This Jiffy Lube is a block from my studio. It is a concrete paved blight – a spa to service and pamper the
toxic, two-ton metal rolling boxes we use in order to eliminate our natural distances. The ground of the
Jiffy Lube is stained with the blood of these boxes. The people who work here, when there is no car to work
on, stand on the street corner like prostitutes, waving signs to entice the driver to have their car serviced.
This is required by the company, of course, a corporate commandment to wring profit out of any idle labor.
When the workers are busy, this poster is the enticement. The perfect looking white couple in their open-top
convertible, sweater tied around the neck.
A year ago in August, I noticed this poster because of the mustache. For me, the mustache drawn on faces never
gets old; it is always funny. The Sharpee mustache defaces, de-faces, these false faces. The modern
inspiration would perhaps be Marcel Duchamp’s mustache on a postcard of the Mona Lisa. This was a common
Dadaist practice, the destruction of the supposedly ineffable, done in the spirit of creating new possibility
and new beginnings.
This spring, upon walking by it again one day, I noticed that the mustache was gone. Not removed or cleaned by
the Jiffy Lube workers, who probably couldn’t care less about it. Rather, washed away naturally by rain and
time, a cold-weather season of storms doing its own work on the image. Only the mustache had not washed away,
but diluted and bled across the poster’s image, leaving an inky dark cloud around the people in the car. The
woman in the image had her dignity restored, but at the cost of the environment around her, now forever
stained and tarnished.
So an oil painting, incorporating the Tourist with this oily, polluted image, is perhaps fitting. Now, with
the painting, the woman, the car, the Tourist, are all sculpted from oil. Thinner and mineral spirits drip and
cloud the image, no longer a projection of flawlessness but painted as an immanent object of imperfection.
Similarly, a Sharpee mustache is drawn on the painting, but it is perhaps ultimately The Tourist that is the
mustache. His participation in this image is a device, used as an act of defiance against the false hegemony
of American car idolatry and a challenge to my own desires for art to carry a universal transcendence.