This article began as an interview between Rirkrit Tiravanija and Landon Wilson after an unfortunate crash on US-9. An introduction from the editors of Terminal Beach offers a narrativized account of these very real events.

On a familiar, white morning in late February, Landon rushed toward the Poughkeepsie train station, brushing past mountains of fresh snow. He may have been driving just five miles over the speed limit, but this was only with hopes of making the 12:01pm Metro-North train to New York City. What was at first a routine exit off the Mid-Hudson Bridge and merge onto US-9—a highway familiar to all upstate drivers for the fearsome multi-lane traffic—soon led to Landon standing face-to-face with Rirkrit Tiravanija’s busted Jaguar, which he had been dutifully charged with car-sitting for the past eight months.

The wrecked 2001 Jaguar XJ8, 2026.

A deep, stomach-pitted fear immediately washed over Landon. Crashing your boss’ car would strike terror in anyone living paycheck-to-paycheck, but especially a graduate student who knows all-too-well the absurdist reality that the crashed car in question may also function as a specialized work of art: cars being a lesser-known cornerstone of Tiravanija’s long-held social practice. Landon knew this from experience, having spent the last year working as part of the artist’s studio, where he routinely researched the ever-so-thin lines between mundane object and artwork.

Following routine insurance procedure, on yet another frightfully crisp morning two weeks after Landon’s upstate accident, Rirkrit called in from his warm New York City studio to deliberate the looming logistics of this object: to send or not to send their jointly beloved Viking off to the Valhalla of total-loss determination. The pair had to decide whether to file the claim under art or auto insurance, if not both, or worse, neither.

Rirkrit’s incorporation of cars into his practice began not as a grand art-world scheme, but as a pretty simple solution to a logistical problem: borrowing other people’s vehicles in exchange for promising to make the process into a work of art (one might say, art as a means of getting a free ride). After years of offering his cars to other friends, lending Landon his Jaguar was hardly unprecedented under the guise of his larger practice.

Rirkrit Tiravanija: There’s quite a few cars; that’s the whole point. What I had for a while was Burkhard [Riemschneider]’s car, which was like an old sub that I drove for a little bit. And then this Peugeot my then partner bought for me, and we drove around Europe, taking many, many people around. At one point I had a station wagon that belonged to the mother of my German assistant, so I bought it with Martin Klosterfelde, who was then my first car partner. He used it, and then Jan Buck made it into some artwork at some point. I’m not always anywhere. So when I'm not there, whoever needs the car; they use the car.

Since the early 90s, Rirkrit has applied the Buddhist principles of non-attachment (immateriality of art) to the car (both his own and others’). This early practice soon culminated in the longest art project and longest road trip he’d ever taken: In 1998, Rirkrit traveled with five art students, visiting from Thailand, across the United States, mentoring them about ‘American culture,’ and later attributing the piece untitled 1998 (on the road with jiew, jiew, jieb, sri, and moo) to the experience. The students were meant to offer their objective observations about America, performing a kind of reverse ethnography—thereby allowing Americans to see their country through the eyes of foreigners. The group traveled to iconic tourist destinations such as Disneyland, Death Valley, Graceland, and even Lincoln’s birthplace, as well as some key Land Art sites like Double Negative and Marfa, Texas. The road trip took an unexpected turn, however, when their camper van was totaled in a high-speed rear-end collision with a hit-and-run driver (the driver literally ran off into the desert night on foot).

A WhatsApp exchange between Landon and Rirkrit.

RT: We were on the road talking to all these different schools as we traveled, and then we would meet them when we arrived. People were tracking us, so everyone could follow where we were; it was a big project. There wasn’t a lot of money, so I bought a used mobile home rather than a new vehicle. It was a particular used model that we then took to Jorge [Pardo]’s studio in LA, where he and one of his assistants turned it into something really beautiful and really functional. There were six of us, and we all fit in it without any problem: we had a bathroom; we had a shower; we were all sleeping in it. It was like an ‘Eames Palace on wheels,’ everything was plywood, we had Eames furniture, and one of those chairs is actually here now. It has a little broken part because of the accident. When the accident happened, that chair flew into the wall and hit Jiew, my co‑pilot, in the head. It made a hole in his head. The chair is here because we never retrieved the rest of the car; it ended up in some junkyard in Tucson. First, Gavin retrieved it from ‘hell’ (from Tucson) and put it in a show, broken, at the Wexner [Center for the Arts]. But then, for some stupid reason, he didn’t bring it to New York. Either he couldn’t afford to bring it, or he couldn’t store it, so they sent it back to the junkyard in Tucson. I’m not sure; it may still be sitting there somewhere.

Landon Wilson: And then you wrecked it—or it got wrecked—in Arizona?

RT: It got wrecked in Arizona as we were climbing what’s called the Continental Divide. It’s basically a big hill you go up, but somehow it’s the Continental Divide. As we were slowly going up with our light blinking, a drunken person just ran up behind us and slammed into the back of the van. All the kids were sleeping in the back; by any standard, they would all have been dead. It was a strange miracle that they weren’t, and I think it was because of how the car was built. It was like an eggshell.

LW: It was like an Airstream or something, right?

RT: It wasn’t an Airstream: it was called an Ultra Van, which was built kind of like an airplane. Everything was beautiful, but the only problem was the very, stupid engine. If you were driving on a flat Californian highway, it was fine; but if you were going to climb [a hill], it was a problem. We were going to go to Utah, to the [Great] Salt Lake, to Spiral Jetty, and I realized, ‘Wow, we’ve got to climb that mountain and we can’t do it,’ so we didn’t go. We veered away and changed the schedule. The attempts and diversions became more interesting than the destination; diversions led us to other places and people.

LW: So the diversions were actually more interesting than reaching Spiral Jetty?

RT: Yes, because of the accident, we had to go from that van into a minivan. With the minivan, we were calling ahead to different people, and they’d say, “Okay, you can stay with us.” We went to Marfa, which usually didn’t let people stay there back then—they weren’t prepared for visitors. Because we didn’t have a place, they let us stay inside instead of turning us away. So we got to be in places we wouldn’t have been if we’d still had our original van. A bad thing turned into an even better thing.

LW: I read a quote from you about looking for the Michael Heizer [work] and never finding it—that wandering in the desert and not finding it was the beautiful part, almost spiritual. Do you feel like the wreck was similar, destabilizing the trip but making it better?

RT: It made it better, for sure. Because we didn’t have our own space or home, everyone had to open their homes to us. We had to stay with people; we’d show up, and they’d let us stay in their houses or wherever they had space. We moved every day, which meant we could be closer to people—we had dinner with them, cooked with them, instead of cooking on our own. It became a different trip, but a better one.

LW: Do you feel like the Ultra Van was already a work before you even left LA, given that you’d done projects in Lyon, Turin, and Zurich with friends?

RT: Yes. I would’ve wanted to keep it going. It was like the apartment, but on wheels—it could have been parked somewhere, and people could have stayed in it. It was in itself its own object. Because we actually lived in it, it collected memories of whoever was in it. People would say, “I remember being in that car when we did this or went there.” I was interested in that: it was a moving platform, a moving meeting space. You pile people into the car, and they all have to deal with each other; people who didn’t like each other had to sit next to each other.

LW: Did you ever try to do a similar trip again with students after 1998? This was before you were at Columbia, right?

RT: Yes, it was before Columbia. I was doing workshops here and there. In Spain, I spent a whole week on a class that was really “how not to do anything.” We went on bicycles north of Barcelona, in the countryside, and I was asked to do a workshop there. I said, “Okay, I’ll do a workshop on how not to do anything.” We bicycled through the countryside, found a shady tree, and read John Cage—things like Silence, more open texts where you don’t have to do anything.

LW: Do you think that ethos of “not doing anything” is how your cars become works? Even with the Hans Ackermann project, where you’re basically getting rides from friends, it wasn’t supposed to be anything—you’re doing nothing but documenting the journey. Is that what turns a regular car into something different for you? And is the [Fisker] Ocean car you’re driving now a work?

A local parking violation in upstate New York, found on the Jaguar XJS.

RT: No. Nothing is ever a work. That’s the point. Nothing is ever work; it’s only work in the minds of people who want it to be. Cooking is not work. So when you ask about thresholds, the threshold is in people’s minds, and different experiences create different thresholds. People who are very art‑oriented—art historians, for example—will have their own thresholds.

LW: How did you end up with the Land Rover and the Jaguar?

RT: I went on eBay and would randomly put down the minimum bid on cars I liked, and I kept winning them. With the Land Rover, I never paid more than $3,000. I really liked a particular Jaguar model; Liam [Gillick] used to drive a Jag back in London and would talk about it, and I liked the idea of the car. I randomly put the minimum bid on one and won it, so we had to go get it. It was in Louisiana. [My assistant] Glori went down there with her friend, made a whole trip to New Orleans, and the seller had taken very good care of the car, keeping it garaged. He was selling it only because he was getting an older Jaguar model and couldn’t park both. I thought it would be a crappy car because it was $3,000, but it wasn’t. She drove it up, and we parked it upstate; I mostly used it in summer and parked it in the barn over winter. Before that, I got the Land Rover the same way: I saw it on eBay, put down $3,000 (the minimum), and got it. It was in Philadelphia, so we drove down to Philly and brought it back up. It was a good car, not great, but the really great thing was finding a Land Rover garage guy upstate who was a Land Rover fanatic. He’d check it, fix what needed fixing, and it would cost about a hundred bucks. We fixed the Land Rover up hugely after a huge accident. It was fixable, and I had it repaired upstate by another crazy woman who took the car and fixed it; the whole side was like a sardine can.

LW: What happened in that accident?

RT: A guy pulled into the middle of an upstate highway. I was coming down at 55 miles an hour from a hill. He drove up from a dirt road and parked in the middle of the highway, talking to his neighbor who was picking up mail, without looking to see that I was coming. I braked but realized I’d crash into him, so I swerved to avoid him. His neighbor’s car—a trailer truck—was parked there, and a little metal piece sticking out from the back scraped the whole side of my car from front to back like a sardine can. I thought it was the end of the car, but the insurance gave me the total value ($5,000), which [could have] fixed the whole thing [to be like] new. Nobody died, nobody was injured; only the car was shredded.

LW: Was the Peugeot in 2010 the last time you made a work out of a car?

RT: Yeah.

LW: So you’ve made maybe three or four car works, maybe five—the two Peugeots, the Ultra Van, others.

RT: But the bicycle was really the first thing [first vehicle as social practice]. It was always a bit tongue‑in‑cheek, a kind of reverse colonialism. It was in Spain: I landed at Madrid airport and walked to the Reina Sofía, pushing the bike. The bike was just to carry stuff. In the PS1 show, the bike was lying on the floor with a big table on it, and seats bent around it; you couldn’t immediately tell it was a bike. For me, it was about crossing borders, walking over boundaries, returning—going back to “their” place. It’s not unlike taking something out of a museum case and reusing it; there’s a connection to retrieving things.

LW: Do you ever think you’ll ask the Nationalgalerie in Berlin for the Peugeot back? [Referencing untitled 2010 (all the days on the autobahn)]

Installation view, Rirkrit Tiravanija untitled 2010 (all the days on the autobahn), 2018, from the collection of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz.

RT: No. I would love to, but there’s another car sitting in Brussels or Antwerp. That’s the last car—a gray 1971 Peugeot sitting on blocks. So actually, this Peugeot [untitled 2018 (the icebox 204)] is the only car I didn’t share with anyone. I primarily used it, but you know, a lot of people were in that car. And when it came time to give it up, we decided to put it in a cube. It was for show. It’s from 2018. It was in the Glenstone show but not seen because it was the last piece: a sealed room with concrete brick walls, maybe sprayed with “Ne travaillez jamais,” and inside was the car with a refrigerator and beers. The idea was that on the last day of the show we’d break the wall down, go inside, and drink the beer. But because COVID came, we couldn’t go back to the museum, so the piece was never seen.

LW: And the car you showed at Gropius Bau [a 1969 Opel Commodore GS]?

RT: It was drivable, but we drained the oil and other fluids, and it’s probably frozen now as a car. If you don’t use a car, it gets stuck—rust, etc. It had come to a point where it was too old to keep going. You could change the engine or take it apart and clean it, but that’s not the point. There's a work that’s just a pair of boots, and another that’s just the luggage I used for ten years. These are remnants of travel, and I see the Opel in that same relationship: a vehicle of moving, and in that moving is memory.

LW: So you decide the threshold for each car—when it stops being a vehicle and becomes a memory?

The repaired 2001 Jaguar XJ8, 2026.

RT: Yes. It comes to a point where you say, “Okay, it should just become a memory.” Sometimes it’s functionally not working—if a wheel breaks or something happens, it needs to change. Interestingly, Danh Vō has made works with luggage; he put things into luggage and transported them. He asked for one of my suitcases and made a work with it. I find it interesting when things carry off into another dimension, another reason for being.

LW: I saw some of Danh’s Rimowa bags in Pinault’s collection—maybe one was yours. I was thinking about the Jaguar I drive now as a place where I spend 20 minutes a day with you, driving from Kingston to CCS [Bard] and back. The CDs in the car haven’t changed, so a 20‑minute drive is a whole Brahms [Three] Intermezzi [for Piano, op. 117], or something sexy on the way home. We’ve still never driven together in that car, but it holds the memory of our relationship; I get in, remember I need to text you. Tom [Eccles] told me he and Liam [Gillick] were jumping the Jag for a long time while Liam was driving it.

RT: Yes. He wasn’t driving it enough. In winter, you put a battery charger on it the whole time, and then when you start it up, you have to keep driving it. He didn’t drive it enough, so the battery dies. If you drove from the city to Montauk or Orient and back a few times, it would be fine, but he drove it there, parked it, and didn’t use it for three days. I expected him to know what to do because he had one. Also, they didn’t need to use it all the time; when I had it, I drove long distances, not just to the market and back.

LW: When I pulled up to Bard in September, Tom had a déjà vu moment seeing the car—remembering jumpstarting it and how much work it was. I couldn’t decide if it was more embarrassing that I was driving a car I couldn’t afford or that it belonged to you.

RT: You just have to say you’re car‑sitting—the car needs to be driven—like house‑sitting.

LW: That’s really what it is, car‑sitting. It’s been fun: mini road trips further upstate or into the city. There’s something beautiful about road trips. You can’t get that time back, looking straight ahead, listening to good music, just going. There’s a slowness, even though you’re traveling fast; that’s beautiful. Is that relationship between people in the car something you’re always trying to capture, like in Yokohama with the tiny minivan, in 2001 when you were cooking out of the back?

RT: If anything, in Yokohama it was just myself and one student, a young artist. We went on a fishing trip; it was more about meeting people on the way. If you look at Wim Wenders’ Alice in the Cities, one of the early films I watched as a young artist, there’s something about traveling, being in space and time, maybe not having a clear point—searching, returning, moving. The feeling of “keep going forward” was important to me. I love the idea of seeing; when I first said I was going to become a photojournalist, it was like that: “I’ll just go forward and encounter whatever I find on the way.” I grew up very nomadic, so you’re not attached to a place. Lately, I find myself asking, “Where do I really want the last bed I sleep in to be?”

LW: Do you really think like that? About the last bed?

RT: Yes. If I were going to the last bed, even if I kept moving forward, I’d still think, Maybe I want to sleep under that tree; that’s the place I want to go. You’re too young to think about that, but that’s my thought now. I’d say it’s the bed in Chiang Mai; I’d want to sleep there. I love this apartment here, but it’s transitory. It’s still very much home, but in the end it’s not my home. It will never be mine; it’s not something I have to own. Maybe if I were in the old upstate house I built, that would be different. But even compared to that, I’d rather go to the bed in Chiang Mai. Maybe that’s where I feel my nature, where I feel at ease to let things go. It’s like coming to the end of the road. I’ve always thought I would just sleep in the car. My preference would be to leave my luggage in the car, not take it out. If the world were a better place, I’d just drive everywhere, because you get to see.

Cooking from the back of Franz Ackermann’s 1969 Opel Commodore GS while making untitled 1995 (bon voyage monsieur Ackerman), somewhere between Berlin and Turin.

LW: So the car is just a vehicle for seeing, not about the car itself or attachment to place?

RT: Yes. It’s a vehicle. It could be a horse.

LW: You just want to get there in good time.

RT: Yes.

Landon, now feeling Rirkrit’s warmth, understands the car as something that brings their two disparate worlds into tight relation; an unexpected convergence of a shared experience of precarity, past, and present. When their conversation began, Landon couldn’t quite anticipate what Rirkrit was about to say, not for lack of trying: “No, it's just an Ultravan”; “nothing is ever art.” But now, having tenderly discussed where they’d like to die, Landon came to a new, perfect understanding of what his boss meant. For, of course, the grave may as well be a horse; they’d each just like to get there in good time.