A few years ago, San Francisco artist/art student/667 Shotwell member Liz Cohen started her art project, coverting a Trabbie into an El Camino, and now it looks like she’s a year from completion — but more importantly, sexy photos of her working on the lowrider/East German twostroke mashup are being sifted to the surface of the interwebs again. There seem to be a few new pics as well.
Webhistory: a Wired article from 2003, a Boing Boing post last year, and we blogged it on Fleshbot this time last year. Now she’s popped up on sexblo.gs after her recent photo show in France, with sexblo.gs liking to an extremely annoying Artnet article with pics, and I found this way, way better Phoenix New Times piece about Liz, her machine shop learning process and the nitty gritty about cramming two unrelated cars together. Also, another great gallery of pics here.
Why does the Artnet article irk me? As you all know, I’ve been working in a machine shop for the past ten years with a lot of other really amazing women, and a few of us are ultra-femmes. And particularly me — I’m a fetish model who enjoyes being feminine and sexualizing myself especially in relation to the machine/heavy industrial work I do. I don’t dumb myself down for it, and I’m not — as the Artnet article suggests for girls-in-the-shop-context — I’m not “crossing class lines in a kind of willed downward mobility, and conflating gender divisions, as she masters both male and female roles within a distinctly working class subculture.” What a pretentious bunch of dated bullshit! I’m not taking on a male role. I’m taking on *my* role. And I’m not afraid to go all the way with my machines; I can be honest and celebratory about my very female sexuality at the same time I work in the shop. While a sexy girl in the shop who *is capable and skilled* might blow the minds of some people, who then scramble to label her with with some higher-minded context — I’m here to tell ya, it needs no context, because there’s nothing wrong with thinking a girl is hot while respectfully asking her if she can show you how to drive the forklift.
Pushup bras and Carharts: I call myself a ‘tomboy femme’. Regressive trappings of sexuality, my ass. Literally.
* Note about the pic — you should never, ever weld in a bikini, unless you want some nasty arc-sunburn. Not that I would, uh, know…
