Back-to-front Ford Ranger takes truck nuts to a new level at Frieze Los Angeles

Drivers bound for Frieze Los Angeles will be startled if they come bumper to bumper with an unusual red truck bearing New York plates. “Most people notice the truck nuts first before they realise it’s a backwards car,” says Nicky Godoff, the driver of the artist Pippa Garner’s Haulin’ Ass! (2023). The body of the road-ready and street-legal 2003 Ford Ranger has been rotated and reconfigured so that the truck appears to be moving backwards. Godoff describes himself as a member of “Pippa’s pit crew”, a group of six people who built Haulin’ Ass! based on Garner’s directions in New York last year for the organisation Art Omi. Haulin’ Ass! is Garner’s second reversed vehicular creation, following 1974’s Backwards Car, a 1959 Chevy that she drove over San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Both cars, like a lot of Garner’s work, play on social expectations, bodily transformation and “gender hacking”. (Garner has two other projects at Frieze this year, as well as a talk on 2 March at 3pm at the bookstore in Hauser & Wirth’s Arts District complex.) Haulin’ Ass!, an irreverent tribute to the car culture popularised in Los Angeles, will make circuits around Santa Monica every day during the fair, at noon and 4pm.