Swiss-born photographer Robert
Frank crisscrossed the United States in 1955–56 documenting
the American landscape during the lull between World War II and the
social and cultural upheaval of the 1960s. Many of the gritty black-and-white
pictures in his influential book The Americans, published first
in Paris in 1958, show pockets of the country that missed out on postwar
affluence. His empathetic images reflect the loneliness and solitude
of the open road as well every-day life in small-town America. Having
emigrated to the U.S. in 1947, Frank furnished the ambivalent perspective
of an outsider who participated in two cultures at once.
The photorealist paintings of California artist Robert
Bechtle, which first appeared in the late 1960s, depict
scenes of the California middle-class transcribed from snapshots that
frequently include the car. In his dead-pan depictions, such as Agua
Caliente Nova, 1975, Bechtle diverged from the many artists before
him who saw the automobile as a new, exciting agent of cultural change.
Becthle shows it instead as a banal, inescapable object in suburban
landscapes washed out by intense sunlight.
Bechtle made this painting as a participant in a bicentennial project
funded by the U.S. Department of the Interior, which gave forty-five
painters a travel allowance and an honorarium to explore the country;
the resulting works were featured in the nationally traveling exhibition
America 1976. Bechtle took off on a road trip with his family
and shot many slides of the area around Palm Springs, California, including
this image of his family and their car at Palm Canyon, on the Agua Caliente
Native American reservation. In this painting, Bechtle first extended
his subject matter beyond the car-as-still-life to the car in the context
of a greater landscape, which later became his primary interest.
New York–based artist Amy Stein
has driven cross-country photographing people who are isolated and beleaguered.
Her series on stranded motorists began after she saw the heart-wrenching
images of people trapped on rooftops in New Orleans during Hurricane
Katrina. Overcoming a learned fear, particularly prevalent in women,
she stopped to lend assistance to needy travelers, and captured on film
the extreme isolation of stranded motorists. Stein describes the images
as often “rushed, tense and awkward,” in keeping with the
effects of distress, powerful even in circumstances of relatively minor
inconvenience.1 Stein has also photographed
a graveyard for cars submerged during Hurricane Katrina. The stacked,
flattened, multicolored hulks at the side of a road are a reminder of
the association of cars with disaster, and an expression of Stein’s
empathetic response.
Danish artist Jens Haaning
remarks on the role of taxicabs in countries’ absorption of new
immigrants. Haaning has placed small vinyl stickers showing the flags
of all the native countries of the company’s employees in the
fleet of the AAA Yellow Cab Company in the greater Scottsdale / Phoenix
area. The drivers are from Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Ethiopia,
Germany, Greece, Indian, Iraq, Iran, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Lebanon,
Mexico, Nigeria, the Philippines, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania, the
Russian Federation, Somalia, Spain, Turkey, Vietnam, the United Kingdom
and Native American nations. The diversity of the list reflects the
reality that much of the U.S. labor force comes from outside the country,
particularly taxi drivers, farm and construction workers and restaurant
personnel. This phenomenon occurs elsewhere as well––Haaning
first executed this project in Denmark, whose cabdrivers, he discovered,
came from countries ranging from Afghanistan to the United States.
Cabs provide personal mobility in a quasi-public form. Unlike planes,
buses, trains, ships and other scheduled and routed modes of transportation,
a cab makes possible an independent arc of movement. Like the cab drivers
themselves, taxis move through established paths of social exchange
and connect disparate parts of a region. Haaning’s work is likewise
mobile and public, bypassing the traditional art economy to address
social issues. Within the rancorous international debate on immigration,
his simple act of identification suggests that the global exchange of
citizens has always been part of the economics of trade and the shaping
of hybrid national identities.
Over the past five years, Liz Cohen
has been converting an East German Trabant into an El Camino, the über-muscle car of the 1970s. The car was purchased in Berlin by Akademie Schloss Solitude and shipped to the United States while Cohen was in Stuttgart for a residency.
Cohen, (whose parents are from Colombia), began photographing
Latino car culture while living in San Francisco. She has shifted from
a passive documenter of lowrider subculture to an active participant.
Cohen has taught herself the craft of car customization, under the tutelage
of the crew at the high-end Elwood Body Shop in south Scottsdale, where
she has set up her “studio.” The car of Cohen’s current
project BODYWORK mirrors the conflation of cultures in her
background by admixing elements from historical lowriders and communist-era
Trabants. The artist adds a layer of feminist critique to her examination
of the male-dominated car culture by building up her own body, functioning
as model, spokesperson and creator of her own car.
In addition to presenting Cohen's car for just the second time (previously shown in Stockholm), SMoCA is collaborating
with the Scottsdale Public Art Program on a lowrider car and bike show
(complete with vendors and music) on March 20, 2008, on the Scottsdale Civic Center Mall,
adjacent to the Museum.
A performance by Turkish artist Ahmet Ögüt's,
Someone Else’s Car, 2005, inflects humor into the transformation
of two private cars into public-service vehicles. In low-tech slide
projections, we see the artist stealthily applying vinyl and cardboard
to two ordinary automobiles in a parking lot. Through the flick of a
wrist, he makes a white compact into a police car and a small red two-door
into one of the most pervasive features of Istanbul’s landscape:
the public taxi. Ögüt’s, pairing of a symbol of the
state with a symbol of free movement is pointed, given Turkey’s
pivotal role in the cultural struggle between the East and West.
Ögüt is more politically explicit in Light Armoured,
2006, a cartoon-like video animation showing an unmarked Humvee being
pelted, ineffectively, by one rock at a time. While stoning is not allowed
in the contemporary world as a punishment for social trangressions,
Ögüt may be commenting on the inadequacy of traditional responses
to the military might represented by the Humvee.
Mexican-born artist Margarita Cabrera,
who lives in El Paso, Texas, strikes a humorous note in her sculpture
Hummer, 2006. Her work recalls Claes Oldenburg’s soft
objects of the 1960s, which mocked muscular, masculine postwar sculpture.
Cabrera has attached a few components from a real Humvee onto a sewn
vinyl replica to exaggerate the schism between hard and soft. Hummer
is part of a series of works she created to commemorate a furtive road
trip common in the southwest—that completed by immigrants crossing
illegally into the United States. Along with her ineffectual Humvee,
Cabrera made backpacks for parents and children escaping north, as well
as a few potted cacti. The loose threads that dangle from the Humvee
refer to the activity of women in factories along the Mexico / U.S.
border, where they are paid menial wages to provide the American market
with cheap goods.
Working under the name The Atlas Group, Walid
Raad addresses the politics of social interactions, historical
knowledge and cultural memory and thus examines complex social and political
events. Over the past ten years, Raad has been researching the causes
and effects of car bombs during the civil war in Lebanon, conducted,
with intermittent cease-fires, from 1975 to 1991. The use of car bombs
in Lebanon presages the prevalence of this very effective weapon in
Iraq, the car being so ubiquitous as to be virtually impossible to control.
Under the name of an invented historian, Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, Raad created
notebooks that detail the date, time and impact of car bombs across
Beirut, accompanied by collaged pictures of the make and model of each
car employed. These notebooks serve as “agents of memory”
for a country whose ancient social connections have been slowly destroyed.2
Cars, once our friends, became indiscriminate killers. While Raad explores
issues of philosophical significance––the rebuilding of
social memory––he achieves this through the examination
of cars’ adaptation for nefarious purposes.
Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck
is known for videos and installations that depict the desolate urban
landscape of contemporary life. Representing a slight departure, Border,
2001, more specifically concerns human smuggling in Europe. Op de Beeck
brought to the piece the poetic sensibility reflected in his images
of empty crossroads at night or vacated merry-go-rounds. His earlier
works speak to the human capacity for invention, while Border
recognizes the negative side of this inventiveness.
Against a dark screen, voices speak of a yearning for the freedom of
the landscape. Initially, this could be interpreted as a meditation
on the tragedy of loss of sight. Then an X-ray image slowly comes into
focus, a giant tractor-trailer outlined in ghostly white. In the center
of the truck’s floor, the rounded forms of living, breathing cargo
can be divined. Humans have enslaved and smuggled one another across
borders for millennia: in North America, the American southwest is a
primary site for this activity. Through the recorded voices, Op de Beeck
gives the migrants a lyrical, if invisible, dignity.
Austrian artist Erwin Wurm’s
series of “fat” objects and people plays on the literal
and metaphoric meanings of things. As a sculptor, his first concern
is with mass and volume in space, and he is particularly interested
in forms that are nontraditional, sometimes even anthropomorphic. His
performative gesture of padding people with layers of clothing implies
external manipulation by an outside force. His series of fat cars, however,
addresses other issues. Fat Car, 2000, presents a doughy, fleshy
vehicle of indistinct make parked on a shrinelike pedestal. Wurm takes
car customization to an absurd level to subvert our preconception of
cars as aesthetically pleasing, sleek and fleet. His car is slightly
repulsive, arousing our disgust at seeing flesh where it doesn’t
belong. The association between obesity and the car might suggest that
over-reliance on the car may have contributed to a national health crisis.
In the most contemplative work in the show, Belgian artist David
Claerbout’s American Car, 2004, draws subtle
parallels between the physical phenomenon of the “persistence
of vision,” which helped scientists invent film, and our natural
human desire to create narrative connections where none exist. He also
correlates the technical capacity of video with the primary function
of a car: mobility. American Car features two screens. In one,
we see two hulking male figures in the front seat of a car, looking
to their left. They do not speak. Paired with this scene is a distant
shot of their 1970s muscle car, inexplicably parked in a meadow that
slopes down and away from the camera. The surrounding landscape is oddly
silent. A rain has just ended; we hear water dripping off of tree limbs
onto the grass, a songbird celebrates the end of the shower. There is
a sense of impending danger in the work, created by the conditioning
of commercial film and television.
Like Claerbout’s previous works, American Car exploits
the natural impulse of humans to stitch together disconnected images
and events to arrive at a continuity of meaning. Claerbout also uses
nostalgia; in this work he has adopted the motifs of 1970s anti-heroic
films like Steven Spielberg’s unsettling Duel (1971),
not to create a linear storyboard but to reference a time when cars
were at the apogee of their representation in popular culture.3
The opinions herein are those of the author and do not reflect the position of the Scottsdale Cultural Council or SMoCA.
Marilu Knode,
Guest Curator, Associate Director/Head of Research, F.A.R.
(Future Arts Research) at Arizona State University.
Notes
1. Amy Stein, e-mail communication, June 20, 2007.
Notes in author’s files.
2. Britta Schmitz, “Not a Search for Truth,”
in The Atlas Group (1989–2004): A Project by Walid Raad
(Berlin: Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof-Museum für Gegenwart,
2007), 43.
3. See Peter Wollen and Joe Kerr, eds., Autopia:
Cars and Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2002).
