The car is one of the twentieth century’s most persistent symbols
of freedom, a modern-day Pegasus taking humans on a headlong rush into
the future. The car has allowed us to fly away from our troubles. Since
the automobile appeared on the landscape, artists have used it as both
object and subject to create and perpetuate a new set of modern myths.
Under every silver lining, however, there lurks a dark cloud. The ancient
story of the winged horse Pegasus, captured by Bellerophon to help him
accomplish many dangerous deeds but then lost due to the warrior’s
inflated ego, sounds a warning to the human race: reach too far and
you will fall. Cars have likewise posed dangers to a glittering future.
Artists in the first part of the twentieth century celebrated the role
of the automobile in shaping a utopian future. By mid-century, however,
following the devastation of World War II, artists were already depicting
the fraying of the myth, and by the early twenty-first century, many
see cars as villains in our daily dramas. Car
Culture touches on the current skepticism and outright
rejection of automobiles as metaphoric saviors. The investigation focuses
on the United States as perceived by artists from around the world,
suggesting how widespread the impact of the car has been. Cars exemplify
and serve the stereotypical American character—individualistic,
inventive, fast, neglectful of history in favor of the new—and
have also broadcast its shortcomings worldwide.
Although different forms of wheeled transport have existed throughout
time, the nineteenth century saw a flood of inventions that led to the
automobile. When American farmer Henry Ford put an internal combustion
engine into a vehicle and began its large-scale production in 1913–14,
he started a revolution. Like other revolutions, this one wrought irreversible
changes in the organization of society, reshaping the physical and social
landscape of countries throughout the world. The car democratized and
expanded the enterprise in ways whose meaning is still emerging.
For each upside of the motor vehicle, there is a downside. Altering
economies and politics, the car has exaggerated as well as eliminated
differences in social status, gender and race. The introduction of motorized
wheeled transport allowed for rapid and efficient commercial exchange
between the isolated farm and the dense city. While trucks made it possible
for farmers to send their produce to distant markets, however, they
contributed to the alienation of consumers from the land. Cars gave
young people the freedom to escape the demands of family structure,
yet introduced a threat to social mores. Automotive innovation created
spin-off industries, jobs and opportunities that provided social mobility,
while slowly eating away the resources of the earth. Cars permitted
the formerly homebound to see the world, while causing traffic accidents
that continue to kill increasing numbers each year. Cars afforded door-to-door
service that now threatens public transportation and maroons those who
for one reason or another do not own a vehicle. Family care is now mobile
and breadwinners are taken farther from the home for work.
In the 1920s, it became easier for the fortunate few to travel in America,
on account of improved car design, a surfaced road network and the support
of related industries that popped up. Drivers began to seize control
of public space. In the 1930s, cars became affordable for regular folks,
and the landscape continued to change—new roads were built, towns
were reshaped and new forms of architecture emerged. During World War
II the automobile industry saw a significant drop in production, but
it improved the efficiency of vehicles designed for the war effort.
Car manufacturing rebounded with a vengeance after the conflict ended,
the postwar products recalling bomber planes in their details and overall
design. The explosion of American strength and wealth in the 1950s increased
consumer confidence. Cars became essential to the American dream.
The effects of both consumer culture and the racial and economic segregation
that accompanied the accommodation of cars in urban renewal plans led
artists to rethink the automobile’s place in society. Contemporary
art began to address the issues of gender, age and race that emerged
during the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Artists began to appropriate
popular cultural products––from SoCal low riders to beach
bums––to assert their dissent from the cultural norms of
white, middleclass culture. A global gasoline crisis in the 1970s heightened
international tensions and dampened enthusiasm for big muscle cars.
The organization of the first Earth Day in 1970 reflected a widespread
recognition that the pollution from burning fossil fuels—largely
from cars—had to be addressed. During the globalization galvanized
in the 1980s by new technologies such as mobile phones and personal
computers, corporations moved overseas to obtain cheaper labor and sidestep
regulations at home, including those of the automotive industry. Simultaneously,
the American automobile industry declined in the face of Japanese competition.
The outsourcing of manufacturing continues to this day, and some of
the twenty-first century’s most intractable problems are centered
around the hunt for fossil fuels.
A site for the projection of dreams and desires, the automobile has
served as artistic muse since the late nineteenth century. In Europe
during this period, the car was glorified in music, literature and the
new medium of film. Since that time, works of art have traced the car’s
shifting role from local workhorse to global movie star, from engine
of economic change to driver of environmental degradation. Cars are
both vessels for metaphoric projection and literal killing machines.
The contemporary works of video, installation, photography and sculpture
in Car Culture are joined
by a selection of historical works to reflect and comment on the various
roles cars play in commerce. It would be impossible to catalogue all
the significant artworks of the past one hundred years that have celebrated––or
condemned—cars. In the first half of the twentieth century, cars
contributed to the utopian belief that cultural advancement could be
achieved in the new century through science. Like other machines, cars
could save lives, if not souls. They allowed artists, misfits and dreamers
to wander into new landscapes of promise and surprise. Italian Futurists
such as Umberto Boccioni painted scenes of cars churning up the age-old,
bucolic Italian landscape. Artists of the Russian avant-garde compared
the new human—one freed of the hierarchies and economies of the
past—to the car, a machine able to push society forward through
incessant work.
After World War II, the love affair with the car intensified, while
both the infatuation and the car itself were also critiqued. Many, particularly
Americans, loved their vehicles more than ever, customizing and fussing
over them. Others began to evaluate the negative effects of cars and
car culture, among them artists who began to tear way the veil of postwar
enthusiasm. For them, automobiles represented the divisions created
by the discordant economic and cultural needs of people around the world,
an inequality that was to lead to the practice of smuggling human beings
across borders in cars and trucks, themselves in the shadow of military
or security vehicles. This illegal migration permanently rent the social
fabric of many cultures.
Other crises have resulted from the burning of fossil fuels, a process
that literally fueled the extraordinary success of the industrialized
First World. To grab onto the material riches of the West, Third World
economies also consume fossil fuel at a furious rate, the volume accelerating
the physical degradation of the planet. The centripetal force of car
travel has flung the population out of crowded urban centers and has
caused uncontrolled sprawl; in China, cars are replacing bicycles as
the preferred mode of transport, even as cities are covered with a perpetual
fog of brown air.
The artworks that address the more negative elements of the car include
the tableau Back Seat Dodge ’38 (1964) by the late Los Angeles–based
artist Ed Kienholz caused a furor when first exhibited at the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art in 1966. The work—a ratty ruin of the eponymous
Dodge with the crudely rendered forms of a couple getting “close”
in the back seat—so offended the community that the museum nearly
closed in response to the outcry. Andy Warhol’s “disaster”
paintings of the early 1960s shocked the public because of the content
of the gritty, unflinching images of death and destruction, among them
car crashes. In 1974 conceptual performance artist Chris Burden “crucified”
himself on a Volkswagen to comment on the violence of the Vietnam era.
John Chamberlain’s sculptures of crushed car parts similarly evoke
a brooding on the destruction and physical violence found on the streets
of many American cities.
Although most of these artists worked in Los Angeles, the cliché
of L.A. as the ultimate car-plagued city is now tired. The most remote
areas of the globe suffer from the environmental impact of cars, even
if indirectly. The artists whose work is represented in Car
Culture continue the cultural critique, which will undoubtedly
take a new direction as the populace of the twenty-first century struggles
to undo the damage wrought during the twentieth. We appear to be on
the brink of a new way of perceiving the city and urban life—with
politicians finally joining activists to address global warming, ecological
sustainability and the imperative of breaking our dependence on fossil
fuels—and the car controls and embodies, to some degree, how we
respond to this new perception.
