Exhibitions
We Make The Cars And The Cars Make Us
Vanessa McRae
LIFE IS OFTEN described as a journey, so it's not surprising that rites of passage are often tied to the possession of a car. Most of us remember our first car as fondly as our first pet or first kiss. We can remember its name, its colour and the hum of its engine as if we parked it around the corner just minutes ago.
The car is liberty and identity. It allows us to go places, physically and psychologically. It has shaped life throughout the 20th century, yet it was only in post-war America that the car developed its mass appeal and mythic status and became more than just a means to get from A to B. As Detroit turned out gas-guzzlers whose futuristic lines expressed a new optimism, a consumer dream, cars became both a ubiquitous commodity and a mark of individuality. The car co-evolved with other aspects of Fordist consumer society. They were not only necessary for the new suburban lifestyle, cars made the suburbs possible. The car also became a means of escape: in hitting the road one found freedom. When we speak of the car, we are not just referring to a machine, but to an ensemble of values and opportunities, a way of life. Supercharged showcases twelve Australian artists whose work considers how the car has shaped us and how it expresses us. The works in the exhibition present our relationship to the car from different perspectives: as an icon and a relic; a commodity and artefact; as a dominant technology but also a near obsolete one.
ONCE UPON A time you could go cruising in your V8 from drive-in movies to drive-through dining. 'Blockies' and 'parking' were the order of the day, and there was always someone at the fuel pump to serve you. All your needs could be met in the car. You could meet a potential partner, date and consummate the relationship in your car.
Brand recognition and loyalty were important. In Australia you were either a Ford or Holden person. In the 1970s brand allegiance was epitomised by the rivalry between racing legends Peter Brock (Brocky) for Holden and Allan Moffatt for Ford. Roderick Bunter's paintings of vintage Holdens and Fords recall this time, nostalgically returning us to an era before fluctuating fuel prices and global warming. Like car magazine centrefolds, Bunter's works allow us to marvel at our preferred 'dream machine' in all its glory. Bunter superimposes his cars onto patterns (classic custom-paint flame patterns and tyre tracks) and adds in decal-like logos (a generic alpine graphic, suggesting 'getting high'; a pint of beer; and the cliched 1950s comic character 'Uncle Bob'), as if to imply a system of aligned cultural-consumer values.
While Bunter's works recall 1950s and 1960s Australia, a culture based on the bush, beach and backyard, Martin Mischkulnig's photographs provide a portrait of today's auto-exhibitionist, operating in a global era. Mischkulnig's documentary photo-series Hatchback Heroes finds Sydney hoons 'show'n'shining' – parading their cars for all to see. It gives an insight into contemporary Australian car culture where the once mandatory shiny chrome, speed stripes and flames have been superseded by fuel injection, turbo-chargers, DBs, and L.E.D.s. Today's street machines are smaller and lighter. Typically Japanese manufactured, these cars are known as 'Rice Rockets'.1 Their owners are peacocks on the prowl, and the cars amplify and idealise their libidinal energies. One Mischkulnig image features a proud owner, his personalised number plate labelling him 'MR SHOW'. Another, The Hatchback, lifts the hatch to reveal a fetishised flesh-pink interior with in-built speakers. We see male passengers within, on their mobile phones, perhaps setting up dates. Oddly, or not so oddly, this male space is coded as deeply female. Mischkulnig's gynaecological view is like some perverse riposte to feminist artist Judy Chicago. We don't need Derrida to deconstruct this image.
Daniel Wallwork's painting is informed by his day-job in the automotive industry. He is spray-painter by trade. A devotee of auto-technology, he uses materials such as zincanneal, two pack paint and chrome to create sublime surfaces. His Rebadged paintings are a hybrid of minimalism and pop, high and low. They may owe something to the Los Angeles Finish Fetish artists of the 1960s, like biker Billy Al Bengston and John McCracken, who revelled in high-tech materials (plastics, resins, fibreglass) and industrial finishes. Wallwork's Rebadged series pays homage to the generational aesthetics of the modified car, referring to successive stylistic changes that only another car aficionado would appreciate. Custom signals the development of custom car culture and hot-rods of the 1950s, the futuristic designs, raised lines and art deco edges. Muscle suggests the high-powered Monaros, Chargers and GHTOs of the 1960s and 1970s with their speed stripes, flames and pin-striping. Turbo takes us to the modern turbo-charged street machine, where decals and custom duco are embellishments of choice.
Patricia Piccinini is also well versed in the aesthetics of the car surface. Her 'autoerotic' Car Nuggets and Panel Works seductively mimic the qualities of custom car finishes. However, her work Radial moves behind the reflective surface to suggest a new stage in the evolution of the car. In this work a biomorphic creature – recalling H.R. Geiger's Alien – appears to be growing out of the tread of a generic black car tyre. Is it road kill that has morphed into the tyre, or has it been spawned by the tyre itself? Is this a cautionary glimpse of the future direction that our autopian society may take us, a mix of organics and mechanics, of genetic engineering? Has customising gone too far?
THE ICONIC STATUS of the car is well captured in cinema. In many ways the development of cinema parallels that of the car. Ford had its production line, Hollywood its studio system. If the car is a flying carpet, transporting us to new places, films are a form of virtual travel. They allow stationary audiences to enjoy thrills and spills. Many post-war American films revolved around cars, youth culture and rebellion. Hollywood perfected the 'road movie' genre, updating Homer's Odyssey for the automobile age.
Australia's film industry offers some parallels. Many Australian car films focus on the vastness, isolation and tyrannical distances of the landscape and the emergence – or demise – of the individual within it. For example, The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), Mad Max (1979), Priscilla Queen Of The Desert (1994) and Wolf Creek (2005). Tracey Moffatt draws on this mythology in her photo-narrative Up In The Sky. It reads like a series of film stills. The action is set on the edge of a half-real half-imagined Australian outback, a bleak frontier populated by missionaries, misfits, madmen and mercenaries. Up In The Sky conjures up a post-industrial landscape, like that of Mad Max1, where the 'world is seen as a non-stop demolition derby, as gangs of motorised savages rove their desert wastes, bereft of speech, thought, hopes or dreams, dedicated only to the brutal realities of speed and violence'.2 Three of Moffatt's images suggest a post-apocalyptic world where masculine women stand over wrecked cars with sledge hammers. It's hard to know if they are responsible for the carnage or are cleaning up the mess. Are they helpful panel-beaters, pirates or vultures?
In cars, people feel protected from the outside world. The car's body is metal skin, personal armour, and the greatest fear is to break down in the middle of nowhere. In two Moffatt images, a man crawls back and forth across a bitumen highway in front of his four wheel drive, clearly distraught. We view him as if we are driving towards him and are faced with a moral dilemma: to help or drive on.
GAINING INDEPENDENCE AND becoming an adult are linked to driving. Getting your licence is a defining moment: a rite of passage. But since the 1950s cars have also been associated with loose morals and 'the invention of the teenager'. Cars – your own, or borrowed from the olds – could rocket you away from parental control. The car became a portable bedroom, giving 'cruising'and 'parking'salacious overtones. This aspect of the car has been romanticised in films like American Graffiti (1973) and Australia's own Puberty Blues (1981). Bill Henson puts a spin on this idea. His staged-but-gritty photographs capture nocturnal youth activities. They show young men and women hanging out in parked cars, beyond city limits, away from their parents' judgement, but flaunting themselves before ours. Shot at dusk, the youths seem caught in a moral twilight. It's not clear exactly what is going on, but they seem to be involved in intense interaction with one another and themselves; sex hangs in the air. Henson's photographs recall the qualities of David Lynch films, particularly his road movie Lost Highway (1997), where events spin into depravity and the moral compass falters.
The association of cars with reckless youth and casual sex continues in Scott Redford's work. I Love You With My Ford / 1 Car, 4 Doors, 4 Times, Forever suggests would-be notches on someone's bedpost. He dresses upholstered car door panels from a 1970s Ford with images of pin-up pretty boys stripped-to-the-waist. The images have been torn from Pavement magazine. The work recalls teenagers' bedroom walls, adorned with images of things they want, people they would have, people they would be. The boys' bodies rhyme with the lines and textures of the grubby vinyl-and-carpet panels. Redford's nostalgic sentimental shrines also incorporate graffiti tags, personal snapshots and toy-versions of men's clothes, bought from a scrapbooking shop. Redford combines the macho grunt of fast cars and texta graffiti with the feminine tenderness of Pavement's girlie-boys and doll-play.
There is a similar conflation of the car's and the lover's bodies in Louise Paramor's Classic Shazzy collages. She sources her racy-girl-and-flashy-car images from girlie calendars found in garages and other male haunts. Paramor enjoys the blatant sexuality of the classic grease monkey fantasy of fast women and faster cars. She uses a paint-by-numbers approach to translate the photos into lurid collages. It goes without saying that in her source images women are merely framing devices, the car being the real sex object. The woman and the sports car are presented as analogous, with matching pert curves: her bust mirrored in the 'front end' of the car. Girl and car aspire to have the perfect chassis and to 'handle well'. They are at once feminine and phallic, badges of male power. Paramor plays on this, making woman and car mirror and melt into one another, mirage-like.
ASSOCIATED WITH FREEDOM and restriction, cars are a mixed message. Nothing is quite as regulated as driving. And for many young men, breaking the law is the essence of driving pleasure. When boys get behind a wheel, they turn into thrillseekers. They are the worst culprits when it comes to speeding, drink-driving, and general motor mayhem. A live-fast-die-young devil-may-care attitude prevails. No one wants to insure them. Testosterone mixed with burning rubber and petrol fumes is perfume to them.
Rev-heads have great set pieces to show off the power of their machines and their driving prowess. They do burnouts, doughnuts and hand-breakies causing their tyres to vaporise in clouds of smoke to the rapturous applause of their peers. These days police will confiscate cars if they catch their drivers attempting such stunts. However every year Canberra enjoys Summernats, a pageant for hot-rods, street machines and 'sleepers', where this activity is legitimised and commodified as a spectacle. Ben Morieson's video Burnout 2004 – Overhead combines such events and fine art. A car performs choreographed manoeuvres under instructions from the artist for an enthusiastic audience. It is filmed from above, from a camera suspended from a cherrypicker. From this godly vantage point we can appreciate burnouts and doughnuts as drawing and the ability of the driver to control what is essentially out of control. For Morieson, the car becomes like the long-haired brush of the Zen calligrapher.
J. G. Ballard explains: 'the car as we know it now is on its way out. To a large degree I deplore its passing, for as a basically old fashioned machine it enshrines a basically old fashioned idea – freedom. In terms of pollution, noise, and human life the price of freedom may be high, but perhaps the car, by the very muddle and congestion it causes, may be holding back the remorseless spread of the regimented, electronic society.'3 As the bitumen highway gives way to the information superhighway, real world experience is superseded by simulation. Morieson suggests this in his interactive arcade video game Burnout 2001 – Part II: The Game, where we can pursue road warrior fantasies in a virtual environment. Morieson's Burnout works confirm Ballard's observation, first showing the sublimation of the car-rebel urge into a spectator sport played out in a sanctioned environment and robbed of risk, and second its transformation into an arcade game.
Photographer Anne Zahalka observes something similar in her Leisureland series, which shows how we have developed a distanced spectator-relationship to the car. One photograph presents a stadium crowd watching Robosaurus, a massive mechanical monster, chomping through car wrecks. Other images feature motor shows, with car enthusiasts enjoying museum-like car displays, and massive game arcades, where kids fancy themselves rally drivers (with driving and cinema becoming further conflated).
TIM RYAN'S PSYCHEDELIC video Crash Media takes our 'rubber neck' voyeuristic compulsions to a sublime extreme. Compiled footage of car crashes from television shows and movies is slowed down to a meditative snail's pace with added special effects. These give the footage a decidedly Monet quality with enlarged pixels becoming like brushstrokes and exaggerated colour: saccharine hues of blue, pink and purple. As the cars deform and disintegrate so too do their images, as if the video technology itself was malfunctioning. At times we are unsure of what we are looking at, the only hint is a soundtrack of screeching rubber and splintering metal. (They say that in a crash time slows down and you have a drug-like euphoria as adrenaline courses through your body.) There is something terribly appropriate about Ryan's entrancing aestheticisation of disaster. We have a secret pleasure in watching car crashes, in witnessing the thrilling and spectacular destruction of man and machine. That's why so many movies expend their budgets on pushing cars off cliffs or blowing them up and why you can buy video compilations of great car crashes.
Cars are killing us. Even if you are not hit by them, their pollution certainly cramps your style. Sadie Chandler's beguilingly cute installation Drive places a graphic wall-painting of a gothic hearse alongside video animations of more desirable Mustangs, sports cars and limos. The images evoke old cult TV shows like the Dukes of Hazzard and The Munsters, and the line-graphic-style recalls old-fashioned car ads. Drive reminds us that the hearse will provide our last ride. Chandler is interested in our conflict: loving the freedom of car travel and hating the consequences of congestion and pollution. After living on Sydney's Parramatta Road, a transport corridor also zoned residential, for a decade, Chandler came to resent cars. She filmed speeding polluting juggernauts and sent countless emails to the council urging that residents be evacuated because of the unbearably high levels of urban traffic and pollution. Chandler is acutely aware of the environmental and social costs of our unwavering commitment to cars. Nevertheless, she lovingly traces their beautiful lines for her protest art.
IN THE PAST many of life's milestones have involved cars: getting your licence, your first car, and your first sexual experiences. Will these continue to be rites of passage in this century? A sense of nostalgia pervades Supercharged as the car is superseded by new technologies and new ways of defining our physical and psychological boundaries. The idea that the car will free us is now contradicted by the interminable commute, the rising cost of oil, and a recognition that cars contribute to global warming. These days the car is the locus of conflicting desires. Yet, as Supercharged reminds us, it still holds massive charismatic power.
1. Clinton Walker Golden Miles: Sex, Speed And The Australian Muscle Car Lothian Books, Melbourne, 2005, p164.
2. J.G. Ballard A User's Guide To The Millennium: Essay And Reviews Picador, New York, 1996, p22.
3. Ibid, p266.
[Image: Bill Henson]
Road Test
Glen Fuller
Learning how to cross the road is part of growing up. It involves learning two things. The first is the technique, which is normally learnt through supervised practice. The catchy look-both-ways song sticks in your head, so you remember the technique 'be-fore you cross the road'. The second is that it is important. Learning to cross the road isn't like learning how to write a sentence or do multiplication. When you learn how to cross the road, you also learn its importance. Like the catchy tune, this importance sticks to you, in your body, shaping your thoughts before you think, and you never-ever forget it.
'Crossing the road'is not about cars. It is called crossing the road, not dodging the cars. OK, I admit, they did make that video game involving a nimble frog that was more dodging than crossing: Frogger. And of course crossing the road is about cars, but only as constituent elements of what sociologist John Urry calls the 'system of automobility'.1 Automobility isn't just about cars. It requires car + road + a whole range of attendant technologies which together form a system. We become functioning elements of this system to avoid the fate of the frog. Squashed. Game over. Like in magazines, where cars are road tested and put through their paces by adult adolescents, as a child you are put through your paces by the lesson of the road. Think of it as your first road test, and one of the first rites of passage from child to independence. Your elders will assess your road craft before granting you the freedom to become a BMX bandit.
It is essential to stake out the importance of this 'importance'. There are all the other elements of the system of automobility, which you learn how to relate to, with and against. These snowball around the 'importance' you learnt with the catchy tune. We stitch the functioning dynamics of the system of automobility into our lives. Everything from petrol stations, to automated car-washers, to workshops, to massive concrete ribbon motorways, to the registration and licensing authorities, to the carpark down at Macca's late on a Thursday night. How we live this 'importance' shapes the enduring roles we play in car culture as consumers, enthusiasts, thieves, statistics, and so on. At a certain point it ceases to simply be 'important', and gains a qualitative consistency. We recognise this when we single out the car and it becomes a charismatic technology.
In the 1960s, Tom Wolfe was worried about 'Detroit'routinising the charisma of the car into a 'ball of polyethylene'.2 Wolfe was drawing on Max Weber's conception of charisma, which was primarily concerned with charismatic forms of leadership and organisation. The connection to car culture is not immediately obvious. Weber's relevance is in his discussion of what happens in charismatic modes of organisation with no leaders. He argues that 'the followers or disciples may set up norms for recruitment, in particular involving training or tests of eligibility. Charisma can only be "awakened" and "tested"; not "learned" or "taught".'3 Authority as such is built into the culture of the organisation as a series of tests and awakenings.
That is how the car's charisma works, through tests; a multiplicity of road tests. Indeed, it is not the car alone that tests us, but all the other attendant technologies in the socio-technical bureaucracy of automobility. They ask questions of us, for which we readily provide answers. Do we belong to an automobilised world? What does the car allow us to do? We are tested everyday by the snowballed importance of the system of automobility. Guess what? We pass these tests with flying colours. We are reassured by the car's easy charisma; we are a success, because we pass the tests. Of course, Weber got the notion of charisma from early Christian cults. But don't let this concern you. You're one of us...
Wolfe was anxious that the charismatic dimension of car culture was becoming diluted or lost because of capitalist machinery. In fact, the opposite occurred. Post-industrial capitalism relies on the passion and enthusiasm that constitutes 'charisma'. 'Charisma' becomes a resource to be cultivated, protected and mined like a cross between a mineral deposit and agricultural crop. Anne Zahalka's image of a motor show captures the activity happening literally and metaphorically under the signs of 'passion' and 'obsession'. The motor show is an institution that works in concert with the motoring press to rhythmically punctuate the imagination of a car buying public. 'Passion'and 'obsession' are awakened and tested. These tests rely on a synergy between an automotive industry and media industry that routinely service and exploit the charisma. To indicate how this functions in Australia I shall shift gears and focus on two events of 1984. The first, the Button Plan, was one of the opening salvos in the process of globalisation. The second was the 'V8 til '98'campaign and has a near-mythical status amongst car aficionados. These events need to be read together or with other events in a similar fashion. One captures how material conditions of the automotive industry were transformed, and the other captures how a given market can be consolidated around a particular immaterial charismatic relation.
The Button Plan heralds the first wave of contemporary globalisation in Australia. As part of the Hawke government's 'economic rationalist' tendencies (comparable to US neoliberalism), Labor Minister John Button introduced a plan to reduce 'iron lung'protectionist tariffs on automotive imports. This forced the once-protected local industry to become globally competitive. The historical link between national identity and a country's automotive industry is also reflected in the era of globalisation with transformations to the Australian automotive market. We were exposed to what is called 'badge engineering'; a situation when the same basic car is sold by two separate manufacturers under different names. By the mid-1990s manufacturers found it was cheaper to import fully built vehicles from overseas, which radically changed the composition of the market again. The Button Plan also triggered some investment into Australia as the site for the production of 'global'vehicles or parts. The automotive industry is still adjusting today. Except now it is feeling the ultimate after-effects of globalisation with the threat of closure for many of the component part manufacturers.
The 'V8 til '98' media-led consumer campaign sought to generate support to save the locally produced Holden V8. The campaign largely bucked the globalising 'economic rationalist'trend, as it was organised around retaining an out-of-date 1960s technology that was only sold in any quantity in the very small Australian market. Indeed, it seems a bit weird to think of the 'V8 til '98' campaign as the first Australian mass anti-globalisation movement. Support for the idea was born of a panic about the possibility of there being no local V8s. Ford stopped producing the Cleveland V8 in 1982 due to environmental and fuel consumption worries. There was also an abject 'Aussie'ethnocentricity regarding 'foreign'built vehicles (witness the flagrantly racist 'Brian Plankkman' columns in Street Machine at the time). In particular, the Holden V8 was under threat because of the phasing out of leaded petrol, which would require the engine be expensively re-engineered. Involved in initiating the movement were iconic race car driver Peter Brock, founding Street Machine editor Geoff Paradise, and 'GMH Marketing heavy' Ross McKenzie.4
Media got behind the movement, including newspapers, radio and magazines. 15,000 people participated in a letter writing campaign to Holden. As Paradise noted in the pages of Street Machine, the logic of keeping the V8 was understood as a pay-off for the cancellation of the ancient Holden Straight 6 and its replacement by a Nissan-sourced motor. These industry machinations locate the decision regarding the V8 in the context of the globalised post-Button Plan automotive industry. But couldn't the entire campaign merely have been a public relations exercise in drumming up support for the V8 before the new model Commodore was released? That is, an attempt to cultivate and exploit the charisma of the V8? One rumour is that money for the bumper stickers (that played a crucial role in the campaign's public visibility) came from a Holden PR department. Regardless, if Holden had not kept producing the V8 until 1999, Ford would not have been pressured to reintroduce the V8 in the early 1990s, and we would not have HSV Commodores and GT Falcons today. Part of the mythopoeia of Australia's masculine V8 car culture would've been radically different. By retaining the V8, Holden ensured the further generations of largely young men would be charismatically 'awakened' by the V8. But what about the non-enthusiast road-user population? They may not be interested in V8s, yet automobility's charismatic dimension also plays an important part.
The first thing I was taught when learning to drive a manual was feeling for the clutch's friction point. The friction point is the threshold at which the parts of the clutch-plate are coupled with enough force to make the car move or, for your mates' amusement, stall. Easy does it. You have incorporated the act of driving into your body when you drive without remembering, but without forgetting, the friction point. When we gain full independence and perhaps receive our licence we fully incorporate the system of automobility into our lives like the friction point of a clutch. This doesn't happen only once. There is a friction point or threshold, which engages and disengages us as part of an automobilised society. You might describe it as when the rubber hits the road, but there is far more than road and rubber in contact. Here we find the location of a more subtle vein of charisma coursing through automobility and correlative multiplicity of road tests, one that isn't as obvious as the loud and purposeful presence of actual enthusiast cars. When we are young we are so happy to finally have a license, to have the freedom from home, from school, from work, from the rigid timetable and sad looking people of public transport. All too soon this becomes a kind of hassle and utterly banal. It is incorporated into the bodies of road-users as a necessary immediacy. Engage, disengage. Engage, disengage. Engage, disengage. Hundreds of times a day. All at the threshold-event where the various elements of the system of automobility are articulated together: the friction point of automobilisation.
Here is the location of a critical juncture in automobility and culture. Anthropologists have been very interested in investigating the introduction of the 'Toyota' into remote indigenous communities. Beyond possible governmental applications of such research, it is a classic case of studying the practices of the Other to understand the Us. They want to investigate this transformative friction point of automobilisation before it is forgotten, so we can better understand how we all have become automobilised. Art serves a critical and celebratory function in a similar way. It helps us to not only understand car culture, but good art forces us to experience and think about the more complex issues of how we have become automobilised and the constitutive burden of 'charisma'. It forces us to remember the importance, the snowballing momentum, and that point of friction at which we incorporate the car into our bodies and stitch the system of automobility into the fabric of our lives.
1. John Urry Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities For The Twenty-First Century Routledge, London, 2000, pp57-8.
2. Tom Wolfe The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby Bantam Books, New York, 1965, p102.
3. Max Weber The Theory Of Social And Economic Organisation Free Press, New York, 1947, p367.
4. Geoff Paradise 'V8s til '98' Street Machine October-November 1984, p38.
[Image: Wolf Creek]