![]() ![]() Here, this dangerous and widely illegal practice brings together not only incommensurate automobile models, but the opposing ideologies that produced them: Cohen’s 'cut ‘n’ shut' is formed from a Cold War-era East German Trabant, and a Chevrolet Camino, the ultimate American muscle car. The car in the noted American artist Liz Cohen’s photograph Bodywork Roof is what mechanics call a 'cut ‘n’ shut', created by welding together the front and back halves of two written-off vehicles into a single, hybrid ride. It seems they’ve been cleansed, along with all their messiness and complexity, from this creepily immaculate American dream. Note the fact that not a single resident is pictured, here. What the artist gives us, then, is a deadpan, purposefully affectless vision of suburbia, in which a series of near-identical white boxes and boundaries – cars, houses, picket fences, road markings – contain and circumscribe human life. In interviews, Bechtle stated that his interest in such now-retro automobiles stemmed from the fact that they were “ordinary objects”, with a mundane existence outside the fantasies of “what advertisements showed and our imagination They were not antiques, and there was nothing glamorous or exotic about them”. This, though, was very far from the artist’s goal. ![]() Looked at today, his etching of a sparkling white ’64 Chrysler parked up in a spotless North Californian neighborhood might, for some, prompt feelings of nostalgia for a lost American past. Time to hit the road.Īlongside Richard Estes and Chuck Close, the American painter Robert Bechtle was one of the pioneers of 1960s Photorealism, a movement that both channeled – and developed a critique of – the ubiquity of the photographic image in late 20th-century visual culture. Automobiles, here, speak variously of escapes into the wilderness and of stultifying suburban conformity, of clashing ideologies and the things we notice – and neglect – on life’s long road trip. Given the complex role automobiles play in our lives, it makes sense they have inspired numerous great art works, among them Andy Warhol’s iconic silkscreen Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times (1964), Gustav Metzger’s prescient sculpture Mobbile (1970), in which a modified Citroën collected and stored its own deadly carbon emissions, and Roger Hiorns’ Untitled (2006), a BMW engine rendered inoperative by a flowering of glittering blue copper sulphate crystals.īelow, we gather together six artworks in which the car is the star. Against that we should balance not only the alienation inherent in travelling in the steel and glass hermit’s caves of our own personal vehicles, but also the environmental impact – put plainly, cars run on fossil fuels are costing us the Earth. Yes, they represent the freedom of the open road, and grant us the ability to choose our own traveling companions, even if the journeys we most regularly embark on are not Jack Kerouac-style adventures but trips to the mall and the daily school run. Over a century on, much of humanity has come to view cars as a mixed blessing. Reading the art theorist's ecstatic hymn to petrol power today, makes the average Jeremy Clarkson monologue sound like Greta Thunberg. Thus, he swept aside millennia of artistic tradition, and announced that the still-embryonic 20th-century would be characterized by a radical Modernity, with the car as its shiny, speeding emblem. In his 1909 Manifesto of Futurism, which outlined the aesthetic programme of the Italian art movement, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti proclaimed that “A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace”.
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