Amarillo and Cadillac Ranch: Art You Can Spray-Paint

Ten Cadillac automobiles are buried nose-first in the Texas Panhandle at a precise angle, matching, by the artist's intention, the angle of the slope of the Great Pyramid of Giza. They have been there since nineteen seventy-four, when a San Francisco art collective called Ant Farm buried them in a wheat field belonging to a helium-fortune millionaire named Stanley Marsh the Third, who commissioned the piece and described it as a monument to the rise and fall of the tail fin. The Cadillacs span the years from nineteen forty-nine to nineteen sixty-three, the entire arc of the tail fin era in American automotive design.

They are buried on Route Sixty-Six, now paralleled by Interstate Forty, west of Amarillo. They have been painted over tens of thousands of times. The original color is gone.

The current color is whatever someone sprayed last weekend. Visitors are invited to bring spray paint. This is the instruction.

It is among the most successful pieces of participatory public art in the country, partly because the instruction is simple and fun and partly because it is about Cadillacs, which is about America in a way that requires no interpretation. Amarillo processes approximately thirty percent of the United States beef supply. The Pantex Plant, about twenty miles northeast of the city, assembled and disassembled the majority of the country's nuclear warhead stockpile for decades.

Palo Duro Canyon, one of the largest canyons in the United States, is thirty miles to the south and visible to almost no one who drives this highway. The Texas Panhandle is what it looks like from Interstate Forty: flat, agricultural, enormous sky. What it is underneath requires getting off the highway.