy to the car, to the tires, to the tread, to the asphalt, until the lines are deciphered and read as “art” by the human imagination.
So those boys in fast cars? They aren’t making mischief. They’re making art.
