The “Ghost Stang,” white-powdered and returned to the wild near Weldon, California. Artist Charles Linder, who wrangled the Mustang out of the desert, offers the potential collector GPS coordinates to the Stang’s original location where conversation, campfire and cold champagne are necessary tributes to the re-installed auto.

Charles Linder at Gallery 16
and Back

The Ghost Stang as Coral Reef,
Mr. Linder as Clark Gable

  John Graham

I HAD HEARD ABOUT CHARLES LINDER’S latest shot-up, found American artifact a few weeks before his show started at Gallery 1616. For years, Mr. Linder has collected road signs, spent fuel cans and other fistfuls of cultural bric-a-brac, blasted by firearms and plunk-crazy citizens, creating an archival litany of ordinance-perforated stuff he often repainted or simply left “as is.” However viewed, it was a consistent artistic obsession that I liked to see and, often, hear about.
  His latest discovery—its edgy lore described by Mr. Linder and associates—seemed to be the ultimate roadside cherry.
It was a 1965 Ford Mustang, harangued by gunshots and time, splintered away in the dust as a desert rat made its living hanging on inside the carriage of the lost automobile like a remora clinging to a shark.
  I was really looking forward to this object as I walked down Third Street, San Francisco, toward Gallery 1616. And when I entered the gallery, there it was—a visceral moment I had expected the previous storytelling to dilute. My only curiosity came upon seeing the deep, white paint job Linder and folk had arranged for the Geisha-faced auto. My personal vision was the Schwinn sparkle blue suggested by the driver’s seat and blue-on-white motif circling the car of the other work hung in the show (a budget decision?). But once I digested that, the shredded sides of the chassis from various calibers and shotgun blasts made up the kind of hand-lacerating coral reef surface that many cars sitting on ocean floors create to this day. Shot-up and sunken American automobiles are the last few decades’ "new coral reefs." Fish just love ‘em, I’m told. Should I suggest that Charles Linder and his New Coral Reefer Band will be performing all month at Gallery 1616?
  Naw. But almost.
  Mustangs are notorious for their front end suspension problems—as we admire them, restored and passing down the street, we are usually beset by the sound of their front ends making squeaky squeaky as they hump on by. In the case of this Mustang, the problem is either intensified or nullified, depending upon your point-of-view—being undriveable, Mr. Linder’s Mustang needn’t worry about its front end mobility. As a kind of nobility, its new servants will make fair passage of this carriage when needed. (“It was a small load; we did it by hand.”)
  A nice pay-off arrives when Rat (Fink) shows up in the trunk (where else) of the car, held in a small plastic display box, his eyes still glassy and intact just like the garroted Mob victims stuffed in many a trunk from Western desert to New Jersey turnpike. The presence of the rat tells a story from the grave—the once wild Mustang was the habitat of the rat who now ends up finking on both the automobile and the artist. The dead have tales to tell even if their tails are gone.
  No longer is the Mustang a wild habitat, a coral reef. Human hands have dragged it out of the desert with a coroner’s care, cleaning it up, baking, painting and installing it in a gallery’s setting. Now it's an artifact. Art, in fact. So is the rat. And, I might add, the archival impression of the chassis number 5R07T 52699 / 3038 01. (You can look it up: http://www.classicmustang.com/decoding_part_numbers.htm). As Linder notes, one may be able to determine the original owner of the vehicle by tracing its VIN or vehicle identification number. Who owned it and how did the blanched carcass of a once running Mustang end up still in the hot sun? We know that the Spanish left the mustang of the hooved kind off to the side of the desert road, but who abandoned this one-time cherry? Was it stolen by Indians or did it just plain conk out?
  Linder is both mobster and artist here, a kind of Clark Gable in “The Misfits,” finding his way to redemption by processing this wild mustang to his advantage. It's not pretty, but it ultimately is.

Alas, Linder can’t leave a good ride alone. After the Gallery 16 show—and after humping himself down and back to Miami Basel 2006—Mr. Linder mounted the pretty vehicle once more to ride it back to the location he found it: in the desert near Weldon, California, exact GPS coordinates available to the discerning collector for a price.
  While limited-edition before-and-after digital prints of the automobile are available, the real artifact is, in the artist’s mind, located precisely at the non-point that the collector-adventurer buys into the journey to the location of the mustang. As Mr. Linder confirms, “it's in a safe, climate-controlled storage in the desert for the rest of eternity.” Any questions regarding the archival quality of the piece can be put to rest right there. Bring a pistol.
  As a gesture of gratitude to the desert species whom he displaced during the course of the project, the trunk of the car was loaded with sunflower seeds and bird food. Rat Fink, therefore, is remembered with a small, nutritive trust fund. As the ocean slowly laps its way into Weldon a century or two from now, fish as well will be rewarded when they discover Ford Motor Company’s well-designed contribution to the world’s great coral reefs. Until then, a small campfire can be lit and a fine bottle of bubbly sampled by art’s supporters the moment they arrive, the GPS is turned off and the camera turned on collector and object. “Smile. Say cheese,” as the sound of a whinny is heard just over the rise.
  Or was that the creak of a front end?

—John Graham
   San Francisco, 2007

RELATED LINKS

Classic Mustangs, Decoding Parts