Car consciousness took deepest root on the West Coast, where most of the artists who address it as subject matter have lived. In my version of this art history, everything began with Ed Kienholtz – Back Seat Dodge ’38, 1964, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Before I was 18, this piece was a news story, thanks to its chicken-wire figures having no-rent oral sex. Get a room? Cars are cheaper. To see it, you had to be 18 or an art history student. Being neither, I didn’t qualify but remember thinking, any art the police don’t want you to see has to be worth seeing. It was the point that I began a switch from a primary interest in literature to a primary one in art.
(Click to enlarge images.)
By the early 1970s, J. G. Ballard had begun to think cars as a kind of death-in-life, the equivalent of the cursed ship in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
(From Testpattern)
Approximately 2 years before the publication of J.G. Ballard’s novel
CRASH! in 1973, filmmaker Harely Cokliss created his short film
“Towards Crash!” for the BBC which featured two parts: one based on
Ballard’s short story “The Atrocity Exhibition”; the other based on
Ballard’s then short story “Crash!”. He cast Ballard himself as both
narrator and lead alongside B-movie actress Gabrielle Drake. The short
captures a more empirical tone as it studies the binary systems of
structure and force, form and desire, the collisions of bodies as the
tools of a modern empire. The visual style seems almost stark compared
to David Cronenberg’s visual imagining of the material in his 1996
full-length feature CRASH, which dwelled more on the mutative synthesis
of man and machine/technology/society at the end of the (previous) century.
I’m
interested in the automobile as a narrative structure, as a scenario
that describes our real lives and our real fantasies. If every member
of the human race were to vanish overnight, I think it would be
possible to reconstitute almost every element of human psychology from
the design of a vehicle like this.
(Photo, New York Times. Dirk Skreber at Friedrich Petzel Gallery through June 27. Review, Ken Johnson: consumerist desire on a collision course with death (To read review, click through from here.)
J. G. Ballard, 1971:
As
a writer I feel I must try to understand the real meaning of a lot of
commonplace but tremendously complicated events. I’ve always been
fascinated by the complexity of movement when a woman gets out of a
car. Take a structure like a multi-story car park, one of the most
mysterious buildings ever built. Is it a model for some strange
psychological state, some kind of vision glimpsed within its bizarre
geometry?
Jonathan Schipper at Boiler through June 28.
Stephen Andrews, car crash, 2006, crayon rubbing on mylar, from Platform
J. G. Ballard, 1971
What
effect does using these (multi-story car parks) have on us? Are the
real myths of this century being written in terms of these huge
unnoticed structures?
Whiting Tennis, untitled model at Greg Kucera
J. G. Ballard, 1971
More
exactly, I think that new emotions and new feelings are being created,
that modern technology is beginning to reach into our dreams and change
our whole way of looking at things, and perceiving reality, that more
and more it is drawing us away from contemplating ourselves to
contemplating its world.
Justin Colt Beckman – road hard and hung up muddy.
Alice Wheeler, What Women See At Night
Matthew Day Jackson from The Violet Hour at the Henry, title after Beuys: I Like America and America Likes Me. His muscle car rides on skulls, an allusion to fossil fuel but lit with neon powered by solar panels on the roof. Jackson’s in New York but raised in the Northwest and Northwest in his bones.
Detail:
Hugo Ludeña
Evah Fan, Hiccup
Buddy Bunting
Valay Shende – Buddha Right, Marx Wrong
Detail:
Lee Bul, karaoke machine from Live Forever at the Henry Gallery:
Kathleen Henderson, Pickpocket:
Gonzalo Lebrija, Entre la vida y la muerte (blanco y negro), from Culture Monster:
Kenneth Baker, SF Chronicle, What is American art, a car perhaps?
Charles
Linder appears to think continually about the zero degree of art and
how to meander just this side of it. But a second question preoccupies
Linder: What makes American art American?At the center of his Gallery 16 show, facing “Take Me to the
Drive-In,” sits “Ghostang” (2006), a bullet-riddled 1965 Ford Mustang
body that Linder retrieved from the desert and powder-coated to
preserve it and revive it as an ambivalent object of nostalgia for auto
and gun fetishists.
As a monument, it
offers us symbolically the vanity of the gunslinger nation, in tatters.
“Ghostang” will remind some viewers of the radiant ’64 Chevy Malibu
that levitates at the end of “Repo Man.”
But it makes me think also of “The Master Chassis” (1969), the
legendary dragonfly-sleek car-as-sculpture built by former Berkeley
artist Don Potts. Both Potts’ vehicle and Linder’s might serve as
markers on a distinctly American cultural timeline.
(Shown here as he found it.)
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