Edmondson to make pinewood derby for Invitational

This arrived in the email yesterday - it's a fanciful pinewood derby car made by the artist Greg Edmondson. He calls the contraption "Blinky Palermo," after the German painter who, in turn, adopted the moniker from an American gangster and prizefighting promoter.

Greg made the toy car on a lark for Pierogi a Go-Go, a 15th birthday party for the influential Brooklyn gallery, where artists will race (on a 60-foot track) little cars, powered by gravity alone, that they have crafted from a kit consisting of one 6 x 2 x 3 inch block of wood, two axles and four wheels.

Greg is really getting into the spirit of event - serious artists making childish cars that will be exhibited in a gallery in New York after they have been raced. He even made a poster for the occasion.

This poster is purposely crude in execution. As a tour of Greg's website will make clear, he is more than capable of making art that is beautiful and impressive when that is what he sets out to do. Here, he is just goofing around.

I really want Greg to contribute to the Poetry Scores Art Invitational this year, as he did last year, but I also know he is pretty fed up with the St. Louis art scene (again) and not exactly itching to show in this town.

So last night, as we drank beers at The Tap Room and he yarned about Blinky Palermo - "it may not be the fastest car, but it does glow in the dark!" - it hit me that the poem we are scoring this year, The Sydney Highrise Variations by Les Murray, begins atop a bridge, in a car .

So we're sitting over our sick beloved engine
atop a great building of the double century
on the summit that exhilarates cars, the concrete vault on its thousands
of tonnes of height, far above the tidal turnaround.

"I know!" I told Greg. "Make another car for the Invitational! Make another pinewood derby car! You can title it 'sick beloved engine' or 'exhilarates cars'" (work for our Invitational needs to be inspired by the poem and titled using a verbatim quote from it).

"I like 'sick beloved engine,'" Greg said.

"Yeah! And then your piece will be at the very beginning of the show!" (we display the pieces based on where in the flow of the poem the language used for their titles appears). "We can even rig up some kind of a track and take it for a spin!"

By the end of the night, I actually had talked him into it!

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More in this series

Dana Smith confirms for 2009 Art Invitational
Colin Michael Shaw confirms for 2009 Art Invitational