The opportunity to drive across the US was too good to pass up, says Toby Amies. And he can't wait to do it again.
Last summer I visited a rather large drive-through art gallery called "The United States of America". It was my job to co-present a documentary television series, Artland USA. The idea was to combine the great American road trip with a celebration of American art and architecture.
The plan was simple but ambitious – to drive from Key West in Florida, the southernmost point in the continental US, to Anchorage in Alaska. En route, we would visit the most fascinating and extraordinary buildings, art galleries, installations and artists we could find. Overall it took about three months and we covered nearly 10,000 miles. It was a huge undertaking, and what started as a job soon became a way of life.
I'd fallen in love with the idea of a road trip across North America in my twenties, thanks to a predictable but potent list of artists who celebrated American life on the move: Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac, David Lynch, Tom Waits, Robert Frank, Edward Hopper and a host of others created a longing in me for the promise and terror of the wide open highway.
They inspired me to participate in one of America's most powerful myths: one made up of adventure, freedom, mystery, natural beauty, manifest destiny and some spectacularly fattening foods.
It's a myth that you can join easily: just fly to America, hire a car and point it in the direction of... almost anywhere. But you do need to have a mission. Like Jake and Elwood Blues of Blues Brothers fame, a divine one is ideal, but it can just as easily be gastronomic or historical.
A mission is essential but an itinerary is a fun-killer. You need freedom to roam on the roads not be strait-jacketed by a schedule – on Artland we had to work to a tight timetable that meant tearing ourselves from some locations long before it seemed right: New Orleans, still in ruins after Hurricane Katrina, was for us just a (sad) day. We were shocked to see buses touring the disaster zones, before realising we ourselves were in a bus, touring the disaster zone...
What you drive matters. Our principle vehicle for the trip was a giant RV (recreational vehicle) covered in Pollock-style paint splashes that looked great from the outside but severely restricted visibility.
The RV was also uncomfortable – go for a car with maximum visibility and comfort, and use the money saved by not renting an RV to stay somewhere where the air-conditioning works and you don't have to empty your own lavatory.
Our RV was unwieldy and hard to stop, but the greatest scourge of the trip after our limited time was the driver's friend but traveller's enemy: the sat-nav. Its mechanical expediency was the antithesis of our mission.
But the ugly little box that clung to the windscreen (further impeding our vision) was ruthlessly focused on times and distances, and it kept us imprisoned on the interstates when the best of the US is found away from its major roads. Put the sat-nav in the glove box, use a map so you can see where you're going and where you've been, and save the robot helper for getting you through the labyrinthine American cities.
As for how long to spend on your road trip, I'd work out how long you think you need and then add as many days as you can afford simply to wander. One experience I'll never forget, for example, is the time we wandered off our itinerary to steal a quick meal in Tupelo, Mississippi, Elvis's birthplace, made all the more delicious because we shouldn't have been there.
A road trip needn't be expensive, as motels and food in America can be had very cheaply and if it's visual culture you're after, most of the art and architecture we experienced was free. Thanks to a very active system of patronage and noblesse oblige, America is littered with giant public and privately-funded institutions all competing with each other for your attention.
Thus even the sleepiest midwestern city is likely to have a heavy-duty collection including Picassos, Rothkos, Monets, and Oldenbergs – sometimes it can seem as if they are completing a shopping list: for example, we came across slightly different versions of the same sculpture by one artist in three museums – but this was more than made up for by the wealth of unique intuitive or outsider art that is easily accessible all over the country.
Take Kansas for example. It has a reputation for gentle dullness and certainly, once you've got used to having a flat and infinite horizon in all directions, there is certain consistency to a drive through the state that can be a little wearisome after the first 300 miles or so, but it's full of the most wonderful creative works that cost us nothing to see except fuel, food and lodging.
The tiny, friendly college town of Lawrence (pop. 89,110) which was home to William Burroughs, has a Monet and a Manet in its Spencer Museum of Art. Then not that far from Lawrence, the even tinier town of Lucas is now a worldwide centre for self-taught arts and artists, thanks to it's world-famous Garden of Eden, with 30ft-high allegorical sculptures fashioned in concrete by S.P. Dinsmooor, who finished his auto-monument by building his own mausoleum containing a glass-fronted coffin.
Just a short skip across the state line into in Kansas City (technically in Missouri) we found one of the architectural marvels of the 21st century. What's more, you can wander in and around the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art's recently opened Bloch Building for free. By day this beautiful space is lit inside by opaque glass walls and at night, lit from inside those walls, it resembles a ghost building and is like nothing I'd seen before. That's not all we did in Kansas, but it's the kind of thing you can find in any state if you give yourself the room to wander.
I'm writing this in Queenstown, New Zealand, where you can buy a T-shirt that has the town's name with a ticked box next to it, and the word "done" under it. After thousands of miles, and all that I saw and marvelled at on the road, I still don't feel that I have "done" the American road trip. I have merely done one, and that makes me want to do another.
'Artland USA', Sundays at 7pm on Sky Arts.
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