From: "Mary&Eric Murphy&Salstrand" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: Crash
Date: Sat, 23 Feb 2002 9:36:33 -0600


Glen,

Your posting reminded me of a comment that the critic/artist David Bachelor
(Minimalism/Chronophobia) made what I attended a lecture he gave last year.
He pointed out that there is very little representation of the car in
twentieth century art and that this seems somewhat strange, given its
omnipresence in contemporary society. It is not for nothing that hackneyed
political concepts like 'the information highway' and 'bridge to the
twenty-first century' are simply roadie metaphors.

Anyway, Bachelor did show a slide of a very bad Matisse depicting an
automobile (it was really very bad and I love Matisse!) and did give a
favorable nod to Andy Warhol who at least showed an faint awareness of such
things in his famous crash series.

However, Bachelor pointed out it wasn't until the minimalists came along
that the kind of polychromatic colors of the automobile began to be
represented in some fashion on their new fangled shiny boxes and
installation art.  Bachelor was very positive about this, making the
statement that art should reflect upon our contemporary urban experience
and not merely project an arcadian pastoral nostalgia for a landscape
devoid of highways.  

I found his talk very interesting because Bachelor seems to echo some of
the remarks Lyotard made on color in his book "The Inhuman".  I believe
there are definitely aspects of the sensibility Lyotard portrays in that
book that can be applied to the kinds of things you seem to be writing
about.

Also, I agree with you that in a similar way similar to artistic neglect,
the car has been passed over in social studies, and perhaps for similar
reasons. It is still too close for us to really be visible. The car as a
paradoxical instance of the American Sublime.

I am certainly interested in the car as a instant marker of status in
contemporary society.  You are what you drive. The car makes the man, the
women. The luxury car is a kind of gated community on wheels. A movable
beast.

It is curious the way the SUV has replaced the sports car in American
society as the money symbol has begun to replace the sex symbol among the
aging boomers. It is a triumph of conspicuous consumption - high gas usage,
safe as tank, and all-terrain capabilities which no one ever seems to
really use.  It is like a bad parody of Deleuze's concept of the nomad. 
Here it is a kind of fantasy of nomadism for the rich only. With my SUV and
Swiss Army Knife, I will be safe where ever I roam. 

What also interests me is the extent to which the car is an icon of
individualism, despite the fact it can only exist in the way it does
through massive public spending. The vaunted postwar car culture of America
would never have come into being if Eisenhower had not been committed to
building a vast interlocking highway network which he justified for
primarily military reasons.

Thus the car resembles a kind of sporting sky box on wheels - a product of
collectivist taxation for the purpose of individual ostentation and display.

I must confess that I still drive a 92 Toyota Tercel (ok, at least it is
red and a stick-shift!) primarily on weekends since I live in the city and
commute to work via train. So, I am very incompetent to understand the
subculture of the modified cars you describe. It reminds me of little of
that old reactionary Tory but excellent stylist Tom Wolfe, in the book that
first brought him to fame in the sixties, "The Kandy-Kolored
Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby".  Are you familiar at all with this text? 
It goes all the way back to the stoned age of the sixties and I haven't
looked at it in years, but I recall a few essays dealing with the South
Californian subculture of radically modified funny cars that were the Wow
on Wheels during their brief, but Day-Glo colored age.

Anyway, good luck with your fast, hot-wired writing and keep on trucking!

hot rod eric