The Damaged Porsche 911s of Daniel Arsham, or How Destroying Cars Is Art

Daniel Arsham is an artist from New York who combines sculpture with architecture and performance art to create his vision of the future. One of his most famous works is the Future Relics line, which includes stuff from everyday life re-worked to render his idea of what the future might look like.

This extended introduction probably got you thinking about what this has to do with cars or related content. Arsham, it turns out, has a soft spot for Porches and, with help from the automaker itself, has been able to create a one-off work that is art and a still-drivable car at the same time.

The Daniel Arsham Crystal Eroded Porsche 911 or the Porsche 911 Art Car was created in late 2019 and revealed that same year at Selfridges in London, UK. It was a joint effort between Arsham, the engineers at Porsche (and the Porsche hot-shots, who offered him a brand new car) and designer store Selfridges.

It is, to put it simply, a damaged Porsche: its exterior body is riddled with gaping holes, from which crystals and rocks peek out. It looks as if it’s being slowly eaten away by something, with only the first signs of the damage showing, and it’s perhaps more impressive because it suggests more serious deterioration isn’t visible yet. Continuing down the same over-simplified path, this is a brand-new Porsche 992 that Arsham took a hammer to on purpose, in the name of art.

The idea is revolting to a Porsche purist for a couple of reasons: first of all, Porsche cars are art in and of themselves, so there’s no need to start drilling holes in the bodywork for that. Secondly, Arsham was offered a 2020 Porsche 922 when it hadn’t even been released yet, which means he was destroying it when customers were still waiting for deliveries on theirs. In the name of art.

The idea behind the project, which is now on display at the Chengdu Motor Show in China, after the Selfridges exhibit ended its run in January 2020, actually helps with making sense of this apparent wanton destruction. The story goes, the year is 3020 and the world has changed. For a bit more context, know that Arsham is also fascinated by the idea of volcano eruptions and how objects would look like if they were uncovered years after they were swallowed up by burning lava.

This Porsche Art Car could be one of these objects, or it could have been through the apocalypse and survived. The idea is that it took massive damage to the exterior body but remains as elegant, timeless and enduring as the day it left the factory. And it works just as well.

Porsche put it this way: “The 911 art car presents what it looked like when it was discovered in 3020. After thousands of years, although many parts of the car body were damaged by erosion, it was still able to drive with undiminished performance. This fits perfectly with the 911’s identity as a Timeless Machine, both for design and performance.”

Despite the damage and the erosion happening on the body of the car, the 911 is still very much drivable. Arsham made no modifications to the cabin or the engine, because, he explained before the big reveal, he’d always wanted to make a piece of art that was still, at the end of the day, a fully functional car.

“I’ve always wanted to create a functional car that was degraded and eroded, but was still drivable. We took the entire thing apart and recast all of the sections… trying to piece that whole thing back together was crazy,” he explained.

He’d done Porsches before this Art Car, but never actual vehicles: Arsham’s massive catalog includes at least a couple of Porsche crystal sculptures. His most famous is also the most recent, also part of the Future Relics line: the Ash & Pyrite Eroded Porsche. It’s also a 911 that had been caught in a volcanic eruption, and it stands out as a visually striking study into how Arsham plays with, and ultimately erases, the boundaries between fiction and reality.

The Ash & Pyrite Porsche was on display at the Hong Kong K11 Musea until May 2020, and went under the hammer the next month. You can see it in all its damaged beauty in the gallery above.

Arsham’s work has been on display anywhere from New York to Miami in the U.S., to Greece, France and the UK. He is a widely well-esteemed and highly-valued artist, without a doubt. Whether his art is able to move car enthusiasts – and especially Porsche purists – in the same way as it does regular people, that’s a question you can probably answer best.