Homemade, aggressively rinky-dink art and fashion were pretty cool. I used to go around in an old hand-me-down London Fog raincoat with the Flipper logo painted in day-glo tempera paint on the back. Some people used to make their own clothes. A lot of the aesthetic was trash- and refuse-related. None of this beautiful, polished, “reclaimed materials” vibe you see today.
There were a lot of “art cars” in San Francisco. It was not too unusual to see a car with a homemade paint job, say, done up in stripes, checks, or leopard spots; or one with toys or pieces of junk metal glued all over it. I remember one that was coated with thousands of sea shells, and another one covered with baby doll heads.
The junk aesthetic was a key part of SRL’s nightmarish constructions. Not only did they reuse scrap metal, litter, and garbage, they would sometimes use roadkill in their machines–literally dead animal carcasses.
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