Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art 9780292754041, 2013016700, 0292754043, 9781477302248, 1477302247

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Copyright © 2014 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2014 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-­7819 http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/rp-form ♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Terranova, Charissa N.  Automotive prosthetic : technological mediation and the car in conceptual art / by Charissa N. Terranova. — First edition.   pages  cm  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-0-292-75404-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Automobiles in art. 2. Conceptual art—Themes, motives. I. Title. N8217.A94T47 2014 743′.89629222—dc23 2013016700 doi:10.7560/754041

To Caroline, Camille, Mimi, and Sophia

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Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1

Chapter 1

Conceptual Car Art: Rethinking Conceptualism through Technology 27



Chapter 2

Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic: Photoconceptualism, the Car, and Urban Space 57



Chapter 3

The Nows of the Automotive Prosthetic: Moving Images, Time, and the Car 115



Chapter 4

Communication Space: Automotive Urbanism in Dan Graham’s Work 151



C h a p t e r 5 Hummer:

The Cultural Militarism of Art Based on the SUV 187

Chapter 6

c o n c lu s i o n

Richard Prince: The Fetish and Automotive Maleficium 227 The “Freedom” of Automotive Existence 265

Notes 279 Bibliography 307 Index 323

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P r e fac e

In writing about the genesis of this book, I might look deep into my past for the sources of influence and inspiration: to the wry collision of distinct forces that was growing up as part of a family of classical musicians in the capital of country music, Nashville, Tennessee; to being, like so many Americans, an automotive citizen for as far back as I can remember; or to my early graduate training as an art historian by scholars who viewed this discipline through the prism of landscape and architecture. Yet, the more resonant, even causal sources of this book are located in the shallows of deep memory, in the first years of my time in Dallas. I came to Dallas from Cambridge, Massachusetts, in January 2004 to teach contemporary art history at Southern Methodist University in what was then called the Division of Art History. After years traveling the edges of the intellectual universe on a ship called architectural theory, I was not so much happy to land as I was curious and open to explore yet again new terrains, the discipline of art history some eight years after my departure from it within a small liberal arts school in the heart of Texas. The constraints on my teaching were minimal and the collegiality high. I incorporated a fair bit of architectural theory in the form of structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction into the two-­semester survey of contemporary art of which I was in charge. And it is from the second semester of this yearly course that Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art emerged. What had started as a single lecture on conceptual art and language bifurcated, for there were, in my opinion, several photo-­text pieces that were simply not done justice by this rubric. So emerged two lectures on what was long ago a new kind of art: “Conceptualism I: Language and Semiotics” and “Conceptualism II: Architecture, Urbanism, and Landscape.” The second lecture became the engine of the book and, more precisely, Chapter 2. Seeing Marie-­Josée Jean’s sharply curated exhibition Road Runners in March 2009 at VOX, Center for the Contemporary Image in Montreal, marked another pivotal moment in the project. Jean’s exhibition brought together the fine-­arts populism of the Warner Brothers’ 1949 cartoon Fast and Furry-­ous, the stately, golden-­age conceptualism of works like Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), and new works by young artists, such as Kerry Tribe’s disparate yet recursive Near Miss (2005), a video

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installation unfolding around the reenactment of a car crash in a snowstorm. The exhibition was about the road but not the repercussions of uniting conceptual art and the car. While not recognizing or theorizing this union, Jean had put together an extremely smart exhibition in precisely the realm with which I was toying. In its first incarnation, the book was to be about the car and contemporary art; however, I found that too daunting a task. Contemporary art is far more amorphous and expansive a field than conceptual art, or so it seemed at the time. The experience of Jean’s show gave me the confidence to explore the reaches of this project, to write this book and develop the ideas about the automobile, conceptual art, and technology. And then there is Dallas, Texas, a city not prized for its love of intellectuals but porous and open enough to provide comfortable homes to more than a few. I would never have been able to write this book while living in a city other than Dallas, under the watchful eyes of certain of those inside the intellectual bubble—that is, a number (not all) of the people defining the parameters of the greater field of art and architectural history and theory, many of whom are located in the cities where I lived and institutions where I was trained. Liberating most of the time and painful on occasion, being here outside of the bubble, writing along the periphery, gave me the necessary space, autonomy, and simply put, distance from those who decide what is allowed and what is not allowed to complete Automotive Prosthetic.

x // Automotive Prosthetic

Ac k n o w l e d g m e n t s

The spatial remoteness of Dallas and Forth Worth coupled with their rich and singular contemporary art cultures created a perfect storm for creativity: a sense of being far away and up close at once, disconnected while absolutely connected in. I gratefully recognize the journalism venues seeded here with tendrils spreading outward—for which I eagerly wrote upon arrival and I continue to write today. Though none of the writings in this book appeared in these venues, the voice I tendered for it developed in the Dallas Observer, ArtLies, Glasstire.com, Dallas Morning News, THE Magazine, Sculpture Magazine, ARTnews, and Arts & Culture DFW. Cars + Highways + Unfettered Grounds + Contemporary Art = Book. My penchant for understanding and explaining art through the prism of contemporary landscapes goes back to my training in art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I am the writer and thinker that I am because of two innovative, open-­minded, and brilliant professors, my mentors from Chicago Mitchell Schwarzer and Peter Hales. I owe a debt of gratitude to my mentor at Harvard, K. Michael Hays, for believing in my sometimes spastic expression of talent and for teaching me the grave importance of utopian thinking. I would like to thank John Pomara for listening over the years and Rick Brettell for recognizing the importance of this project long ago. Thank you Adam Herring for inviting me to give a talk about the “automotive prosthetic” and “double aperture” at Southern Methodist University in 2006. Thank you to all the undergraduate and graduate students at Southern Methodist University and the University of Texas at Dallas for the inspiration and vibrant and continuing dialectic. Most important, I give thanks to Trent Straughan, my best friend and far more, and to the pride of women in my life, my mother, Caroline, and three sisters, Camille, Mimi, and Sophia, who give loving ballast and levity to life in general.

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Looking-­at versus Looking-­through: The Car and Art as the Semiotic Construction of Museums and Galleries

There are several recognized uses of the car in art originating from a variety of aesthetic and taste-­making cultures, such as the vernacular, film, customization, and industrial design. There are cars bedecked with odds and ends— buttons, plastic toys, and longhorns—which are the basis of the craft-­cum-­ outsider art known as “car art.” There is the bildungsroman coming-­of-­age sensibility of the road movie. There are “pimped out” cars, the BMW car art series, and the related category of lowriders. And then there is the car as a work of high automotive design unique unto itself. This book is about none of these automotive cultures. Instead, it offers an alternative reading of the car and art. In making this distinction, I find it helpful to describe two ways

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in which the car has been linked to art within the history of art and the automobile: in terms of looking-­at and looking-­through. In the list of well-­known car and art cultures given above, the combination of the car and art is best categorized as a matter of looking-­at. The car is, simply put, a thing. In art and art-­related objects where the car is a matter of looking-­at, the automobile functions as an object distinct from the body, the experience of which reinforces the static viewing practice of the work of art and conventional ideas of the subject-­viewer separated from object-­viewed. Here the car is invariably an object of delectation for its design and for driving and speed. By contrast, in works of art in which the car functions in terms of looking-­ through, the automobile functions as an apparatus—a prosthetic connected to the body and systems of infrastructure—through which to see and experience the world, both in motion on the highway and as a citizen interconnected to other citizens of the world. Here the car is fathomless. It is a mode of communication roving through a system of roads and within, as we will find, the culture of conceptual art. It is a fount of unforeseen phenomenological understanding and existential response from the body in movement. As this book will explore, the perceptual paradigm of looking-­through exists in works of conceptual art in which the car functions implicitly and explicitly as an attached prism-­like lens rather than a disparate object. The car and art from the perspective of looking-­through is related to the world, both literally, as one looks through the car to other objects in space, connecting eye and body to thing and place, and figuratively, as it is a shifting commodity locus within a global economy. In this position, I argue for a broad, thorny, yet open understanding of perception as it is rooted in aesthesis, looking that is optic and haptic at once and literally a concern of the “perceiving” body (to look to the Greek etymology of the word), as this body is in command at the steering wheel of a car. The steersman, or kybernetes, this driver is, at the same time, a thinking and active citizen forming opinions and judgments about the world while careening down the highway. She is the kybernetes in a cybernetic network, connecting road to car to urban landscape to fellow human to global political economy in a feedback loop where car, highway, and human body function like a biomechanical semiconductor. We begin by looking to curatorial exercises for evidence of the origin of this taxonomy, to exhibitions on the car and art at museums and galleries. These shows function as a dialectical barometer of sorts, at once a measurer and manufacturer of cultural norms. Because these exhibitions at the large city museums, which coalesce around the looking-­at paradigm, are oriented 2 // Automotive Prosthetic

to a mass audience, they are perhaps thus also powerful forces in the creation of the overarching semiotic structure within the art world, academic and otherwise, by which we understand the car and art together—and the car within art more precisely. The car-­centered exhibitions that have occurred in art museums and galleries over the last century set in relief this distinction, looking-­at versus looking-­through, not so much with the knife-­ edge exactitude of science but with an undeniable presence of difference. Scrutiny of the exhibitions that fall within these categories of the automobile in art reveals two vastly different epistemological and ontological takes on the machine-­human relationship. In car and art exhibitions formed around the rubric of looking-­at, the automobile is a technological commodity of value on the global market of consumer products. The car portends the freedom of consumer choice, economic status, unlimited open road, manifest destiny, liberal democratic freedom, and an understanding of beauty that comes together around formal delight. Though often more about industrial design than fine art, the car implies a conventional experience of the art object that epistemologically privileges the sense of vision over the roving body and its other senses. Such exhibits broaden and popularize the definition of “art” and, especially in recent times, expand the museum audience. The typical automobile show in a museum, particularly those focusing on the design of the car, tends to offer a means of populist education. These exhibits are premised on long-­ held notions of the work of art produced ex nihilo by the artist-­as-­genius or the object of industrial design as a matter of unfettered inspiration.1 There is rarely reference to the manufacturing order, Fordist or Just In Time, from which the car came. They do not account for the situatedness of automotive beauty, the ways in which it is the result of an interactive network of ongoing technological transformation, the development of infrastructure, global interaction and exchange, systems of mass manufacturing, or class hierarchy. In similar fashion, and by connection, they do not account for the complexities of aesthetic and perceptual mutation as it occurs around and as a result of the technologies of the car and road. The following study focuses on the latter: the aesthetic experience of motion and the car, which is communicated in a group of conceptual artworks. In keeping with its reputation as a bellwether of the fine arts, the Museum of Modern Art in New York was the first to place the automobile within the white-­walled precincts of the gallery. Since its inception in 1929 MoMA has presented six exhibits on the car, all of which subscribe to the looking-­ Introduction \\ 3

at paradigm: Eight Automobiles (1951), Ten Automobiles (1953), Around the Automobile: Paintings, Sculpture, Assemblages, Prints (1965), The Racing Car: Toward a Rational Automobile (1966), A Classic Car: Cisitalia GT 1946 (1972), and Different Roads: Automobiles for the Next Century (1999).2 The exhibition Roads at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1961, curated by Bernard Rudofsky and Arthur Drexler, was an exception. Similar to the exhibitions to come in the new millennium, it contextualized the automobile as a midwife of perception.3 Made up of large-­scale photographs of roads, cloverleaf intersections, and infrastructure, and of drawings of roadways by artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Frank Lloyd Wright, the exhibit considered the road synthetically—or ecologically—as one filament among many in the weave of a technologized fabric of everyday life. The Highway is a related exhibition that originated at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in 1970 that was curated by Stephen S. Prokopoff. The show focused on works of art, mostly paintings and photographs, in which the automobile or road appeared. Although the exhibition catalog includes a short analytical essay by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, the show was not inflected by the sociotheoretical side of architecture, as was MoMA’s Roads. This exhibition tended to focus on the beauty of the open road and the car, conceptualized as inert objects. The car, though a matter of fine art, once again is a matter of looking-­at rather than looking-­through. This object-­oriented looking-­at direction of the automobile in art has by far been predominant, with exhibitions occurring in major institutions in cities such as Montreal, Los Angeles, Boston, Atlanta, and Hiratsuka City, Japan. Such exhibits include Automobile and Culture (1984) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Moving Beauty (1995) at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Auto-­Nom: The Car in Contemporary Art at the Düsseldorf NRW-­Forum Kultur und Wirtschaft (2003), Speed, Style, and Beauty: Cars from the Ralph Lauren Collection (2005) at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, BMW Art Cars (2009) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Car Design History—Nissan Passion and Beauty of Function (2009) at the Hiratsuka Museum of Art in Japan, and The Allure of the Automobile (2010) at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.4 For the most part, museums have yet to recognize the full richness of the car within art, as it is the force of a critical dialectics that interrogates modes of being-­in-­the-­world, from daily movement, perceptual mores, and city form to national politics, actions on a global forum, and war. As the car became a standard form of movement and transportation in the developed 4 // Automotive Prosthetic

world during the mid-­twentieth century, so did it increasingly become a means of communication within art. While the art that is at the center of this study—the car and art based on looking-­through—is not reducible to statistics on the car and highway from mid–last century, the following data illuminate a technological backdrop conducive to related changes in the human-­machine interface and human perceptual experience. This information is foundational to a cybernetic ecology of forces that includes the car, art, human perception, the highway, and automotive urbanism. I use the word “cybernetic” here as it refers to a holistic system the fluctuations of which occur through a feedback loop of self-­maintained balance. The automobile within art as such brings to bear a similar aesthetic experience: one does not simply look at the work of art for meaning but looks through the prism of technology within art, entering into a network of political and economic relations. The car, highway, and urban sprawl created a new mode of experiencing space and time distilled in the logic of the “automotive prosthetic,” and the related technique of looking-­through the car. A pivotal moment in this evolution of the human-­machine interface and its correlative perceptual norms is the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956, passed under President Eisenhower. The U.S. emerged from WWII as the top automotive manufacturer. Today there are 46,726 miles of highways and a new urban condition called urban sprawl. By 1965, the mass motorization of the country was largely complete and the United States was a car nation. By 1960, 34 in 100 Americans owned cars, compared with 11 in France, 9 in West Germany, 11 in Great Britain, and 3 in Italy. Those numbers continued to increase in the next decade, with Europe catching up. By 1970, 43 in every 100 Americans owned a car, compared to 24 in France, 23 in West Germany, 21 in Great Britain, and 19 in Italy.5 Current statistics point to an American identity bound to the automobile, with 85 percent of personal travel taking place by the automobile.6 Americans eat up the road, consuming 3 trillion miles a year, 4 million miles of roads, and 180 billion gallons of fuel.7 Idylls of the “American Dream” include car ownership and free, leisurely movement along public, tax-­subsidized highways. The “road” to success in the automobile industry, though, was rapid but not necessarily smooth. In the early stages of the machine’s history, American dominance of the automobile market was taken for granted. In the 1920s, the U.S. was well on its way to becoming a car nation, with total automobile sales numbering almost 4.5 million in 1929. The Great Depression proved to be a stumbling Introduction \\ 5

block for expansion of the industry, with that number dropping to 1.1 million just four years later. There are many makes, models, and brands from this time—Peerless, Pierce-­Arrow, Dusenberg, Franklin, Marmon, and Stutz— that disappeared during the 1930s economic downturn. Those names are lost to the annals of history. Generations of car drivers will never know that Willy’s was once the third largest American carmaker. Willy’s went bankrupt in 1933.8 Even in the 1950s, with the country’s economy stable and far removed from the depression, the automotive industry was still working out the chinks. One need only invoke the Ford Motor Company’s poorly designed “Edsel” to evoke past obstacles.9 By 1965, things had changed and the course of the automotive industry in the U.S. was smooth rolling. We find the automotive industry once again in trouble as a repercussion of the 2008 market crash of the global marketplace. After government bailouts, the “big three”—GM, Ford, and Chrysler—seem moderately stabilized.10 The car— and perception of the landscape through car windows—has also become normative. Following from the numbers above, this perceptual standard, at least in North America, was prevalent by 1950. In part a result of this shift in transportation technology and perception, we begin to find the automobile functioning as an existential object and perceptual device in new forms of art. The car in certain forms of art would begin to function more as a critical lens through which to experience the world than an object of delectation. The art to which I refer is not so much rare, but is more overlooked: a strain of conceptual car art that does not fit the preexisting framework of conceptual art as a matter of dematerialization and communication through language rather than conventional form. As becomes apparent in Chapter 1, we can draw a connection between technology and the rise of what Rosalind Krauss has called the “post-­medium condition,” or what I refer to in terms of the feedback-­loop-­inspired sense of “mediation.” Though an overlooked technological tool within the few extant histories of technology and art, the car appears as a rhetorical device functioning as a mode of representation, framing device, means of debasement, and conduit for the generalized explosion of media beyond the conventional fulcrum of painting and sculpture.11 By the end of the twentieth century, and into the new millennium, we find this particular perceptual expression unfolding around the car in all forms of conceptual art, from photoconceptualism to video and new media. There emerges by way of this art a new cybernetic and interconnected understanding of the art object and viewer and, by association, of the machine-­human relationship.12 Rather 6 // Automotive Prosthetic

than an inert object catalyzed by human command that is otherwise separate from the human body, the automobile from this perspective transforms viewer and world, changing the mores of bodily sensation and observation and the broader political economy of culture, incorporating discrete reaches of the world into one homogeneous automobile culture. The car in conceptual art is evidence of this reciprocal relationship, or what I would like to call a feedback-­loop aesthetic. Despite this broad body of conceptual art work based on seeing and experiencing the world through the car, it is only since 2005 that curators have approached art and the automobile in this way. Two exhibitions in New York and one in Karlsruhe, Germany, direct us in preliminary fashion down this alternative path: Spiritual America (2007), a retrospective of the work of Richard Prince at the Guggenheim Museum, Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans” (2009) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Car Culture (2011) at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. Spiritual America, put together by Nancy Spector of the Guggenheim Museum, was an overview of the Pictures Generation artist Richard Prince. Since 1990 Prince has been making paintings and sculpture around the automobile, the most provocative of which are from 2008, a series of cars wrapped with photographic laminate skins showing images of naked women. Curated by Sarah Greenough, Looking In was an exhibit of the Swiss-­born Robert Frank’s photo-­book, The Americans. The book consists of black-­and-­white photographs Frank took during a drive across the United States with his wife and two children in a 1950 Ford Business Coupe, while on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955 and 1956.13 While only indirectly about the car, these exhibits highlight the automobile as a means of transforming perception and, by connection, the work of art generally conceived. Perhaps it is precisely in their circuitousness—they are not about the automobile as an object but about artists who happened to use the automobile in the making of their work—that they become about the automobile as a mediator of interaction with the world and about the means of looking-­through as well. Curated by Peter Weibel, Bernhard Serexhe, and Franz Pichler, the German exhibition Car Culture is more directly about the car as a simple, straightforward object than the New York exhibitions, but because the curators linked new media devices to the automobile under the broad theme of mobility, the car operates between categories and powerfully becomes one mediating device among others.14 It is in small galleries and Kunsthalles where we find more poignant framings of the automobile functioning in art as a prosthetic extension: Custom Introduction \\ 7

Car Commandos (2009), an exhibit of four video projects by Nancy Davenport, Lars Mathisen, Alex Villar, and Angie Waller at Art in General in New York; Jonathan Schipper: Irreversibility (2009), an exhibit of “high-­concept mechanics” including The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle, a work in which two pristine muscle cars collide into one another slowly over a six-­week period, at Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn, New York; and Road Runners (2009), a brilliant exhibit curated by Marie-­Josée Jean at VOX Image Contemporaine in Montreal of works of conceptual art from the 1960s to the present. In January 2010, Gagosian Gallery London hosted Crash, an exhibition in homage to the British science fiction and fantasy writer J. G. Ballard. While the exhibition featured work by many different artists, the show was inspired by Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash, based on symphorophilia— sexual arousal from technological catastrophe (in the case of his novel of the same name, the car crash). Contemporary curators were finally responding to the works of art based on a shift in perception that I call the automotive prosthetic.

The Perceptual Experience of the Automotive Prosthetic: Ecology, Cybernetics, Feedback Loops, and Mechanology

Let this kernel of information, the car and art exhibitions in museums and galleries, launch us into our discussion of the automotive prosthetic. Let it be the introductory evidence supporting my argument that there is another kind of car art that is conceptual in nature, which hews closely to the looking-­ through paradigm and tells of a different ontological standing of technology and the viewer. The overarching goal here is to set in relief this condition, the automotive prosthetic, by way of works of conceptual car art that are either plainly overlooked or wherein the car is central but ignored. They are works of conceptual art engaging the view to the road, the car as a device of the mass media and consumerism, and urban and suburban landscapes. In turn, I argue that this body of urban and technologically grounded conceptual art reveals something unique about conceptual art itself, namely that it is a sensibility and attitude broadly practiced as the “conceptual turn” in the past and present rather than a past and completed “-­ism” with a tendency to be recapitulated every twenty or thirty years in a “neo-­” version. Finally, we will find an alternative understanding of conceptual art that, functioning

8 // Automotive Prosthetic

outside of and in addition to language, structuralism and poststructuralism, is rooted in the systems aesthetics of Jack Burnham, media theory of Marshall McLuhan, and thus more generally speaking “an ecology of mind” and cybernetic set of relations. This car art thus requires a different set of philosophical loadstars: ecology, systems aesthetics, cybernetic interconnection, and mechanology. Mid-­twentieth-­century British anthropologist and cybernetics theorist Gregory Bateson developed overlapping theories of ecology, cybernetics, and “mind” in essays written in the 1950s and 1960s that would later be published in Steps to an Ecology of Mind. It is to his thinking that I look in order to explain the ecological understanding of being-­in-­the-­world that correlates to my theory of the automotive prosthetic. Bateson’s book begins with a series of short essays called “metalogues,” hypothetical discussions with his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson originally published in the early 1950s. The topics are often articulated in the form of a question, such as “Why Do Things Get in a Muddle?” “Metalogue—Why Do Frenchmen?” “How Much Do You Know?” Not to be confused with the Socratic dialogue and related dialectics, the metalogue for Bateson functioned something like a feedback loop. Knowledge folds back on itself, re-­creating its contents bit by bit not in order to discover an a priori truth but to arrive at an a posteriori knowledge that does not deviate from the original subject but initiates its evolution. Bateson explained that the metalogue follows the logic of evolutionary process; it is a matter of phylogenetic embeddedness with the original topic always contained within its latest incarnation. He described it as a “conversation about some problematic subject [wherein] the conversation as a whole is also relevant to the same subject.”15 Before getting into how the metalogue functions as a template for much of Bateson’s thinking, I would like to suggest its role here, in this book, as an evolutionary template in the discourse of art history and visual and urban studies. Let us say that I have initiated a metalogue about the history of conceptual art not in order to deviate from its understanding as a reduction of art to language, specifically the “dematerialization of the object” in the name of theory, but to expand on this premise and wind it in a different direction. Through the metalogue I make here, conceptual art impinges upon, even exists within, the automobile, architecture, and urban form. Thus, the metalogue here instigates the evolution of conceptual art through interrogating the role of technology and urban context within its unfolding. I suggest that media and new media

Introduction \\ 9

theory are the best links to be added to this ever-­shifting chain of interacting events otherwise known as “conceptual art.” In short, this book seeks to resituate conceptualism in terms of technological provenance. Bateson’s metalogue is one way of getting at the logic of the overall thesis on the “ecology of mind,” with its open-­feedback-­loop sense of conversation serving as a means for arriving at cybernetic interconnection writ large. Like the metalogue, where two people communicate through a general meta-­ question, the third vector in a developing network of thoughts, Bateson’s “mind” is an ecological reticulum, an interaction of ideas.16 Daniel Foxman explains Bateson’s rethinking of the philosophical universal “Mind” as it is constituted by an open and loose-­ended fabric of woven particulates. “‘Mind’ is neither contained in the brain nor bounded by the skin.”17 Mind connects inside and outside, the immanent to extrinsic and environment to machine and body. Tautological in its framing, mind is made up of a hive of other minds. It is part of “the ecology of ideas in systems or ‘minds’ whose boundaries no longer coincide with the skins of the participant individuals.”18 In outlining an idea of “mind” that supersedes the outer containment of the skin, Bateson devises a systems sense of community “whose boundaries do not at all coincide with the boundaries either of the body or of what is popularly called the ‘self’ or ‘consciousness.’” “And,” Bateson continues, “it is important to notice that there are multiple differences between the thinking system and the ‘self’ as popularly conceived.”19 While the “self ” is a oneness of identity and individuality, the “thinking system” is made up of diverse interacting, deferring, and colliding beings, both artificial and natural, machine, mammal, and more. Bateson’s ecological thinking offers the groundwork for a posthuman existence that is posthumanist in its philosophical leaning. While Bateson’s systems understanding of natural, artificial, and social formations little affected the discourse of contemporary art, the idea was central to curator, historian, and sculptor Jack Burnham’s take on conceptual art at the end of the 1960s.20 Published in Artforum in 1968, Burnham’s essay “Systems Esthetics” brought Bateson’s ideas of human ecology to bear on the “new information art” of the time. As with the shift discussed above from a paradigm of looking-­at to looking-­through, Burnham claimed that “we are now in transition from an object-­oriented to a systems-­oriented culture.”21 Burnham argued that art had adapted the logic and order of cybernetics insomuch as “relations between people and between people and components of their environment” had replaced the object-­centric nature 10 // Automotive Prosthetic

of art.22 Like Bateson’s multifarious sense of “mind,” Burnham’s idea of information ranged from computer data to earthen soil. Explaining how the new logic of systems aesthetics manifested in the work of artist Robert Morris, for example, Burnham described a shift in “sculptural concerns,” which “involves precise information from surveyors, landscape gardeners, civil engineering contractors, and geologists.”23 We understand a similar network of environmental forces coursing through the conceptual car art in this book, seeing the art as a connector between observer, context of installation, greater environment, and local and world political economy. Two years later, Burnham launched the exhibition Software at The Jewish Museum in New York, which brought together these ideas as they materialized in the work of then-­emerging conceptual artists. By the time of the exhibition, Burnham referred to conceptual art succinctly in terms of cybernetic interconnection and “transactional” form.24 In his essay from the brochure accompanying the exhibition, titled “Notes on Art and Information Processing,” Burnham claimed, “The concept of cybernetics now represents a kind of historical snapshot, the germ of an insight expanded and modified far beyond its origins.”25 Writing a decade later, Burnham recounted the greater force and enthusiasm over art and technology in the late 1960s and early 1970s from coast to coast in the United States, listing his Software as a seminal incarnation of this momentum, among four others, including Billy Klüver, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Cage’s Experiments in Art and Technology, which started in 1965; the 1968 British exhibition curated by Jasia Riechardt, Cybernetic Serendipity; MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, launched in 1965; and Maurice Tuchman’s Art and Technology initiative at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which lasted from 1967 to 1971.26 By 1980, Burnham looked back on the collective chutzpah with scorn, viewing the entire effort as a failure for economic reasons as well as for its overreaching and misguided intellectualism. Though Burnham’s view on this momentum and each embodiment of its energy was negative, a Sturm und Drang sensitivity I interpret as an existential response that is not far from his original enthusiasm about the possibilities of technology within art, the events and institutions he criticized are a reminder of the technological platform, in addition to that of language and protest, from which conceptual art was formally launched. Of course, the curators, artists, and engineers involved with each of these institutional forces were concerned with computers, information, and rising digital technology, and not the analogue technology of the automobile. The Introduction \\ 11

Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, held November 27, 1968, through February 9, 1969, is further evidence of this general shift in technological emphasis away from the analogue toward information technology. It is by way of this shift, though, from analogue to digital technology, that we find the creation of a caesura, a gap into which falls the conceptual art about the car that is the subject of this book. While largely analogue in its formation, the automobile itself as a machine is part of a cybernetic network of manufacturing and highways. And beyond the car’s literal qualification as a player within a cybernetic network of interconnections, it is the art at hand, the conceptual art about the car, which I argue gives form to a cyborg subject in its experience and full understanding. So, the theoretical model of the automotive prosthetic is about thinking: it is about perceiving art and the world in a unique way. Moreover, there is an observer who has evolved and mutated from the standard paradigm of the viewing subject. She is similar to the figure of the “observer” at the center of Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer (1990), discussed below, but further along in the mutation of the technological mortal coil insomuch as she is accustomed to her posthuman condition and posthumanist existence in a world of interconnected urban nodes. In keeping with the very logic of interconnection and the feedback loop, two ideas that are central to cybernetics, the technological tools at her hands and connected to her body bear a phylogenetic interconnection with other tools. The logic here is that these tools immanently bear the logic of techné that is the property of not only their past incarnation but also that of other past tools. Functioning like a meme that is active and unfolding rather than simply symbolic, the car has a bio-­evolutionary effect because of its ability to transform human perception within a generation. This is the position of the late philosopher of technology and scientist Gilbert Simondon. Though he is best known for his L’individuation psychique et collective (1989), it is Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (1958), an existential theory of technological tools, that is more of interest to the study at hand.27 Simondon’s existential take on the machine will be our bridge to an affective—failed, uncanny, exuberant, and sublime—interpretation of the car, as it works it way through conceptual art. More precisely, I would like to use his mechanology as a stepping-­stone from analogue to digital technology in my discussion of the cybernetic subject, or cyborg, which is the observer and percipient of the automotive prosthetic—the cornerstone of the subjective experience of conceptual car art. Distinct from cybernet12 // Automotive Prosthetic

ics, which offers a pattern of thinking that is different from the causality of scientific determinism in that it is based on past error, prediction, followed by self-­correction, mechanology is a genre of studies about machines. In the preface to Simondon’s published dissertation, John Hart writes that Simondon’s mechanology is a “science of machines” rooted in the writing of the historian of technology Jacques Lafitte, who wrote Réflexions sur la science des machines (1932).28 Through Lafitte to Simondon, mechanology allows users of technology, in this case analogue technology, to “perceive the possibility of incorporating the machine into the family of human things as part of a global cultural renaissance.”29 Simondon’s mechanology is a “true phenomenology of machines . . . and proposes a theory of technological evolution.”30 The phylogenetic nature of technology was central to Simondon’s mechanology. For Simondon, there is a direct evolutionary relationship between the parts of given technological tools, including the automobile (an example to which he often refers), which exists from machine to machine, engine to engine, creating a certain mise-­en-­abyme pattern. Like Bateson’s tautological sense of mind, wherein mind is made up of minds, it is a pattern of nesting made up of other nestings that extends, at once vertically and horizontally, upward and outward into the universe creating a mechanologized ontology. Simondon explains: The fact that there exists an organic character of thought and a mode of being in the world obligates us to suppose that the origin of technological objects [objets techniques] bears repercussions on other human productions, on the attitude of man facing the world. . . . If this mode of existence is defined by its genesis, it is a genesis not only of objects, or even a technological reality: it comes from further out, it is part of a vaster process which continues to engender other realities after the appearance of technological objects.31

Indeed there is a qualitative difference between analogue and digital technology and, by parallel, mechanology and cybernetics. But this is precisely the difference I am trying to bridge: though unique and with special characteristic properties, they are evolutionarily connected in Simondonian fashion. Following after this statement, the crosspiece I would like to forge is between the machine technology of the automobile and cybernetic sensibility, in particular as it is articulated in the cyborg observer that is foundational to conceptual car art. There is a dialectical relationship between Introduction \\ 13

the phenomenological tool and phenomenological observer. If Simondon’s phenomenology of technological tools shores up the existential side of the mechanical object, then the reciprocal percipient is different—unique as changed by the tools through which the world is apprehended. With its parts interconnected within and without itself, as a gestalt and part of a continuum of technological development, the automobile is an existential object of human use, and in this case, the object by which the driver-­cum-­visual subject experiences the world uniquely and according to her interaction with the world, that is, by way of the automotive prosthetic. Brian Rotman creates a similar bridge, relating the “machine intervention” to advanced technologies in contemporary medicine, such as “gene analysis, brain mapping, body scans, and internal scopic procedures.”32 Rotman transforms the line of separation between the mechanical and the cybernetic into a zipper-­line suture that, a bit like Frankenstein, rebirths the human corpus as “a body which . . . is revealed as increasingly exogeneous—made and conceived from its bio-­techno cultural environs.”33 The forerunner of this cyborg subject is the “observer,” the viewer-­figure conceptualized by Jonathan Crary in his short history of vision in the early nineteenth century. The present study of conceptual car art owes much to Crary’s pithy book, having inherited from it a basic rethinking of art history’s teleological, style-­based construction by way of technology. In many ways my book creates a metalogue with Crary’s, building on it in order to reveal a missed technological force in the history of art and technology— the car. In his book, Crary claims that there was a shift in subjective vision in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the thirty years preceding the invention of photography. It is in this period that scientists and various optical technologies heralded the abstraction, rather than the materialization, of vision.34 The abstraction and scientification of vision—its dematerialization into schema and data and, by connection, removal from the body—­continued throughout the century, hastened by several ensuing proto-­cinematic machines, such as the diorama, thaumatrope, phenakistiscope, stereoscope, and stereography. In elaborating this transformation, Crary finds it useful to devise an alternative viewing subject in the form of the “observer” as opposed to the “spectator.” Like Burnham describing the shift “from an object-­oriented to a systems-­oriented culture,” Crary makes a distinction that resonates with the division between looking-­at and looking-­through:

14 // Automotive Prosthetic

Unlike spectare, the Latin root for “spectator,” the root for “observer” does not literally mean “to look at.” . . . In a sense more pertinent to my study, observare means “to conform one’s action, to comply with,” as in observing rules, codes, regulations, and practices. Though obviously one who sees, an observer is more importantly one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations. . . . If it can be said there is an effect of an irreducibly heterogeneous system of discursive, social, technological, and institutional relations. There is no observer subject prior to this shifting field.35

In Crary’s text, he has footnoted this section with a reference to the writing of Michel Foucault, describing his own study of vision and the rising abstraction of the optical experience in terms of Foucault’s concept of “genealogy.” Genealogical studies do not simply begin with history, its subject assumed, universalized, and implied, but rather by accounting for the “constitution of the subject within a historical frame.”36 I do the same here by recasting the viewing body-­self of the subject who reads this text and perceives a given body of conceptual art as a cyborg citizen. At the same time, I would like to suggest that there is a set of limitations in the cyborg field of aesthetic action similar to Crary’s “irreducibly heterogeneous system of discursive, social, technological and institutional relations” that is best described by the parallel Foucauldian idea of biopolitics. Foucault first articulated the biopolitical in a series of lectures at the Collège de France in Paris in 1979. To begin, the central core of the biopolitical is “population,” the enumeration of people and the reduction of a person to a number in the repeated recapitulation of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism, which is further rooted in the felicific calculus.37 I would say that it is Bentham’s eighteenth-­century architectural concept, the panopticon and its functionalist trappings, which is at the foundational core of what Foucault describes as the “liberal art of government.”38 For the sake of brevity, it is the liberalism—the prescripts of liberal democratic freedom and their relationship in the West to free-­market liberalism and to unfettered global capitalism—that births a biopolitical arrangement of people and government, the counting, and thus reduction and limitation, of every citizen body that is also at the root of habeas corpus much earlier in history.39 Today this arrangement exists like an invisible network of virtual incarceration, what Foucault elsewhere calls the “carceral,” in which the designation of freedom is also a form of identification and limitation. In

Introduction \\ 15

being “free” one becomes a citizen and part of the collective of democracy, an enumerated participant in all of its accouterments of identifying, from voting, debt, home ownership, and Social Security to local and federal laws, the jurisprudence system, and penalization. Biopolitics describes the freedom with limits of the kybernetes-­agent who is, at the same time, the cyborg subject—registered, licensed, insured while rolling along in her car—that experiences the road and works of conceptual art about the road. Likewise, it is the underbelly of this freedom, its limitations by way of a virtual network of counting and identification, which describes automotive freedom and the proverbial open road. While similarly limited by the conventions outlined in Crary’s field of action, the theory of the automotive prosthetic is not solely conducive to the abstraction of vision. Crary intends his history of the abstraction of vision in the early nineteenth century to explain how at the turn of the millennium “visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a ‘real,’ optically perceived world.”40 Crary’s book is a prehistory of digitalization and the supposed disembodiment of the viewer-­observer in the new millennium. While sharing the discursive field of action, and related Foucauldian sense of limited agency, this book harbors no such limitations of the aesthetic experience. Rather, there may be an “abstraction” of vision in the experience of the automotive prosthetic, but it is an abstraction that occurs by way of a deeply corpus-­borne aesthesis. The perceptual experience of the highway kybernetes is embodied. This does not, however, rule out abstraction, but rather takes it as a routine set of circumstances. The abstraction of vision might also be considered one of manifold repercussions, if not also one of several existential responses, be they dumb and obvious or profound and subtle, which describe the experience of the automotive prosthetic within these works of art. The present book looks not to philosophers, scientists, and machines of vision, but rather to a particular form of technology—the automobile—as it exists within a field of others, and as it transforms the subject-­spectator to subject-­cyborg ontologically circumscribed by several works of conceptual art. It is my opinion that, in what is a keystone text, this component of Crary’s thesis, his idea that there exists within contemporary visual experiences a deleterious form of “abstraction” that evolves out of technology, is somewhat faulted in its tenor. Mark B. N. Hansen sees positions like Crary’s as opportunities for rethinking semiotic-­dominated strategies of interpretation according to the “robust materiality of technology.”41 In rethinking technology beyond writing, Hansen reevaluates the “wholesale re16 // Automotive Prosthetic

pression . . . of the ‘radical exteriority’ of technology” at work in the writing of Jameson, Heidegger, Freud, Derrida, Lacan, and Deleuze and Guattari—a point that might also be applied to Crary’s writing.42 Hansen argues for a shift away from the language-­oriented and negative take on technology, or what he calls the technesis of the thinkers listed above, toward a position that is at once open and embodied. The problems of such approaches are thus not insurmountable. “The negative presentation of technology, like the negative presentation of the absolutely great and small, remains a temporary setback, a provisional phase on the way toward a successful cognitive adaptation.”43 Simondon describes a related sensibility in the “misoneism oriented against machines which is not so much a disdain for the new but refusal of a strange reality.”44 Echoing the work of Julia Kristeva, I argue by contrast to Crary that the machine bears a kindred spirit to the stranger within.45 Or, in Simondon’s words, “The machine is the stranger: it is the stranger in which the human is locked up.”46 It is, reciprocally, the foreigner within us.

Prosthetic: Between Mechanology and Cybernetics, Soma and System

As does the car within art, the prosthetic device operates in manifold fashion. Of course, it appears in blockbuster Hollywood movies such as Transformers (2007/2009/2011) and Iron Man (2008/2010/2013) in the form of fantastical technological attachments, car to human in the Transformers and robotic carapace to human in the Iron Man franchise. The automotive prosthetic is both a position and a theory that, admittedly, bears only a minimal relationship to these two popular versions of the prosthetic, indeed because the car operates as a literal, but non-­miraculous, attachment to the human body. In the study that follows, the prosthetic is at once literal and figurative, a reference to the automobile machinery about which we wrap ourselves when we set out to drive as well as to a philosophical position. As Donna Haraway put it, “Prosthesis becomes a fundamental category for understanding our most intimate selves. Prosthesis is semiosis, the making of meanings and bodies, not for transcendence but for power-­charged communication.”47 Prosthesis as a discourse recognizes the technological being as normative and, by connection, that nature and putative human nature have changed. They have moved beyond “justifications of domination, especially of domination based on differences seen as natural, given, inescapable, and therefore moral.”48 Introduction \\ 17

Prosthesis bodes a progressive artificiality that goes back to Baudelaire in the mid-­nineteenth century and Huysmans and the decadent writers of the late nineteenth century, which then culminates in high form with Marshall McLuhan’s illuminating list of technological “extensions” in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McLuhan conceptualized a broad range of technological extensions, from the written word and roads to the photograph and, yes, the “motorcar,” and their relationship to the human body according to the feedback loop. Humans do not simply use technology in causal, unidirectional fashion, as a user simply utilizing an object in terms of figure A using tool B to act upon object C. Rather, each use of every distinct kind of technology creates a relationship whereby human and technology are transformed. Our use of the automobile affects self and landscape in a changeful ecology of space and time, architecture, urbanism, and world relations. McLuhan connects the advent of the car to a “complete revolution in transportation and in housing and city arrangement” and “the turn of our economy to making and servicing motorcars, and the devotion of much leisure time to their use on a vast new highway system.”49 He offers examples of not only the feedback loop at work, but also the feedback loop as a way of thinking. This he brilliantly articulates in the distinction between “hot media” and “cold media.” Here we find the usual adjectival descriptives “hot” and “cold” functioning not as commonly understood, that is, as literal modifiers of the technological medium at hand. Rather, he uses each designation in a kind of metaphorical counterlogic, describing one’s relationship and interaction with a mode of technology and the amount of concentration and labor required to interact with it. “Hot media are . . . low in participation, cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.”50 These two categories describe “effect rather than meaning.”51 Influenced by McLuhan’s feedback-­loop pattern of thinking, Jack Burnham describes prosthetic-­oriented robot and cyborg art according to a Norbert Wiener–esque leap into the autogenetic realm of self-­creation, with cyborg art distended away from and unattached to the body. It is nonetheless in keeping with the outward connection of prosthesis and prosthetic devices, as it is art that connects, viz relates, things to people and outward to the world. Robot and cyborg art, for Burnham, marks “a refocusing of aesthetic awareness—based on future scientific-­technological evolution—on matter-­ energy-­information exchanges and away from the invention of solid artefacts.”52 Related to Haraway and McLuhan, Burnham saw a rising “systems consciousness” in the conduit created by art and technology.53 18 // Automotive Prosthetic

Burnham’s idea of systems aesthetics emerged from a combination of careful scrutiny of the art of his time and the writing of the scientist Norbert Wiener. The differences between Wiener’s theory of cybernetics and Simondon’s mechanology reconfirm the connection between Burnham’s system aesthetics and the present book. We arrive, once again, at a crossroads. How, one asks, does Hans Haacke’s MoMA Poll (1970), an information-­based work of art where the percipient and a questionnaire function as a feedback loop, connect to Jonathan Schipper’s Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle: Slow Motion Car Crash (2008), a sculpture with a machine advancing two full-­sized muscle cars into one another over six days in the simulation of an actual car crash (see Figures 0.1–0.4)? Broadly speaking, both offer articulations of technology at work within art—the former by way of the technogenesis of humans as binary code (their answers in the polling are reduced to “yes” or “no”) and the latter by way of a machine-­initiated car wreck. But, perhaps more profoundly, it is in their sharing of the conceptual turn and cyborg-­subject that they meet. Thus, rather than seeing cybernetics and mechanology as separate, I would once again like to link them, and thus also Haacke to Schipper, to reveal not so much their similarities but how they might fit together like parts of a machine or something like the input and output information of a feedback loop. Comparing the two modes of thinking, John Hart locates the forebears of each mode of understanding technology, citing the seventeenth-­century mathematician and scientist Isaac Newton for Wiener and the sixteenth-­century anatomist William Harvey for Simondon.54 It follows thus that “while the central notion of cybernetics was the system, the comparable concept in mechanology is the soma.”55 The system within cybernetics is to the soma within mechanology. The two actually met in person at a conference in 1964. Norbert Wiener was the keynote speaker at a conference titled “Concept d’Information dans la Science Contemporaine,” organized by Simondon and held at an Abbey in Asnières sur Oise, in northern France. Simondon introduced Wiener and his theory of cybernetics in terms of “the time of Newton,” expounding that it was “without a doubt” a similar context in which they would listen to Wiener speak that day.56 Though effusive in his introductory comments, Simondon had already distanced himself from certain aspects of Wiener’s thinking. In his delineation of a phenomenology of mechanical tools, Simondon criticized cybernetics for a missed opportunity. Cybernetics was too rigid and taxonomic, he thought. “It accepted at the get-­go what technology should refuse: a classification of technical objects organized through the criteria Introduction \\ 19

F i g u r e 0 .1.

Hans Haacke, MoMA Poll, 1970. © Hans Haacke/ARS. Courtesy of Paula

Cooper Gallery, New York.

of genres and species.”57 Simondon sought a discursive yet cogent take on technology. Henning Schmidgen explains, “His point was that Wiener had made the wrong choice relying on a quasi-­Linnean, stable classification.”58 Simondon had developed a dynamic system of understanding mechanical technology that was made up of three components: the element, the individual, and the ensemble.59 Each component, decisive and unique, works together in the creation of an elastic and changeful fabric of culture and technology. The terminology is quite self-­evident, with the element repre20 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e s 0 . 2 –0 . 4 .

Jonathan Schipper, Slow Inevitable Death of

American Muscle: Slow Motion Car Crash, 2008. Courtesy of Jonathan Schipper and Pierogi Gallery, New York.

senting the component of a given machine, the individual being the user, and an ensemble constituting a complex of machinery, as in a factory or laboratory. The terms, all of which are interrelated, helped Simondon establish the importance of context, what I have called elsewhere the situatedness of technology, its phenomenology and phenomenological connections to a given locus. There thus exists a unique yet shared strain of bio-­dynamism within each mode of thinking through technology. For Simondon, it is in the anatomical-­cum-­ecological approach to technology in the world, the idea that mechanical and human beings are both parts of an interconnected skeleton of the “inner and outer milieus or Umwelten”—the surrounding world.60 Wiener found that machines could mimic if not enact the same process of logic as mammals in what is a nonlinear feedback loop, or an expanding, interconnected, and supra-­effectual network of moving information that exists in biological as well as technological form.61 Wiener in effect described the biological template of a computer motherboard. In bringing the two senses of dynamism together we get, as Hart says, soma and system, or, if stretched a little, a body roving through a network of information, and the car in a reticulum of infrastructure and looping highways. As human body, the kybernetes at the helm of the car, she bears what I call in Chapter 5 the haptic unconscious—a mode of perception wherein the memories of tactile experience, seeing and feeling the road, are deeply embedded in the subconscious of the body as a whole. And this existential side of mechanical technology, in this instance the automobile, is brought to bear in the work of Simondon, as well as the conceptual car art at the center of this study. The skin of the kybernetes—car and self combined—is a porous membrane and celluloid-­like pattern holder of the body’s unconscious, and the ergonomics of the car-­body-­road trifecta, or the machine ensemble, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch called it, make an imprint on the mind’s body as opposed to the mind’s eye. She does not consciously know or recognize her movements but performs them by habit; just as in many of the works of art at hand, the car is there without being consciously recognized. This book is thus about a new subject position—the theory of the automotive prosthetic—as evidenced in conceptual art about the car. It is not a sociological study or a social history of the car; rather it is a theory about the car and us, the empirical proof of which is located in conceptual art in, of, and about the car. Six chapters survey the condition of the automotive prosthetic from 1951 to the present. Chapter 1 focuses on the structure of thinking by which I am able to arrive at the theory of the automotive pros22 // Automotive Prosthetic

thetic. I start by resituating Tony Smith’s famous account of his drive down the New Jersey Turnpike during the late 1950s in terms of the technology that is its creator, the automobile, and a more recent quote from the early 1990s by contemporary artist Julian Opie. In comparing Smith’s account to Opie’s thinking on the car and the road, my goal is to bridge two periods of time and thus expand our notion of conceptual art. This pairing launches my development of the “conceptual turn”: a new take on conceptualism that is chronologically broader and, rather than being an -­ism limited to a few years in time, is a decision-­making process and sensibility that came to the fore in the post–World War II period, and that is now normative. The chapter explains the relationship between the conceptual turn and technology by way of a related theory of “mediation,” while homing in on the oft-­overlooked role of the automobile in conceptual art. Chapter 2 focuses on a large body of photoconceptual views to the road, arguing in the introductory section the unique nature of this work by comparison to a very important but more conventional modernist view to the road by Robert Frank. The chapter works through the manner in which the car is evident as a critical-­minded frame in several works of photoconceptualism, some canonical and others not, by Margaret Lawther, Jeff Wall, John Baldessari, Paul McCarthy, Martha Rosler, Dennis Hopper, Ian Wallace, Iain Baxter, Ed Ruscha, Richard Prince, Bill Vazan, Ed Kienholz, Julian Opie, and Cory Arcangel. I develop the logic of the automotive prosthetic here by way of “entropy and the vast defeatured landscape” and the “tropes of the car in photoconceptualism,” to quote Jeff Wall.62 I elaborate the subjective implications of the experience of the automotive prosthetic outlined in these photoconceptual views to the road by way of the cyborg-­ subject. Based on the writings of Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, and Mark B. N. Hansen, I argue for a viewer position the epistemological formation of which comes out of the embodied subject of new media theory. This figure, a cyborg-­subject, is a relational being, a viewer looking at art that extends from artist to viewer-­self, which in turn implies an ecological paradigm of artwork and world. Chapters 3 and 4 are somewhat symbiotic in that together they constitute the time and space of the automotive prosthetic. Chapter 3 focuses on the subjective temporality, the affective time, according to Hansen, of the interior experience of the automobile as exemplified in moving-­image artwork, both film clips and video art. There I connect various philosophical senses of the “now,” including the ideas of Francisco Varela, William James, BerIntroduction \\ 23

trand Russell, and Walter Benjamin, to moving-­image pieces wherein the car functions as a womb-­like pod of existential dread, fear, and deep rumination in films by Joel Schumacher, Wim Wenders, and Robert Altman and in video art by Charlotte Posenenske, Artlab’s Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine Richards, Ant Farm, Nic Nicosia, Teresa Hubbard, Alexander Birchler, and Yael Bartana. Chapter 4 is about the spatiality of the automotive prosthetic, the urbanism of the car, looking to the implicit and explicit role of the automobile in Dan Graham’s work on architecture and the single-­family home. In this chapter, I further elaborate the “haptic unconscious” of the car, connecting it to the highway-­based architecture projects of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. The overarching theme of the chapter is the idea of “communication space,” wherein I link infrastructural systems and systems theory to the rethinking of the viewer-­subject and art-­object, linking highways to Graham’s use of video, and surveillance cameras to his early discussions of “radical software.” I make several connections here, linking the car and highway to the suburban landscape, to the time-­delay video projects in the overall parsing of a sense of “communication space.” Chapter 5 focuses on cultural militarism in art that engages the SUV, in particular the Hummer. I have divided the chapter according to a triangle of psychoanalytic positions: repression, sublimation, and the real. I take my understandings of “repression” and “sublimation” from the Freudo-­Marxist analytics of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Under the category of repression, I place actual Hummer drivers, those who drive the now-­defunct civilian version of the warfront Humvee down neighborhood streets acting out fake war in civilian space in what amounts to the repression of actual war. They are faux warriors playing at war as though it were a matter of video gaming, costume, and eschatological apocalypse. Under the category of sublimation, I delineate a group of sculptural, video, and installation works based on the Hummer. Several are mimetic in nature, distilling the Hummer as painted or life-­size three-­dimensional form; two are works of video art focusing on the SUV and Hummer; and one is a traveling installation piece that comes together around a blown-­out car from Baghdad. I argue that, politically speaking, these works reach the delimitation of art as a political device, insomuch as they bring light to the problematic of cultural militarism by sublimating it into the form of fine art. In the final category I coalesce clips from YouTube.com under the rubric of the Lacanian real. These include Hummer commercials and violent videos of American soldiers forging through Baghdad traffic and taunting Iraqi children. I close 24 // Automotive Prosthetic

with a careful reading of ethical moment in Lacan’s thinking on the real, the linchpin of which is the clinamen swerve—the chance-­based decision to take a position against unwarranted and unlawful American intervention in foreign countries. I have devoted the final chapter, Chapter 6, to the question of the “fetish” in the car-­based work of Richard Prince. After founding the discussion on well-­established philosophies of the “fetish” by Freud and Marx, I develop the mischievous nature of Prince’s layered form of fetishism, underscoring the prankishness and misdoing, or maleficium, of his fetish. From the appropriation of the reproduced image, to the muscle car as sculpture and painting, to images of white trash culture, to feigning personas such as J. G. Ballard, Richard Prince is the master maker of the fetish in his art. Looking to his most recent work, wherein he pulls a photographic skin over the bodies of cars from the 1980s, I argue that these works might best be understood according to the concept of the skin fetish. Based on the French philosopher Didier Anzieu’s concept of the skin-­ego (moi-­peau), these cars by Prince set forth a form of roving image-­as-­desire and image-­as-­self: the car as self-­created picture, objectified thing and person, and a remainder; proof that the act of appropriation, and its core of want and wish, bear the logic of a feedback loop, rolling back on itself in never-­ending reproduction of desire.

Introduction \\ 25

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Conceptualism and car art: there could be no two categories of form and aesthetics so seemingly separate and far apart. A simple set of binaries reinforces the breach between them. Conceptualism is academic, critical-­minded, serious, and politically engaged, while car art is intuitive, indifferent, fun, and politically passive. A theme of institutional iconoclasm interconnects the two categories in what might be called a dialectic of allegiance and willful oblivion. The critique and deconstruction of the official status quo in the art world nourishes conceptualism while having little interest in makers and fans of car art. The histories and mores of each practice only widen the gap. Current historiography holds that conceptualism emerged in the 1960s according to an agnostic turn in the art world, or according to what art writers Lucy Lippard and John Chandler called in 1968 the “dematerialization of art.”1 In many ways, the logic of conceptualism mimicked the

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student marches and civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s in its rejection of the hallowed art object in the name of immediate and evanescent action. In giving up what had immemorially made art art—its valuable material—conceptual artists launched a salvo of resistance against the art market and bourgeois art culture. Conceptualism is known best of all, though, as a philosophical and linguistics-­inspired movement in which art objects gave way, at least temporarily, to published discourse and words on the wall. In contrast to conceptualism’s hermetic cerebralism, car art boasts a populism of the eccentrics. While historians Eric Dregni and Ruthann Godollei have traced the origins of the “art car” back to the tomb of Tutankhamun in the second millennium BCE, car art emerged in the modern period with the first art car parades of the early twentieth century.2 In its current form, and very unlike conceptualism, car art is all about the object and materiality: cars that are old and worn out, bedecked with a fanciful taxonomy of found objects ranging from plastic baby doll heads and Barbie parts to shards of glass and bottle tops.3 While makers of car art might consider that they are artists, they neither care about nor engage in the international art world, ignoring its market, fairs, galleries, academic discourse, and art criticism. Then there is the hybrid category of art I have named “conceptual car art.” What is conceptual car art and how does one understand it? Conceptual car art treats the automobile not as a passive fetish object to celebrate but rather as a transformative and existential machine with which humans have a reciprocal relationship. The car acts on people; people act on it. It transforms how humans know the world; it transforms how the world is. Conceptual car art shows us how the automobile shapes our perception, both close up as we see landscapes through the car window and far away as we plunder the earth in search of natural resources to keep the car running. Conceptual car art comes in a variety of forms—sculpture, painting, photographs, photo-­text pieces, interactive educational artworks, performance, video, and new media—and always functions through deferral and mediation. Unlike conventional car art, conceptual car art is not literally about the car as an object, but rather metaphorically about the car, its effects on humans and environments, and its affects as a motivator of emotional response. Artists that make conceptual car art deploy the automobile according to what it does—how it has changed the way we see and feel, the way we understand ourselves (especially our identities), the way our cities look, and the way we interact as citizens of the world internationally. To establish a category such as conceptual car art is to proffer simulta28 // Automotive Prosthetic

neously an alternative reading and historiography of conceptual art. It is also to reinforce the naturalized relationship drivers have with cars. It is to support, by way of art, the cyborg relationship between humans and their cars.4 This chapter establishes the foundation by which conceptual car art exists as an intellectual category within the history of art. One might think of the overall polemic of this chapter in terms of what philosopher Fredric Jameson calls “periodicity.” Periodicity opens a historical moment to different and varied concerns, in this instance showing conceptual art’s moorings beyond language and philosophy in technology. Here, between technology and language, there is a “sharing of a common objective situation, to which a whole range of varied responses and creative innovations is then possible.”5 The chapter that follows offers an alternative periodicity for conceptualism, broadening it and shifting its base, in order to tease out and interpret the critical import of the automobile within certain works of art where it has often been ignored and overlooked. I look to subtle and often unnoticed rhetorical moments within art criticism over the last fifty years, starting with the writing of conceptualist Brian O’Doherty, then reframing sculptor Tony Smith’s famous drive on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike in terms of its mechanical enabler, the car. I launch a discussion of mediation and the role of technology within conceptualism in order to argue that a new ontological positioning for conceptual art is possible by way of thinking conceptual car art through the technologically enhanced percipient, or what I call the cyborg-­subject position.

The Pop Phenomenology of Conceptual Car Art So traveling along the highway we are suspended between two vanishing points, one in front unraveling, one behind gobbling up. Things get bigger, things get smaller, separated by an abruptly silenced rush. By all logic this vanishing point should be psychologically magnetized.6

Most famous for the essays published as Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, the Irish conceptual artist and art critic Brian O’Doherty also wrote about the car-­road-­driver interface.7 Taken from O’Doherty’s essay “Highway to Las Vegas,” published in Art in America in 1972, the above quote is evidence of his interests in phenomenology, here in particular the aesthetic experience of the road. He writes of the space-­ Conceptual Car Art \\ 29

time suspension unique to the car and road and, thereafter, the cluttering of visual space from the roadside signage seen through the car windows, both of which are part of a shared landscape of the bizarre, imagined, and unforeseen. The loquacious and colorful casino signs along Vegas roads; an uncanny smell that rears its head at the drive-­through; the dreaded de-­ oxygenated air inside a car parked on the acreage of hot open blacktop; and the fear and loathing of going dead on the shoulder of a busy, sunken inner-­city highway: these are some of the feelings experienced as part of what O’Doherty calls a “Pop phenomenology.”8 Pop phenomenology gives serious, philosophical attention to what is commonplace, everywhere, and often ignored, in this case the car and road in works of conceptual art. Conceptual car art operates according to this inventive coupling of everyday road life and philosophical rumination on experience: it is a matter of sardonic Warholian art-­play and the analytics of technologically driven proprioception. As a pop phenomenology, conceptual car art frames the car as a catalyst of emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic experience. It also transforms the definition of conceptualism, opening it to a certain strain of critical-­ minded populism. Conceptual car art as an interpretative category brings the sophisticated analytics of aesthetic experience to bear on the everyday life unfolding around the automobile. This includes the road in its manifold forms, automotive urbanisms, and the systems of manufacturing and global trade that constitute the political economy of the car. In light of O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube, the Las Vegas piece takes on a different, more critical appeal because of its union of automotive perception and philosophical language. Appearing in Artforum in 1976, the essays that would become Inside the White Cube bear the voice of an indignant conceptual artist that has turned his talents to criticism. While the angry deconstruction of the ideology of the white walls of the art gallery that is at the heart of Inside the White Cube seems far different from the lyrical description of the experience of the road entering Las Vegas, there is in fact a twofold connection between the two. They are interconnected by the phenomenological and the structural. First, they share a phenomenology of the art experience and, second, one serves as technologically driven intellectual ballast for the other, the road piece for the deconstruction of the gallery. Writing about the road to Vegas, he focuses on the sensorial elision of the body, car, and roadside. In a related phenomenological analysis four years later, he tells of the connection between percipient and space, in particular as it manifests in the alienating experience of the art gallery. It is an alienation 30 // Automotive Prosthetic

rooted in the sterile experience of white walls, which, through a semiotics of disinterest and Platonic purity, dissimulate a willful politics of choice. The road to Vegas, by contrast, is open and a matter of repetition punctuated by roadside entertainment. As for conceptual infrastructure, the road trip experience in the hinterlands of the American West serves indirectly as technological foreknowledge of the critical analysis of the prototypical gallery space in New York City. Their commonality thus coalesces in a particular kind of nesting, with one inside of the other, the view to the road as the mechanical unconscious of the conceptualist interrogation of the white cube. It is a bit of kitsch embedded in the avant-­garde. There inside the deep mind that plays on the surface we locate an outsider’s approach to writing about art characterized by the pushing of boundaries in order to open up new territories of thinking. We can link O’Doherty’s phenomenology of driving and the kitschy landscape to the lofty enterprise of criticizing the white walls of the gallery cube, finding technology at the base, here the automobile, of such a bridge. The banal and putatively ugly meet the lofty and rational in this pairing. Moreover, we begin to discern a heretofore-­unrecognized existential phenomenology skulking around within conceptual art. Functioning at once heuristically and aesthetically, O’Doherty’s “Highway to Las Vegas” teaches the logic of conceptual car art while also being a work of conceptual art. He writes about the trance-­like phenomenology felt from behind the steering wheel: the embodied perception of an interconnected sequence of moments along the roadside. Here, bringing a term from the philosophy of digital technology to bear on analogue, I import the theory of “embodiment” to explain O’Doherty’s textual work of conceptual car art in order to reinforce the complexities, intellectual and affective, of the phenomenological experience of conceptual art. Theorists of new media art and technology have developed a wide-­ranging politics of materiality by way of the word “embodiment.”9 An idea developed around the philosophical school of phenomenology and behavioral brain science, the theory of embodiment offers a materialist counterstrategy to the simple idea that one is disembodied in the experience of digital technology. Digital disembodiment is based on the mind-­body split of classical Cartesian logic. It holds that one’s consciousness is disconnected from the body and unleashed into an alternative universe of social possibility when connected to the Internet. Early experimenters with virtual reality interpreted the relationship between the human and personal computer metaphysically, celebrating the interface as a preternatural portal where the mind goes free from Conceptual Car Art \\ 31

the body and physical realm.10 By contrast, philosophers of embodiment reinforce the centrality of bodily experience in any digital interaction. For Mark B. N. Hansen, embodiment works as the “mediator between computer and world.”11 At the same time, it constitutes the fabric by which we become interconnected social agents: “In its role as primary access to a (now) highly technologized lifeworld, embodiment serves to couple body and world.”12 In using the theory of embodiment to describe conceptual car art, the intention is to give voice to the central role of aesthesis—perception and experience—in conceptual art, where it otherwise goes overlooked.13 Outside of conceptual art’s usual bearings in language and philosophy, it is the roving, perceiving, and interactive body that plays out the meaningful effects of technologically inspired conceptual art. O’Doherty’s writing—about Vegas and the gallery—are, from this perspective, a matter of interconnecting bodies in space: it is language that makes meaning according to an epistemology of the flesh and words, rather than words alone. O’Doherty is well attuned to the embodied mediation of the world by the automobile, treating the machine-­human interface with language that is equal parts poetry and theoretical rumination. He starts the piece with a simple question: “What do you look at when you’re driving?”14 Its straightforward simplicity belies the intellectual twists and turns that are to follow. Collapsing mind into body, language into car, O’Doherty describes a scenic system of concrete infrastructure, signage, and the landscape flashing by. He tells of the mutative and becoming character of the car-­body-­road event. Everything seems to slide together, creating a network of relations: hands on wheel, body in car, wheels to road down below, and gaze shifting between eyes to the road out front and advertisements up high, with the boisterous signage outside connecting the body-­car interface to the political economy of Las Vegas and the open road. Interrupted here and there by the staccato marks of signage, both billboards and brightly lit casino marquees, the landscape has a certain slurry rhythm with matter suspended in time. It is mechanical movement bearing a forgetful temporality. Like the mystic writing pad of Freud and childhood play, this machine-­human hybrid momentarily captures the views outside the window only to have them lifted and virtually erased as though from the flick of a filmic layer. This turning of the thin plastic page covering the surface of the pad shares the logic of the moment-­ by-­moment changes of the view to the road. Memory moves, passes, and tries to hold pace with the rapidly unfolding infinity that is the highway, as the driver perceives glinting form from the wheel while lost in the reveries 32 // Automotive Prosthetic

of moving concentration. “Under a smooth boredom our perceptual motor is kept busy,” he tells his reader.15 Preoccupied by the signs along the road, which body forth a certain difference within repetition, O’Doherty tells of the “daffy kineticism” of the car and road, as together they create an absurdist sense of perception catalyzed by advertisements seen in motion.16 O’Doherty references the fluency of form he sees from the driver’s helm in terms of what was for Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, author-­architects of Learning from Las Vegas (1972), a new kind of linear-­strip urbanism. For O’Doherty, the city’s billboards, bright lights, dynamic shapes of casinos, and monumental symbols constitute the “apotheosis of the vernacular.”17 The giant advertisements along the highway and Vegas strip are imagistic extensions of the body. Signage is something like an epidermal envelope, which at once covers, cocoons, and further sutures the driver to car in a sign-­body-­car continuum. The “signs frequently idealize the machine” and create a “transferred narcissism, since the car, like a suit of clothes, is part of one’s body image.”18 As a pop phenomenologist, O’Doherty is neither condescending nor moralizing about the automotive landscape. Rather, he cheekily compares it to the canonical form of another period, French art nouveau, describing its over-­the-­top bombast as “Guimard gone berserk.”19 A puff of Paris in the desert, Vegas “has a European aspect,” he argues, “a certain smugness in its delirium.”20 Writing about the experience of an absurdist world mediated by the car, O’Doherty gives form in poetry and prose to a pop phenomenology and thus also to the critical-­minded populism of conceptual car art. From Medium to Mediation: Perceiving through the Car The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn’t be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first I didn’t know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there which had not had any expression in art. To n y Sm i t h 21

You only experience a motorway by driving on it, and the experience is kind of numbing—you leave reality, the state of speed being the negation of reality. I wanted to create this effect, the numbing shift out of reality. J u l i a n O p i e 22

Conceptual Car Art \\ 33

The pop phenomenology of conceptual car art is often present as unrealized potential. It is there in a work of art yet left silent: experienced by the viewer in full-­body gusto while perhaps not recognized, discussed, or thought about. Because it seems to lack critical importance, the presence of the automobile in the abstract and experimental zone of conceptual art often disappears chameleonlike into the background, as it has with most accounts of sculptor Tony Smith’s famous description of driving down the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. Though an artificial prosthetic-­like device, the car in works of conceptual art goes unnoticed because of its naturalized mediation of the world. But in reframing Smith’s quote in terms of conceptual car art and, more precisely, the work and writing on the car of the contemporary artist Julian Opie, we find a new element hidden in plain sight. It is the car, the technological tool of mediation by which Smith came to an epiphanic understanding of the Zen-­like repetitive logic of minimalist sculpture. Though a half of a century separates the words of artists Smith and Opie, their descriptions of the experience of the car and the road are testament to the importance of the automobile as a perceptual device mediating the human and world, artist and the articulation of form. In placing them side by side, I intend not so much to show plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, but to bring home the centrality of technological mediation in the art of the post-­WWII era. The quote from Smith comes from a famous interview with curator and collector Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr. and is often used in histories of minimalism to set in relief the aesthetic of mechanical repetition at work in minimalist sculpture. For Smith, the repetitive rolling of car wheels and driving on a brand new, desolate, and seemingly infinite stretch of highway captures this aesthetic, but his mode of discovery—the midwife of his aesthetic that is the car—has never been discussed in any way, recognized, or, as I do here, theorized. Assuming it to be unimportant, art historians ignore the presence of the car, furthering the sense that it is an assimilated shell with a lens attached to the body. In connecting Smith’s account of driving along the unfinished freeway to Opie’s work and writing on the car, I home in on the car’s importance, bringing together two artists, one of the past, the other of the present, and their discussions of the technologized perception of the automotive experience. In resituating Smith’s quote, I am able to posit a new framing of conceptualism that, though overlooked, was always already extant. Before I get to the meat of the matter of conceptual car art, a brief excursus on terminology is in order. First I would like to rethink the once succinct and separate artistic 34 // Automotive Prosthetic

mediums in terms of an ecological paradigm of interchange and mediation borne in part on the automobile. Second, and by connection, I would like to hypothesize that conceptual art was part of something broader, an instance of what I would like to call the “conceptual turn.” The conceptual turn is a critical sensibility, choice, and attitude that here links two seemingly disparate artists, Tony Smith and Julian Opie, and broadens our temporal understanding of conceptual art. I connect Smith to Opie by way of the question of technological mediation, experiencing the world through the car, in order to direct our attention to something profound—namely, a discussion of the temporal elasticity, breadth, and characteristic of conceptualism. In rethinking conceptual art in terms of technology and the automobile, I argue for a broadened history of conceptual art, one not so much with deeper roots (as Marcel Duchamp and Laszlo Moholy-­Nagy continue to mark catalytic beginnings), but with an earlier incarnation (after WWII but before 1966) and a more expansive influence.23 The few histories of conceptual art that currently exist focus on what I call “high conceptualism,” the six years of 1966 to 1972, further set in relief by the iconic phrase “dematerialization of art.”24 The idea and temporal framing are now canonical. In viewing conceptualism as a finite movement within art, these histories, though seminal and extremely useful, bear a logic generated by “styles”—the writing and teaching of art history as a linear trajectory of one style subsuming and overcoming another in sequential fashion. In limiting conceptual art to a proscribed period, these historians fail to understand the fundamental paradigm shift that conceptual art initiated in the postwar period. Furthermore, these histories of a contained conceptualism do nothing to explain the grammatical role of conceptual art in contemporary art practices of the twenty-­first century, that is to say, its omnipresence, or in Roberta Smith’s cheeky words, how it became “the new Cubism.”25 Yet, instead of a style, conceptualism understood according to the conceptual turn is a sensibility and pattern of choices: it is an artistic process driven by the myriad tropes that a century ago emerged with Duchamp’s readymade, the performance of what first he and then Thierry de Duve called pictorial nominalism (literally, the picture in name, not essence), and the general yet related question, “What is art?” Building on de Duve’s work on Duchamp and the question of the artistic medium, Rosalind Krauss locates photography as the central instrument causing the move within art away from medium specificity to the broad and porous field of art-­in-­general.26 The photograph is, for Krauss, “the wrecker of unitary being,” and by turns, Conceptual Car Art \\ 35

the most important force in the move away from art practiced according to a specific medium or traditional support.27 The photograph is also a mode of technological communication, and is thus a catalyst like the car for ontologically and epistemologically rethinking the subject-­viewer in terms of a new relationship between art, technology, and institution, to name just three forces touched in this transformation. I would thus like to extend Krauss’s powerful and apt identification of photography as “the wrecker of unitary being” to include a host of technological tools, as they are corroborated and assisted by critical thinking in the identification of an equally general form of practice identified in the word “mediation.” The action of mediation is central to the conceptual turn. Mediation destabilizes the conventional sense of medium—painting, sculpture, architecture—casting it into the realm of embodiment, relations, and the affective. In the word “affective,” I intend to underscore the unknowable, immeasurable, and subjective side of technology, its existential and imaginative side. In a similar spirit, Brian Rotman argues for an understanding of the sublime in mediation, or more precisely the “ghost effect” of “all communicational media.” They “have about them an aura of the uncanny and the supernatural.”28 Krauss does not enter the supernatural in getting beyond medium specificity, but she does resort to a paramedium position: a sense of medium that looks toward mediation, moving beyond, outside, and resistant to the clean boundaries between painting and sculpture. The critical interrogation inherent in the question “What is art?” and technological filtration open and expand the intellectual space of meaning within art, creating a necessary distance from what was once a more direct act of making, experiencing, and knowing a work of art. In short, mediation replaces immediacy. Often when art historians or critics today invoke the challenges that technology have posed to epistemological and ontological conventions, it is in the name of wireless and digital modes of technological mediation—cell phones, computers, the Internet, and the like. What goes overlooked is that utterly banal but altogether transformational, life-­cultivating, and urban form-­giving mode of technological being-­in-­the-­ world: the automobile. I would like to frame the automobile here, as it exists in a bevy of artworks, as an instigator of the shift from medium-­specificity to mediation, which is no less important than any other preceding form of technology, from the printing press to the Sony portapak, the paintbrush to the computer. Similar to these other means of technology, the car is a force for the rethinking of the medium in terms of what New Left critic Ray36 // Automotive Prosthetic

mond Williams describes as “social practice.”29 Similar to his thinking on “mediation,” the medium as social practice marks a shift from art conceived according to its materialization as a succinct object within a clearly outlined subject-­object, viewer-­viewed relationship to a set of objects interconnected in space. The car is part of the very banal, very common social practice of driving—inclusive of getting a driver’s license, buying and registering a car, purchasing insurance, paying for a place to put the car, and driving down the highway with fellow drivers. These things are interlaced in an ecological matrix, creating a continuum described by Williams as a “form of social organization.”30 We find works of conceptual art in which the automobile functions as a lens and thus also maker and midwife of perception. The classical artistic medium gives way to art functioning as a mediation of the world, setting in relief a system of vector-­like nodes including the artist, art world, and academy, and with this specific body of work, the political economy of the automobile. Driving down an unfinished freeway, minimalist sculptor Smith described those transformations borne by the automobile in a revelatory moment. In an interview in the 1960s, he recalled to the contemporary art expert Wagstaff: When I was teaching at Cooper Union in the first year or two of the ’50s, someone told me how I could get on to the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. I took three students and drove from somewhere in the Meadows to New Brunswick. It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by the hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes and colored lights.31

Smith described the subjective element of the automotive experience through observations of the artificiality and what he found by relation to be the unconventional artistic qualities of the highway and the automotive landscape. For Smith, the subjective openness of the road and driving triggered a parallel opening of the mind. A younger artist of a different generation, the painter, sculpture, and ideogram designer Julian Opie describes the automobile as transformative of the picture plane in similar terms. Driving for Opie functions in filmic fashion, creating an “infinite picture.”32 The car makes for shape shifting along the roadside and within the cognitive realm of art; that is, like other technologies, it catalyzes changes in the way we make, Conceptual Car Art \\ 37

receive, and perceive art. Not only did Smith shed his preconceptions and conventional understanding of art through the car on the road, that is, by way of the mediation of the automobile, but he came to the conclusion that “the experience on the road was something mapped out but not socially recognized.” He thought to himself, “It ought to be clear that’s the end of art.” The car was a “wrecker of unitary being” for Smith. It destroyed the “being” of the enclosed, succinct, and disparate medium as well as an older, more conventional definition of art. In an odd turn of events, technological mediation gave to Smith an understanding that art must be immediate: “There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it.”33 In Smith’s famous account, there are coupled two types of interconnected and overlapping experience, one that is technologically mediated by a machine, and the other immediate, in real time, and rooted in the body. Smith found immediacy in the automotive experience because of its emancipatory value: its relationship to the open road and, more important for this argument, its wrecking of unitary being. At the time, using the car for discovery or as a perceptual tool for making art was feral in its far removal from the confines of the academy and art world. The car was no doubt out of bounds. As we will find in the following chapters, conceptual artists working in the same years (Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, John Baldessari, Dennis Hopper, Paul McCarthy, et al.) made work perceptually mediated by the car because, in its lowness, banality, and what art and language chronicler John Roberts describes in terms of a “primitivistic renewal,” the automobile, among other critical acts and technological forces, turned the status quo of the high formalism that was the mainstay of Greenbergian modernism on its head.34 The car collapsed art into the everyday life of technological mediation. It mediated reality while also functioning as a recognizable form of signage within art. As with the documentary photograph, the automobile functioned as a trope signaling amateurism and everyday commonality, which in turn helped to destroy the old high-­art system of medium-­specificity—painting as separate from sculpture as separate from architecture—which had been in place if not immemorially then since early modernity. In a careful reading of the same quote from Smith, the art historian Pamela M. Lee claims, “The car literally drives this sense of medium.”35 The car helped to unravel medium-­specificity within the arts. As with other forms of technology, the automobile brought forth a new understanding of perceptual knowledge, new patterns of relating to the world, which in turn 38 // Automotive Prosthetic

transformed representations of that world. The flip side of the car as an art-­ sign of banality is the reality that the automobile had become a readymade biological extension—a machine naturalized and assimilated to the human body, or a prosthetic. The car had equally become part of the ecology of North American urbanism. It was present in art because it was omnipresent on North American roads. Looking ahead to the late twentieth century, Opie describes the car-­based project Imagine You Are Driving (1993) to Tate curator Mary Horlock according to a similar set of variables. Opie discusses the process of mediation in his experience of the car and, by connection, the combined exhilaration and nihilism of speeding along the highway. Opie’s account of the road lays bare the role technology plays in creating an escapist experience: “You only experience a motorway by driving on it, and the experience is kind of numbing—you leave reality, the state of speed being the negation of reality. I wanted to create this effect, the numbing shift out of reality.”36 The road brings a bodily sense of immediacy that is similar to Smith’s account of the New Jersey Turnpike with the exception that it distances you from reality rather than pushing you closer to it. An installation of Imagine You Are Driving at the Haywood Gallery in London included several road perspective paintings in opaque colors and minimalist form reminiscent of the isotypic figures of the Viennese Bauhausler Otto Neurath, computer monitors playing animated versions of the road-­view paintings, and three racetrack sculptures cast in concrete that look like oversized versions of toy racetracks made for miniature Match Box cars (Figure 1.1). Each component of the project— painting, video, and sculpture—has an anonymity rooted in Opie’s interests in systematicity: his fascination with the mass manufacturing of parts to create vast civil engineering projects that in turn make up the greater gestalt of the experience of the road. The paintings show a view presumably through the front windshield of a car in an un-­peopled landscape (Figure 1.2). The video is an animated loop of the same view. With the sculpture of the racetrack, Opie found inspiration in the module-­based systems of architectural and civil engineering megastructures. Opie explains: I based the racetrack sculptures on Scalectrix tracks, where you build your own track from various parts. With Imagine you can order these [a related project] I used this idea of creating systems, where you had a number of units out which you could order and build something—inspired by buying kitchen units from Ikea.37 Conceptual Car Art \\ 39

F i g u r e 1.1.

Julian Opie Imagine You Are Driving installation, Hayward

Gallery, London, 1994. Includes (on the floor) sculptures (1993); (on the side walls) paintings (1994); and (on the far wall) computer film (1993). Courtesy of Julian Opie Studio, Artists Rights Society, and Lisson Gallery, London.

F i g u r e 1.2.

Julian Opie, Imagine You Are Driving, 1993. Courtesy of

Julian Opie Studio, Artists Rights Society, and Lisson Gallery, London.

There is a fusion of toylike playfulness and modern technocracy in Opie’s systems approach. The seemingly mass-­produced homogeneity of Opie’s concrete components mimic in miniature the mass-­manufactured nature of the automotive landscape for which such components, when blown up to life size, become the infrastructure. The paintings and video loop bear a similar anonymity, but shot through the visual grammar of early video game technology. By connection, the anonymity of the road views in the paintings and video loop reveal the cultivation of technocratic mores—the normalization of the highway commute—in children through patterns of play. Opie hypostatizes the process of the naturalization of the car by using a video-­game view to the road as a basic symbol. While the pared-­down image functions very similarly to Neurath’s universalizing system of pictograms, triggering immediate recognition by way of a seemingly natural set of signifiers—rolling road, landscape, and a billboard—Opie’s displacement of the video-­game roadscape symbol into the gallery setting frames it as other, the unnatural and manmade reality in which we live.38 Opie actively mediates reality and the world of art at several different levels in Imagine You Are Driving. Critical distancing is catalyzed in form, content, and technological means. His appropriation of banal subject matter—the digitized view to the road and the highway—for the realm of high art is an easily recognizable trope, the once avant-­garde annihilation of artistic autonomy by collapsing art into the everyday life performed in this instance by references to the act of driving. Yet it is not an actual view to the road, but one concocted by the computer. That the simulacrum of the view to the road is the basis here tells us that reality, like art, is highly contested. In keeping with the conceptual turn, it intimates the constructed nature of both art and reality. At the same time the works that make up Imagine You Are Driving must be seen in light of other projects the artist made around the same time, such as Imagine You Can Order These (1992) and Imagine You Are Walking (1993), the bright colors and standardized form of which make ironic comments on the standardization of choice and packaging of lifestyle. Viewers deduce from this work that the human imagination has similarly been standardized, manufactured, and commodified, like the objects that feed it. At base, however, Imagine You Are Driving tells of a world negotiated and mediated by the automobile. In flattened and Spartan form, the paintings show a caricature and dreamlike translation of the automotive landscape, the manner in which it has become archetypally inscribed in our subconscious, made normative and biologically part of the collecConceptual Car Art \\ 41

tive memory of automotive citizens of the world. Opie readily makes connections between the human and the machine, in particular by way of the driver-­car-­computer trifecta. In describing the open road, Opie underscores the homology between the windshield and screen: “And of course the glass is like the windscreen of a car or a computer screen.”39 In the flatness and simple graphic nature of the forms in the road images of the paintings and the video, Opie references the obsolete technology of early race car and driving video games from the 1970s. Opie’s work functions within a field where the old categories of separate and distinct artistic mediums were long ago blown wide open. As Smith’s quote about driving along the New Jersey Turnpike tells us, minimalist-­cum-­ conceptual artists made proverbial mincemeat out of the separate categories of the arts beginning in the 1950s. As with the historic avant-­garde of the early twentieth century, it was the signature of avant-­garde artists in the post-­ WWII period to work between mediums, bleeding and blending them into one another and, as a result, transforming the succinct artwork into a fully environmental project. Art ceased to be a specific object. No longer falling within the clean historical divisions of painting, sculpture, and architecture, art became active and often took place in time and space beyond the gallery. In his engagement with the computer, road, and car, Opie likewise obliterates medium specificity thrice over. But rather than committing an act of radical rupture, Opie programmatically practices in spaces both within and beyond traditional artistic mediums. The obliteration of medium specificity is nothing new. It is his wont and habit. In both Smith and Opie, we find that the car technologically filters reality and at the same time constructs and constitutes that very reality, creating a kind of feedback-­loop sense of information. When recognized as a life-­ making and reality-­shifting filter, the automotive drive becomes more than just travel from point A to point B. As with all forms of conscious use of technology, it has the potential to become a critical-­minded interaction with the world. This is because critical consciousness of technological mediation by definition brings along with it awareness of the role technology, in this instance the car, plays in the creation of everyday mores, forms of urbanism, and political economy. Tony Smith’s recognition of the double effect of experiencing the world through the car—that technological mediation of the world filters and creates reality in the same instance—was revelatory insomuch as it also gave him a broad-­minded, progressive, and up-­to-­date sense of art in his contemporary moment. In Smith and Opie’s accounts of the 42 // Automotive Prosthetic

road experience we find a brief unfolding of enlightenment following along the lines of what media theorist Marshall McLuhan early on described in terms of the “extension.” In Understanding Media, McLuhan elaborates the nature of mediation emanating from a range of technological tools, from the spoken and written word to weapons and automation. McLuhan devotes Chapter 22 to the “motorcar.” His inclusion of the automobile in the study of the technological extensions of humans tells us that, for McLuhan, the car was as important as the spoken and written word, roadways, newspapers, cinema, and armaments. Almost at the same time that Tony Smith recounted his 1950s road experience to Samuel Wagstaff (a decade after the fact), McLuhan explained the assimilation of the car to the human body: “It is also true that the car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.”40 The subtitle of McLuhan’s chapter on the automobile was notably “The Mechanical Bride”—also the title of his first book, published in 1951, during the same years that Smith would have taken his ride with a handful of students on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. Uniting words and technological tools, McLuhan states: “All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms. The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.”41 Here, the media theorist proposes a definition of “medium” that, rooted directly in technology, is much more pertinent to the then emerging array of postmedium artistic practices. From the perspective of McLuhan’s definition of “medium,” we find that artists were not so much engaged in postmedium practices as they were moving beyond a certain outdated idea of the artistic medium into the realm of a new idea of medium, the hinge of which was the broad communication enabled by umpteen old and new media tools that had been forming individual subjectivities for some time. In other words, artists transformed the objective medium into a conduit for interactive mediation along the lines of McLuhan’s notion of extension. McLuhan injects the notion of medium with a sense of self-­reciprocity that, though bearing far different outcomes, seems upon first blush not far from the Kantian ideas of self-­reflexivity that are central to Clement Greenberg’s notion of medium. McLuhan’s focus on specific and individual modes of technological mediation resonates with Greenberg’s emphasis on clearly delineated and separate artistic mediums. In keeping with this inclusive brand of Conceptual Car Art \\ 43

“medium specificity,” McLuhan’s famous phrase “the medium is the message” implies that the technological medium of any given experience, from reading the text printed in a newspaper to driving a sports car, has specific effects on the experience or interpretation and knowledge gleaned. The tools of mediation must not be seen as so many disinterested midwives of experience, but rather as formative of it.42 Out of this unique form of reciprocity in McLuhan’s theory of medium we find that there is a fundamental distinction in individual agency separating Greenberg from McLuhan. If the artist-­as-­agent in Greenberg’s paradigm of medium actively transforms material in a unidirectional fashion, then the artist-­as-­agent in McLuhan’s paradigm is but one point in a matrix of interacting and crossing vectors. The agent in McLuhan’s understanding does not simply use a technological device to make art in a one-­to-­one relationship, wherein subject acts upon material to yield object, as in Greenberg’s paradigm. Rather, the McLuhanite artist-­as-­agent is herself always transformed by technology and contributing to the transformation of the collective epistemological state of being by actively using technology. Conceptually, McLuhan’s “medium” proffers a user, an artist-­as-­agent, who makes art through technological tools in a relay, a back-­and-­forth of labor, force, and, most appropriately, communication, the dynamism of which works something like a feedback loop. The artist changes as the tools change and, in turn, the nature of the medium and object co-­actively change. Building on this idea, Donna Haraway later developed a related concept of cyborg critical consciousness. I would like to reframe Smith and Opie’s thinking, their experience of the world through cars, in terms of the cyborg percipient, and by connection to direct our framing of conceptualism beyond the realm of language toward an embodied cybernetic paradigm. Their collective consciousness of the cultivating aspects of technology, in particular the car, is also a matter of confronting and owning the destructive repercussions of technology as well. In Haraway’s words, cyborg consciousness brings with it a form of “taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology,” which in turn might mean “refusing an anti-­science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skilful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts.”43 Critical consciousness of technology is coeval with taking heed of the full effects of technology, knowing today, for example, that by using a global positioning system in your car or a Roomba to clean household floors you 44 // Automotive Prosthetic

are imbricated in the American war machine, as the technologies for both were developed by the Pentagon.44 Or, for that matter, that in driving your car, whether a Prius or Hummer, you are equally bound up into the global political economy of petroleum. Collective cyborg consciousness confronts, embraces, and takes responsibility for the good and bad transformations wrought by technologies and welcomes the supercession of old essentialist paradigms of “human nature,” the artistic “medium,” and “art” broadly conceived by more recently theorized human-­machine interfaces. At the same time, we find that this interface reflects back on the thinking human body, showing the body itself to be a fundamental tool of mediation. In early conceptual art, the body is a filter of immediate and unscripted critical acts. Starting in the 1950s, happenings, performance art, and experimental dance are evidence of this. By connection, Smith’s drive on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike reinforced the need for immediacy in artistic experience, the same sense of immediacy motivating other formative moments in the longer, broader plenum of conceptual art, including Fluxus events, Allan Kaprow’s happenings, and Carolee Schneeman and Vito Acconci’s performance art, all of which occurred roughly in the ten years or so surrounding Smith’s account to Wagstaff. Here, when brought together, we find a more general sense of mediation functioning in terms of a critical distancing, technologically along the road in the car, intellectually in terms of a catalyzing a radical rupture with past definitions of art, and corporeally as the body performing in the ephemeral and instantaneous event. Both types of mediation, technologically and intellectually negotiated, usher an end to the modernist paradigm of artistic experience. To repeat Smith’s words, “It ought to be clear that’s the end of art.” In Chronophobia, Lee sees a connection between Smith’s experience and a new temporal paradigm for art: Smith’s narrative conveys a sense of openendedness around the work of art that is a function of the organization and expansion of its media. Something that defies not only the categorization of the discrete work of art but signals the very “end” of art itself because, paradoxically, it is endless.45

While the “endlessness” of the rising new art may have signaled for some the possibility to create and activate a temporality that functioned outside of and alternatively to market-­based norms, Lee describes a much more phobic sensibility among artists of the time. Under the umbrella term “chronoConceptual Car Art \\ 45

phobic,” Lee expresses what Hansen calls “technesis.” That is, Lee brackets technology, reifying it rather than interrogating it according to its full contextuality. She explains a condition of fear and paranoia that artists working “across movements, mediums, and genres” experienced in terms of an “insistent struggle with time.46 Lee’s overarching thesis on fears of new normative temporality borne of “technological rationality” is less persuasive than certain of the intricacies by which she argues it.47 Following from her careful reading of Smith, Lee looks to the etymological root of the term “medium,” as it comes from the Latin medius, meaning middle, to shift the focus from an object-­centric understanding of making to an in-­between process and act, reinscribing “medium” as a middle condition rather than according to it a reified status, a thing that can be bought, sold, and collected. The artistic medium, like the work itself, becomes more a matter of interactive experience—a matter of mediation—than a passive rumination between viewer and object. Smith’s account of his drive along the turnpike fortifies changes already in process in the post-­WWII art world. They are shifts that in hindsight seem fundamentally for Lee to be about a radically new sense of time, the time of “global technocracy,” which resulted in a broad sense of cultural anxiety registering in works of art, such as the kinetic projects of the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely.48 What Lee views as a catalyst of phobia in mid-­century art may have more to do with her own fears than those of the artists about whom she writes. In the preface to Chronophobia, Lee confesses one force in the writing of her text: her fears while driving on freeways.49 Lee’s reading of time in the postwar period is hindered by a personal phobia of technology—the car—and an unrealistically negative interpretation of its effect on artists of the period. Departing from yet building upon Lee’s time-­based understanding of the radical shifts of the art world over the last half century, I would like to argue that the shifts in making art in a posthistorical reality are equally a matter of the ubiquity of technology, from the telephone to the TV, the automobile to the personal computer, the existence of which calls for an alternative understanding of contemporary art broadly understood. While embracing Lee’s statement that “the car is its own medium,” if only to tweak it by asserting that “the car is its own mediation,” I do not accept Lee’s observation that a technologically catalyzed “phobia” about time was the main undercurrent for the unique kineticism of postwar art. Rather, this study sees technology, in particular the car, as significantly transformative, in both good and bad ways, of perception as evinced 46 // Automotive Prosthetic

in works of conceptual art from the 1950s to the present. Smith’s account is proof of the car’s importance in the ongoing cultivation and evolution of the human sensorium. For artist Smith, the experience of the car and the drive along the road meant not so much an end to art, but an end to the art that had been with putative Western civilization since the codification of one-­ point perspective by the architect Brunelleschi in the 1420s. The car, like the telephone, the TV, the Sony portapak handheld video camera, and the computer, helped to unravel and replace long-­held conventions of human communication within the arts that had been in place since Brunelleschi and held steadfast until Clement Greenberg’s high formalism of modern painting in the mid-­twentieth century. In this unfolding, we are reminded of Victor Hugo’s prescient words on technological transformation in The Hunchback of Notre Dame: “This will kill that.”50 If Hugo meant printing will kill architecture, in this instance it means the car, along with the other aforementioned forms of technology, will kill the medium-­specificity and self-­reflexivity of art vaunted by Greenberg. In the words of Smith, then, we are witness to a profound turning of the page in the history of art and communication, from modernism to postmodernism, which must likewise be understood according to a broad sense of mediation: the mediation an artist undertakes through the tools of technology and by means of the sheer critical encounter, choice, or action.

The Car as Mediator: The Bodying Forth of Conceptual Art in the 1950s

The conceptual turn rears its head in the years of Smith’s drive, at the dawn of the 1950s. It is there, in the decade of the 1950s, that we find symptoms of broad cultural changes, a fullness of transformation from which the conceptual turn first emerged. I would like to demarcate three crucial reasons for this focus. First, it is that decade, in fact its first half, that was host to the critical analysis of the “folklore” and “mythologies” of the mass media by Marshall McLuhan and Roland Barthes, respectively, the two most important scholars of rhetoric and media analysis in the second half of the twentieth century. The publishing of these two books, one by a Canadian professor and the other a French literary critic, describes a new condition in which the mass media had achieved a colossal influence unlike anything known before in history. The new powers of affect garnered by the mass media were Conceptual Car Art \\ 47

cause for a new epistemological mode, both critical and deconstructive in nature. McLuhan and Barthes were the first to posit such a means to interpret rhetoric in the new age of mass media-­fication. This means of critical-­ minded interpretation is instrumental in the conceptual turn. Second, it is also in that time that we find the seeds of the conceptual turn in the fine arts through the blossoming in unique postwar form of the sense of mediation, both critical minded and technological: a rising protocol in the making of art that had found its incipient form in the work of Duchamp and Moholy-­Nagy some four decades earlier. Third, the early 1950s would mark the beginning of a new stage of American dominance in the world, an imperialism driven by both cultural and military power, the foundational roots of which were a newly exploding housing market, the military industrial complex, and the mass manufacturing of the automobile in numbers higher than any other country in the world.51 The decade of the 1950s was host to a paradigm shift the full effects of which we are feeling now in the art world in the form of the conceptual turn. The objects of evidence, I argue, are the media analyses of McLuhan and Barthes and two formally related objects, a scroll with a tire print by experimental composer John Cage and painter, performance artist, and then “neo-­dadaist” Robert Rauschenberg, and the original scroll on which Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road. Published within a few years of one another, McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951) and Barthes’s Mythologies (1957) take the iconography and language of advertising as their subject.52 Each collection of analytical vignettes of popular culture inscribes the most important components of the interpretative template constitutive of the conceptual turn. They bring keen awareness of how the mass media, its tools and spokespeople, naturalize the manmade while laying bear the power of irony as a critical practice useful in the determination of “truth.” Wrapping anthropological language around a classical Marxist reading, McLuhan and Barthes refer to advertising as a new mode of massified storytelling—­folklore and mythology—which in turn requires a new kind of analysis and reader. In the preface, McLuhan warns his readers against misreading his work: “Many who are accustomed to the note of moral indignation will mistake this amusement for mere indifference.”53 Old patterns of moral indignation are useless on the new horizon of interpretation. Readers looking for a moral voice would be disappointed with this early, for McLuhan found the old antinomies of moral judgment useless in analyzing the new mode of mass media communication. McLuhan describes a wide range of possibility that 48 // Automotive Prosthetic

technological communication might bring: “It is full, not only of destructiveness but also of promises of rich new developments to which moral indignation is a very poor guide.”54 The new reader must likewise not look for a “truth” at the core of his analytical readings of a given newspaper article or advertisement in The Mechanical Bride. “No effort has been made to exhaust their meaning,” he tells us, referring to the individual articles that are the subject of each excursus.55 Delineating a reader-­based interpretation of the “work,” McLuhan states there is no single interpretation of the individual pieces included in The Mechanical Bride. Similar to analyses of “The Romans in Films,” “Toys,” and “Soap-­powders and Detergents” in Barthes’s Mythologies, McLuhan’s vignettes are not organized in linear fashion. There is neither narrative organization nor a sense of moral piety in each presentation of readings. The individual vignettes can be read at will, by picking up the book and diving in anywhere, beginning, middle, or end. McLuhan explains, “Because of the circulating point of view in this book there is no need for it to be read in any special order. Any part of the book provides one or more views onto the same social landscape.”56 Refusing to accept the naturalization of the new language of myth common to the collective media environment, Barthes distinguishes early on between the “naturalness” and “historical” quality of mythological language in the preface to the 1957 publication of Mythologies: The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience at the sight of “naturalness” with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history. In short, in the account given of our contemporary circumstances, I resented seeing Nature and History confused at every turn, and I wanted to track down, in the decorative display of what-­goes-­without-­saying, the ideological abuse which in my view is hidden there.57

The new reader of contemporary mythology begins with the following premise: nature has been bastardized for the ends of manipulation and profit. We find here a homology between Barthes’s reader and Haraway’s cyborg of many years later. The cyborg reader is also skeptical about “nature”—as an object, setting, or condition. A vigilant consumer of objects and knowledge, Barthes’s reader will evolve into Haraway’s, a genderless human-­becoming-­ machine interrogating an everyday life fabricated by the mass media, knowConceptual Car Art \\ 49

ing well that “what counts as nature—a source of insight and promise of innocence—is undermined, probably fatally.”58 Barthes’s is a world in which, like Haraway’s and our own in the present, irony functions as a sharp-­ edged knife necessary for parsing the truth. In many ways foreshadowing the role comedians have come to play in news writing and broadcasting in the twenty-­first century, Barthes underscored the interpretative function of comedy in what was then the beginnings of the perverse and surreal reality of the news media today: “What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.”59 In the second part of the book, Barthes applied the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics to the practices of everyday life in the attempt to provide readers a means by which to astutely analyze the new language of mythology on their own. Artists practicing the conceptual turn in the present have habituated Barthes’s precept that “myth is a semiological system,” internalizing as practice the fact that “semiology has taught us that myth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear normal.”60 The automobile plays a semiological role in each analysis of pop culture allegories, with Barthes more directly treating the automobile in a piece on the Citroen DS, while McLuhan’s evaluation of the automobile might be considered merely circumstantial in this, the first of his publications. While perhaps simply a matter of an accidental overlap of verbal play, the title of McLuhan’s book, The Mechanical Bride, would also be the subtitle of his chapter on the “Motorcar” in Understanding Media, first published in 1964. It also should be noted that McLuhan took both the title of his 1951 book and the subtitle of the “motorcar” chapter of his 1964 book from Marcel Duchamp’s large painting on glass, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–1923).61 In the simple renaming of the car as the “mechanical bride,” McLuhan links the father of conceptual art to his own reading not only of the mass media but also of the car. The “mechanical bride” was McLuhan’s specific and general denomination of the car and the mass media writ large, which, if taken to be willful and intended, places the car as one leg in a triangulation of technology, art, and mediation. We are brought back to a main strand of thinking here, namely that the automobile is a central mediator between percipient and world, one that has been often overlooked by art historians and critics despite the presence of works of art, in this instance works of literary criticism, centering not so much on the car as an artistic object but, more precisely, on the car as a prism and technological 50 // Automotive Prosthetic

extension. That said, Barthes embeds a fetish-­object reading—a looking-­at sensibility—of the designs of the 1957 Citroen in a book otherwise devoted to an understanding of the mass media as formative of the way we perceive and approach being in the world. In a fit of effusive adulation, Barthes describes the new Citroen: It is obvious that the new Citroen has fallen from the sky inasmuch as it appears at first sight as a superlative object. We must not forget that an object is the best messenger of a world above that of nature: one can easily see in an object at once a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation of life into matter (matter is much more magical than life), and in a word a silence which belongs to the realm of fairy-­tales.62

The new Citroen DS (une diesse française) strikes away questions of generative origin in its quality of seeming to have “fallen from the sky.” Barthes blithely welcomes this goddess into a godless machine age in which the beautiful new design of the Citroen appears as though from the firmament, tweaking deus ex machina into machina ex machina in a new age of parthenogenesis in which the machine biologically gives birth to the machine. I would like to turn the focus to two automobile-­based objects analogous to McLuhan and Barthes’s mass media analyses: a 23-­foot scroll with the imprint of an inked tire, Automobile Tire Print, made by John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg in 1953, and the 120-­foot scroll on which Jack Kerouac typed the original draft of On the Road in a three-­week period in 1951. They are iconic signifiers of a national preoccupation with the automobile and its infiltration into society as a maker and enabler of new perceptual norms. The objects resonate with McLuhan and Barthes’s work on the car; McLuhan’s writing on the car in The Mechanical Bride seems incidental, oblique, and discursive, and Barthes’s is descriptive of the car as a literal and blunt object of high design. In parallel fashion, both scrolls are objects reflective of the wide-­ranging effects of the car. They mimic the literal, temporal nature of the road experience in their unfurling or “unrolling” and distill the metaphorical formation of perceptual norms as individual works of art and literature. With Automobile Tire Print, artists Cage and Rauschenberg use the car as a printing device (Figure 1.3). Rauschenberg recounts inviting Cage to bring his truck to Fulton Street in New York City, where he directed Cage to drive Conceptual Car Art \\ 51

F i g u r e 1.3.

Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, Automobile Tire Print, 1953. Black paint on

twenty sheets of paper mounted on fabric. Courtesy of San Francisco Museum of Art. Purchase through a gift of Phyllis Wattis. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, San Francisco; licensed by VAGA, New York.

his Model A very carefully along the center of twenty adhesively connected sheets of standard typing paper as Rauschenberg poured black house paint beneath one of the tires.63 Curator Robert Saltonstall Mattison writes about how Automobile Tire Print is Rauschenberg’s imprint of New York’s urbanism, in particular the busy automotive traffic that is typical today of this east-­ west route running through lower Manhattan. While in his own account Rauschenberg describes how quiet Fulton Street was at the time, it seems quite plausible that the piece represents Rauschenberg’s general response to his recent move from rural North Carolina, where he had been studying and teaching at Black Mountain College, to the noise and movement of New York City. The work might also be seen as an experimental musical composition with the avant-­garde Fluxus composer Cage as composer-­driver in a performance piece directed by Rauschenberg, the record of which is the composition-­like scroll. Mattison further discusses the piece as it relates to other works by Rauschenberg that invoke the dynamism of “mobility and extension.”64 Seen in the context of other works in Rauschenberg’s larger oeuvre such as Monogram (1955–1959), First Landing Jump (1961), and The 1/4 Mile or Two Furlong Piece (1981), the role of the car loses its specificity as a uniquely transformative technological tool. Mattison absorbs the main signifying figure of the piece—the tire track of a car—into the formal abstraction of a more generalized sense of “mobility.” This interpretation tends to lose 52 // Automotive Prosthetic

sight of the significance of the automobile as a unique technological mediator of life experiences. By contrast, Mattison’s emphasis on “extensiveness” in this work, Rauschenberg’s intention to shift the art discourse into a space of greater dilation and openness rather than “uniformity . . . confinement or isolation,” brings us back to the car as it relates to Tony Smith’s drive along the New Jersey Turnpike, which occurred in the same time period.65 The car in both the Automobile Tire Print and Smith’s drive with students is the mediator of such extensiveness, dilation, and, as stated above, emancipation from an older paradigm of norms within the art world. There is a similar extensiveness and pushing of boundaries at work in a parallel object, also a scroll, Jack Kerouac’s first draft of On the Road from 1951 (Figure 1.4). While Kerouac’s legendary writing of the book in a three-­ week period in 1951 has become the dominant heroic tale behind its making, the book was actually years in the making. In letters to Neal Cassady, among others, Kerouac had been taking notes about a pair of friends hitchhiking across the country at least since 1947.66 Howard Cunnell explains how the long unfolding scroll embodies freedom: “On the Road is the beginning of a process in which Kerouac dismantles and then radically reapplies what he has learned as a fiction writer so that he can, as John Holmes writes, ‘free the whole range of his consciousness to the page.’”67 Yet the unfolding scroll was but one iteration of a series of interconnected notes, fragments, and drafts that Kerouac had been working on, writing and rewriting. He decided in 1951 to transcribe the novel that had until then existed in disparate parts onto the scroll, an object consciously made by Kerouac to allow for hours of uninterrupted writing. Kerouac also intended to mimic the facility of what had been open and endless driving on the long swaths of macadam that made up the American road. The scroll on which he typed was a handcrafted object. Kerouac carefully cut “paper into eight pieces of varying length and shaped it to fit the typewriter. The pencil marks and scissor cuts are still visible on the paper. Then he taped the pieces together.”68 Like Cage and Rauschenerg’s scroll, Kerouac’s scrolls unfolds, symbolizing an alternative sense of art making and temporality. If Cage and Rauschenberg’s intention was to de-­center the conventional container of the frame, Kerouac’s was to set in relief non-­narrative story writing. It is a fiction not of beginnings and ends, but of middle-­ness describing the in-­between nature of movement becoming further movement on the road. It is a fiction of mediation: a book that mediates. While the scroll is novel, indeed singular, it is banal, base, and even everyday in its mimesis of what it contains, a stream-­ Conceptual Car Art \\ 53

F i g u r e 1.4.

Jack Kerouac, original scroll of On the Road, 1951. Courtesy of

Bridgeman Art Library International, New York.

of-­consciousness account of a road trip of a motley beatnik gang. Kerouac’s particular scroll was, however, a truly a unique object, though never read in its intermediary form as an unrolling document. Its configuration as a scroll approximates the experience of the road while obliterating its function as a novel to be read. Viking Press accepted the manuscript for publication six years later, after the text had been further edited and transcribed from the scroll to regular loose-­leaf paper. What is remarkable about Kerouac’s scroll for this elaboration and demarcation of the conceptual turn is how, like Cage and Rauschenberg’s scroll, of which it is the formal homologue, it registers in appearance the dynamic techné of a rolling wheel and, by this conjunction of form coupled with the words that are the scribed form of one facet of its contents, the transformations of perception brought by way of the car as early as 1951. While not exactly the same, as one is a text and the other a tire print, they share form: they are both cylindrical tubes of recorded information. As unrolling works of art, they elicit the unending changefulness of art that was at the center of Fluxus activities emerging at the end of the decade. Though neither object emerged directly from Fluxus events, their form as registers of unrolling endlessness symbolically center on issues of flow and Heraclitian change that were core values of the group. While similar, the two objects are of course not the same. What they do share is provocative: namely, they are works by three artists—Kerouac, Cage, and Rauschenberg—making art between and beyond literature, music, and painting, the distinct disciplines in which they had practiced and/or were trained. Fluxus ringleader Dick Higgins named this material promiscuity within art “intermedia,” describing art’s new capacity to communicate in many modes as resulting from “the spread of mass literacy, to television and the transistor radio.”69 From this expansive light, both scrolls emerge from contexts in which the individually determined artistic medium has given way to something much broader and more inclusive: the performative realm of theatricality in which artists mediate ideas through ephemeral acts and events. Looking ahead to the end of the decade, Kerouac provided improvised narration to Pull My Daisy, Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s loosely narrative 1959 film starring Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, and Alice Neel, among others. In a film that offered a heady mixture of media—with painters and poets playing actors and famed photographer Robert Frank making the leap to film— Kerouac as narrator hewed close to his preordained expertise as writer. Looking back a year to 1952, Cage and Rauschenberg collaborated in Theater Conceptual Car Art \\ 55

Piece No. 1, what historians have billed as the first happening, an event that hosted Cage-­the-­composer as impresario and lecturer and Rauschenberg-­ the-­painter as low-­tech DJ, playing wax cylinders on an old Edison recorder, while his degree-­zero White Paintings (1951) were hung from the rafters to function as screens for a slide projector.70 In stepping outside of their usual roles as composer and painter, Cage and Rauschenberg perform out of self-­conscious alienation of their given métiers and, in turn, set in motion a cascading set of questions concerning the fundamental nature of the métier—the medium—as a Platonic and a priori given. Along with the other participants in this historic event (David Tudor, M. C. Richards, Charles Olson, and Merce Cunningham), the event was all about attitude. They acted upon desire and will, or what might otherwise be considered the conceptual turn.

56 // Automotive Prosthetic

e th d an tic n e o h i r 2 pt st te e p o c a Pr ch er Ph  P ile e   oto b v i co Mo ot n m ce o t pt t h a ua e Au Ca l is

r,

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Spa

,

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There has been little in the way of theory or philosophy about the car in its more than century of existence.1 Similarly, there has been little deep, philosophical analysis of the car within art, as it functions to critically reframe individual and collective perceptual mores. In pairing the phrases “mobile perception” and “automotive prosthetic,” I bring the functional to bear on the philosophical, the actual on the speculative, and thus theorize a mode of transportation and form of technology, the car. I unite these two phrases by way of the discourses of prosthesis, systems aesthetics, and cybernetics. First, the phrase “mobile perception” refers to the interlocked physical experience that begins when one takes the driver’s seat of a car, the wheel hits road, and car and human together become a nomadic vector in the matrices of highway infrastructure. It is the phenomenology of motion whereby ear-­eye-­skin coordinate in an epistemology of mobility. In a space-­time split,

\\ 57

the outer landscape of the car, characterized by shifting urbanisms, sky, and fellow travelers, competes with the interior landscape of the automotive womb, where the mind and emotions circulate through a body seated and protected in a moving car. The mobile subject drives a car, plugging herself into an assemblage of machine, road, and infrastructure, and a host of subjective responses unfold. Second, the theory of the automotive prosthetic analyzes this set of relations as they appear, manifest, and perform in works of conceptual car art. The goal is to show the existential phenomenology of car-­based conceptual art in order to rethink the forces of conceptual art tout court, and then to link the works to an outside world of events, from the banal landscape of big-­box discount retail shopping to the manufacturing base of China. The hybrid body-­machine-­road constitutes a network of bridged counterparts, with the car functioning as a prosthetic of the body. The critical position offered up through the automotive prosthetic begins with the human body, whose perception has changed and been enhanced by technological extensions. Philosopher and film theorist David Wills uses the word “prosthetic” as a connector that brings body to word, language to world. The prosthetic, as he explains, is simultaneously an addition and subtraction. “Prosthesis,” for Wills, “necessarily refers to two contradictory but complementary operations: amputation and addition; and then, of course, the animal and mineral, living or natural and artificial, and so on.”2 Technology functions here something like a conceptual arch that reveals the potential injustice of seeming justices, the rights of mass connection and communication and the denial of those rights. Without electricity, our plugged-­in force of information laborers comes to a standstill; to be without an automobile, individuals in most conurbations cannot go to work. It is the Dike, the bridge, bearing within it the A-­dikia, to recall Jacques Derrida: the jointure of communication that reveals its dis-­jointure.3 Bridging is thus also a de-­bridging, just as the extension is at the same time an “autoamputation,” in Marshall McLuhan’s words.4 Amputation and extension are dialectically connected, as stimulus and speed inspire humankind’s compulsion to “extend various parts of [the] body,” bringing on an intuitive response in the form of a “strategy of amputation.”5 The “autoamputation” that is within the logic of the extension gives substance to an “ego-­I” that is challenged by the transformation of the technologically enhanced body. The body, at once mutilated and mechanically reborn, is an ambiguous self, a doubting individual whose image is, in keeping with the Narcissus myth, “a self-­amputation or extension induced by irri58 // Automotive Prosthetic

tating pressures.”6 The prosthetic de-­centers the “ego-­I” in order to reinvent the individual as a cyborg: a technologically interconnected being who no longer adheres to the myths of “nature”—such as natural gender positions, innate racial tendencies, and essentialist biases rooted in a metaphysics of natural order. The theoretical span of the prosthesis forms a portal through which to rethink a series of photoconceptual views to the road, some of which are canonical and others little known, by both established and emerging artists. What I will show here is how the conceptual turn unfolds in the perceptual experience of the automotive prosthetic, a theory that explains the unique function and sensual prism of the photoconceptual view to the road. The view to the road in the art that follows, including works by Margaret Lawther, Paul McCarthy, Dennis Hopper, Ian Wallace, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Wall, John Baldessari, Richard Prince, Martha Rosler, Bill Vazan, Ed Kienholz, Robbert Flick, Julian Opie, and Cory Arcangel, is different from conventional views to the road in its critical sensibility. To state that the artists at hand make work through the automotive prosthetic is to propound that they are always already perceiving the world through technology and, in this instance, the car. That is to say, the car has become a naturalized oculus. Performers of the conceptual turn, they are artists acting through the automobile, arriving at their intellectual destinations by way of technology. As works of conceptual car art, and inheritors of the Duchampian legacy, these photos and photo-­ text pieces are not journalistic accounts or straight-­shot views to the road, as, for example, with the photos in Robert Frank’s The Americans. Instead, they cast that view to the road and its accouterment of freedom in doubt. They are critical of it. They show it for what it is plain, simple, and fraught, questioning it and its reproduction as image by the tropes of photographic, linguistic, and perceptual engagement. Rereading conceptualism, and more precisely photoconceptualism, in terms of the automotive prosthetic—aesthesis and perception rather than linguistics and semiotics—I argue that these works of art describe a new mode of human experience, the cyborg experience of the human-­becoming-­automotive. What follows in this chapter is a preliminary discussion of each of these photoconceptual views to the road and their representation of various urbanisms, entropic and de-­featured in nature. I then turn to the new and unique subjective encounter proffered by these works of art in the form of the cyborg subject. On the go, she experiences the world flickering by cinematically in her car, while cognizant of the power of her potentially fatal, petrol-­consuming machine. Seen from this light, the Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 59

works recast conceptualism anew, while also forging a distinct paradigm of aesthetic understanding based on the car as a machine and potent symbol of global political economy.

The Photoconceptual View to the Road

We begin our study with a comparison of two kinds of views to the road, shifting from an image that is straightforward and carefully framed to seem immediate to one that is deferred and mediated in its delivery of information. A quick comparison of a straight photograph, Frank’s U.S. 285, New Mexico (1956), and a work of photoconceptualism, John Baldessari’s Econ-­O-­Wash, 14th and Highland, from the National City Series (1967–1968), finds two views to the American road separated in time by eleven years (Figure 2.1). Though unique images—Frank’s of a barren desert highway in the American West and Baldessari’s of a banal highway strip in the California-­Mexico border town of National City—they are both black-­and-­white images that imply the car. The Swiss-­born photographer and filmmaker Frank shot U.S. 285, New Mexico while traveling across country in his 1950 Ford Business Coupe with his wife and two children during a period when they were living on the funds from a Guggenheim Fellowship he won in 1955.7 In this photograph, one of over twenty-­eight thousand taken in a two-­year period that he would winnow down to the eighty-­three of The Americans, there is no straightforward evidence of Frank’s car—no window frame, rearview mirror, or hood out front.8 We see only the desolate road. It is likely that Frank pulled the family car over to the shoulder, took his handheld 35mm Leica, got out of the car, positioned himself at the center of the road and picture frame of the camera lens, and made the shot. The result is an image in which the road disappears seamlessly into the almost flat horizon line of the desert. Frank created a photograph in one-­point perspective that gives the impression of natural perfection, a distillation of manmade macadam and God’s country in flawless union. Like Frank’s photo, Santa Monica–based conceptual artist Baldessari’s Econ-­O-­Wash, 14th and Highland is one of several images made on the road. Like Frank’s, it entails the car even though we do not see any evidence of its framing. Baldessari took the image from the window of his car while driving in his hometown of National City, California.9 He had one hand on the steering wheel and one hand on a camera facing out the driver’s side with his 60 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e 2 .1.

John Baldessari, Econ-­O-­Wash, 14th and Highland, National City Calif.,

1967–1968. Courtesy of John Baldessari and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

finger randomly shooting the utilitarian landscape of the typical American highway strip. Upon shooting, he regularly pulled over the car to record the location of the shots. Afterward, Baldessari had the photograph, one of several, silk-­screened and the location, here Fourteenth and Highland, painted by a sign painter on a large canvas. Capturing the photographic image is but one element in a manifold course of action that began with the artist driving a car, then rolling down the window, positioning the camera at the window, Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 61

carefully managing the balancing act of driving and shooting photos, capturing the image, pulling over to write down the location, developing the film, and taking the photos to a sign maker for preparation as a silkscreen image on a canvas with the address painted in sans serif lettering at the bottom. Baldessari’s hand and gesture, his direct intention, are mediated, channeled through several different interconnected tasks of a process. While Frank’s shot is the result of more direct, immediate action than Baldessari’s, both images emerge from the fount of mediation. Each begins with the camera filtering the world through its lens. Mediation is present in Frank’s image not only in that it is a photograph, but also by way of its careful creation as a balanced composition. An almost immaculate image of the landscape in one-­point perspective, it is a meticulously thought-­out concoction in the guise of an artless snapshot. Instrumental in getting Frank and family across country and in helping him find and document the stuff of The Americans, the car nonetheless plays an ancillary role as a mediator in this particular photograph. It is what got him to New Mexico, but it is not a tool in the direct making of the image. By contrast, the automobile is a central tool in the making of Baldessari’s Econ-­O-­Wash, 14th and Highland. This work, a painting, is the culmination of a complex process made up of several layers of mediation, which include the camera, the car, and a sign maker. As with the fine contrast between Jack Kerouac’s scroll containing the original draft of On the Road (1951) and Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage’s two-­spindled spool, Automobile Tire Print (1953), the differences are subtle but present, with each work producing its own kind of knowledge. They are differences that together define a pivotal shift in the perceptual practices brought on by technology, here the camera. It is another instance illustrative of what Krauss summarizes in the phrase “wrecker of unitary being.”10 Curator Douglas Fogle makes a similarly fine-­spun distinction in “The Last Picture Show,” the opening essay in the catalog accompanying the exhibition of the same name that originated at the Walker Art Museum in 2003. Rather than views to the road, Fogle looks to two photographs of men jumping mid-­air, Harry Shunk’s photo-­doctored image of Yves Klein, Leap into the Void (1960), and Henri Cartier-­Bresson’s straight shot, Behind the Gare Saint-­Lazare, Paris (1932) (Figures 2.2 and 2.3). In the former, we see the French artist, personality, and leading impresario of the nouveau réalistes Klein leaping headlong into a Parisian street. One might understand the work, prima facie, from context and precedent, in terms of Klein’s other interrogations of the “void,” his famous 1958 exhibition of nothing titled 62 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e 2.2 .

Yves Klein, Leap into the Void,

F i g u r e 2.3.

Henri Cartier-­Bresson, Behind

1960. Photograph by Shunk-­Kender. Courtesy

the Gare Saint-­Lazare, Paris, 1932. Courtesy

of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, New York.

of Magnum Photo, New York.

Le Vide, which included an empty vitrine at Iris Clert’s gallery at 3 rue des beaux-­arts in Paris, as well as his preoccupation with Zen Buddhism. Beyond the artist’s biography, there is the autonomy of the object, from which we also derive sense, the formalism and fabrication of the photograph from photomontage, its creation as a setup, to invoke Douglas Crimp’s idea of the “picture.”11 In looking to the facture of the image, we find a tightly woven nexus of mediation. Klein did not really jump into the void between building and street, but into a pile of mats pieced together by students from the nearby judo school. Deploying a manual, analogue version of Photoshop, nouveau réaliste house photographer Shunk carefully manipulated and edited the image, eliding two different shots to create a photomontage, and Klein published it in the ersatz newspaper Dimanche. Its power is in its urban presence, its dissemination in a would-­be newspaper in the city of Paris, and its construction as a “fictionalized photographic document.”12 Some thirty years earlier, the French photographer Cartier-­Bresson captured another, similar image of movement in his photograph of a man leaping gazelle-­like across a giant puddle of water at a train station in Paris. Like Frank’s composition of the road disappearing off into the horizon with perfect symmetry, Cartier-­Bresson’s Behind the Gare Saint-­L azare, Paris is Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 63

marked by compositional beauty captured in the instant, the hunter-­like photographer slaying the perfect moment of a man leaping across a pool of water that functions like a mirror. The train station shed in the background and makeshift wooden bridge surfacing from the mirror-­like water, floating jetsam, man leaping, and the upside-­down reflection of the man leaping in the foreground function to create a formal harmony and a remarkable image of chance-­like exquisiteness in the bustling, changeful life of Paris. It suggests eternal beauty in the midst of fleeting modern life. It is an accidental image, suggestive of what Jeff Wall calls the “Western Picture,” captured with vestiges of the pictorialist tradition while playing “with the notion of the spontaneous, the unanticipated.”13 Just as with Frank and Baldessari’s views to the road, Fogle’s comparison tells of the tension between two separate uses of photography: “the modernist aesthetic transmission of an authentic immediacy through the capturing of a photographic essence and the conceptual construction of a staged event that took up photography as a means to an end.”14 Like Frank’s photograph, Cartier-­Bresson’s is an image captured in an instant, with a sense of what Fogle describes as “immediacy.” In contrast, we might say, mediation is the force distinguishing the straight-­shot documentation typical of the modern, journalistically inflected work of Frank and Cartier-­Bresson from the photoconceptualism of Shunk, Klein, and Baldessari. In keeping with the logic of the conceptual turn, heightened mediation functions to set in relief and question the “assumed verisimilitude of the medium,” which is in this instance photography.15 With the work of Shunk, Klein, and Baldessari, the object of art gives way to a set of relations: an ecological unfolding of processes in time and space and a catalyst for and receiver of movement and change. Another incarnation of this interconnected ecology of forces, the car-­ body-­art matrix, is at the center, for example, of Canadian artist Margaret Lawther’s series of photographs Autopia (2006). In Lawther’s sequence of photos, the view to the road tells us more about the car’s transformation of human perception than about the road itself. The photos point at the same time to the fact that it is the road that hews body to machine and world, connecting together the natural and the manmade in what is an otherwise disparate set of images. Lawther’s views show disparate images of the road. There are those of openness, the road splicing through a green swath of big-­ skied open space at a diagonal (see Figures 2.4 and 2.5), and others of enclosure, bringing the viewer into the sign-­crowded foreground of a McDon64 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e s 2.4 a n d 2.5.

Margaret Lawther.

Margaret Lawther, Autopia Series, Red Semi, 2006. Courtesy of

ald’s drive-­thru, for example. Road and car work together to equalize the natural and the artificial, linking one to the other through modernization in the form of infrastructure. For Lawther, the car is the McLuhan-­esque “ground” around and upon which the figures of the natural and manmade landscape are erected. It is the creator of an intricate field of banal roadside architecture the temporariness of which changes the way we understand urban infrastructure: In this project I wished to look beyond the activity of driving and the technology of the car to what Marshall McLuan [sic] has referred to as the “ground” of this cultural “figure.” I examined the phenomenon of car culture in an urban situation as it is manifested by the huge service environment of roads, oil companies, car lots, filling stations, fast food outlets, and other allied services of manufacturing that are the “ground” of the car in both the city and on the highway. I wanted to look at the “ground” around the automobile in order to understand its cultural impact. For it is the “ground” of any technology that is the medium that changes everybody, and it is the medium that is the message of the technology, not only the “figure.”16

Though Lawther’s views to the road are relatively new, there is nothing terribly new or ingenious about the transformation of aesthetic possibility of which they are evidence. Humans have been seeing the world in motion for a while. We as a species have been mechanically mobile for almost two centuries, since the advent of railways. For the transportation historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch, the railroad, like the car, introduced a new sense of space-­time. This new space-­time matrix was but an earlier incarnation, if not a more constrained version, of that introduced by the automobile. Schivelbusch argues, “Space was both diminished and expanded.” Similar to the effects of automotive movement, the way it has ushered a new scale and density of urbanism in the form of sprawl, “the dialectic of this process states that this diminution of space (i.e., the shrinking of transport time) caused an expansion of transport space by incorporating new areas into the transport network.”17 In short, the technologies of transportation shaped urbanism, as well as the human will and ability to experience urbanism, just as they do today. Trains and humans bore a reciprocal relationship that ran parallel to this dialectic of space and time. Just as much as the train and railways caused radical shifts in city form, so 66 // Automotive Prosthetic

humans adapted to the train, becoming one component within a network of mechanization. Train riders viewed the world through the frame of windows while seated in rail cars. Their perceptual experience was at once mediated by and constitutive of the “machine ensemble.”18 Humans looking out onto the landscape were at one with the mechanical armature that held them. They were part of the machine. The greater apparatus of the train was trigger and aperture, generator and lens of the human perception of the world whizzing by. Humans became part of a cascade of cause and effect, an element fleshier in form than its metal neighbors, the engine, its gears, pistons and drivers, firebox, smokestack, and blast pipe. With the automobile, the “machine ensemble” of the train gave way to a system of interwoven and interactive “ecologies.”19 Bateson’s thinking informs a reality in which the human and the automobile are communicating vectors in an urban landscape of multiple and overlapping ecologies. The landscape-­human-­car trifecta creates a set of natural and manmade ecologies that are more flexible than the machine ensemble of the train. As highways have overtaken railways as the primary enabler of movement, we find ourselves in settings more complex and adaptive in quality than those of the train. I would like to link Bateson’s idea of “ecology,” here used to describe the web of affiliations created by humans and their cars, to an idea of aesthetic experience rooted in the at once constructive and destructive force of “high civilization” on “Spaceship Earth,” to use Bateson and McLuhan’s terminology.20 In the complexity of our shared Batesonian ecological existence, the human in fact sees the world through many lenses—by way of manifold apertures. The theory of the automotive prosthetic is rooted in the fact that we see the world through many technological devices (the train, plane, television, cinema, computer, telephone, camera, etc.) and that, as such, our visual experiences are often constructed by technology. Yet, at the same time, in narrowing these constructors down to just two, to the twice-­over layering of the automotive prosthetic created by the human seeing through the car window, this theory gives primacy to the role the automobile plays in the specific historical epoch of this body of conceptual car art and the greater urban condition to which it points. The art that distills the automotive prosthetic describes in the most literal fashion the experience of moving around in a car. Yet, in its dumb literalism, the art of the automotive prosthetic never loses sight of what makes its existence possible: the fact that it emerges from a global economy of oil. It is our high civilization—the mise-­en-­scène of the automotive prosthetic—that extends our perceptual capabilities while conMobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 67

tracting nature. High civilization is, though great in its level of economic development, “limited in its transactions with environment.”21 An earlier transmitter of high civilization, the train hastened human mobility through space, but the car, a more recent one, has democratized and decentralized speedy movement, transforming the collective beeline of train momentum into atomized vectors of speed shooting through an automotive landscape. Looped in, we are unbothered by, even oblivious to, this mode of now regular perception, as we increasingly experience the world flashing by at thirty, fifty, seventy miles per hour, and less and less frozen, ambling, or pedaling. Humans have become accustomed to their experience of the automotive prosthetic, as well as its replication in movies and photographs. Just as mobile and framed experience and apperception are not terribly new, so there is little that is unique about most of the works of art that distill the mobile experience of the automotive prosthetic. The automobile became instrumental to the functioning and prosperity of the American economy. With the expansion of the automotive market—both manufacturing and consumption—came a complete transformation of the space-­time of work and leisure. A decentralized urban matrix rapidly expanded, mirroring and accommodating these shifts, with commuters circulating back and forth between suburban home and downtown work along highways like the liquid-­ gel stuff flowing through a low-­slung, built-­up mechanomorph. Like the car, suburbanization and eventually sprawl became the normative condition in America. In addition to its functional role, the car was also a bearer of radical cultural shifts. Coupling forces of new perception, mescaline and the automobile, Aldous Huxley revealed how central a fixture the car had become within the American scene. In his 1954 book conveniently titled The Doors of Perception, Huxley reminisces about a drug-­addled experience with friends in West Hollywood: “We walked out into the street. A large pale-­blue automobile was standing at the curb. At the sight of it, I was suddenly overcome by enormous merriment. What complacency, what an absurd self-­ satisfaction beamed from those bulging surfaces of glossiest enamel! Man had created the thing in his own image—or rather in the image of his favorite character in fiction.”22 Huxley anthropomorphizes the automobile, regarding it as a self-­reflective, much less grotesque version of Frankenstein. In declaring that man had created the car in the image of himself, Huxley failed to understand the full systematic effect of the car. In a logic of feedback, the car had also transformed man, making him in the image of itself, the roving machine. 68 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e s 2 .6 a n d 2 .7 .

Paul McCarthy, Sunset Boulevard, 1970. Courtesy of Paul McCarthy and

Hauser and Wirth.

As the view to the road becomes normative and not just a novelty, we see a parallel shift in its presence—its mode of deciphering and communication—within art. Take for example three works of art almost throw-­away in the marginality of what they depict: a little-­known early set of photographs by the video artist Paul McCarthy, Sunset Boulevard (1970); a work by actor-­ cum-­artist Dennis Hopper, Double Standard (1961); and the bright lights playing against a black night in the Canadian conceptualist N. E. Thing Co.’s Strip Mall, Toronto Ontario (1974) (see Figures 2.6 and 2.7). McCarthy’s Sunset Boulevard is a series of black-­and-­white photographs taken through the car window. Twenty-­four photographs show standstill frontal views seen from a car rolling mid-­motion. The viewer sees the road and horizon as though a driver, with shots taken “approximately every mile” from a car driving down Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.23 There are no people on the streets, just scenes of macadam, cars, and the roadside strip through the front window. Objects out front vie with subtle streaks and blotches on the windshield and reflections from inside the car of dashboard detritus. One after another, images show the truncated word “XING,” the white lines on black asphalt, cars passing in front, the silhouette of a person’s head in a station wagon up ahead, a palm tree, and roadside architecture coming head-­on. As in his installations, films, and other photographs of the same period, such as Inverted Rooms and Hallways (1970) and, perhaps more poignantly, Fear of Reflections (Hollywood Boulevard) (1971), McCarthy interrogates the flexibility and breadth of vision. Looking in this instance is part of the hustle and bustle of whole-­body movement. He destabilizes vision by way of vertigo-­inducing photographs shot through glass and off the surfaces of mirrors.24 Unlike the means at work in Inverted Rooms and Hallways, where McCarthy uses the camera, architecture, and windows as layered apertures, Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 69

F i g u r e 2 .8 .

Dennis Hopper, Double Standard, 1961. Courtesy of ACE Gallery Los Angeles.

in Sunset Boulevard he uses the car as the mediating device of choice. The reflective imagery in Fear of Reflections is closely related to this project. Formally similar to the photorealism of Richard Estes and Robert Bechtle, they are two photographs taken mid-­traffic of cars parked in front of a storefront in the same neighborhood. The two photos are taken within just seconds of one another; a bus passes by in one and is absent in the other. Like Sunset Boulevard, Fear of Reflections shows that seeing is a matter of relations. Seeing means becoming-­other: it is a matter of pendulous, refracted, and nested reflection—looking through, back, upon, and within space. Hopper’s Double Standard is also a black-­and-­white shot taken through the windshield (Figure 2.8).25 Like the images of Lawther’s Autopia series, though, it is more of a straight photograph than a work of photoconceptualism. I nonetheless draw attention to it here as it distills a penchant to capture the world through the car window coupled with a fascination with the highway-­strip topography of Los Angeles. This photograph also coincides with Hopper’s collaboration with pop conceptualist Ed Ruscha.26 Showing the two artists’ shared interest in billboards and roadside signage, Hopper’s Double Standard appeared in the announcement for Ruscha’s first solo show at the Ferus Gallery in 1964.27 Hopper and Ruscha, like McCarthy, also shared a fascination with the destabilizing 70 // Automotive Prosthetic

power of the car’s mirrors and reflective surfaces. Like an updated version of the storefront window in a photograph by Eugene Atget, the shiny carapace of the car intensifies the late-­modern phantasmagoria of strip-­mall retail. In Hopper’s Double Standard, the rearview mirror prominently hangs from the frame of the windshield and enables dual perspectives, both through to the road and street frontage ahead and back to the cars behind. A palimpsest of signage up ahead creates visual white noise and a flattened narrative suggestive of irony that is both urban and gender based. A Standard gas station sits at the corner of the intersection. A billboard behind shows a sexy woman, hair tousled upward and in fine dress, carrying a small tray of cocktails. The sign reads, “Smart women cook with gas in Balanced Power Homes.” At the center of the photograph is a sign pointing to Melrose Avenue. A short palm tree stands in the background amid power lines and low-­slung buildings. While largely bereft of human presence, the sign pointing to Melrose gives us a sense of orientation. It tells us we are in West Hollywood, close to Sunset Boulevard, at the terminus of Route 66 and at the intersection of Melrose Avenue and Doheny Drive. It is a photograph of a run-­of-­the-­mill perceptual experience, a moment captured in time that distills the frenzy of objects and signs that are part of such banal, everyday seeing. Rudi Fuchs describes the “unphotographic quality of Hopper’s photographs”: The motifs are set down sharply, observed from a close perspective in a generally shallow, confined space. The background is often filled with additional motifs such as posters, inscriptions, ornaments: an abundance of other things and marks that come into view in the vicinity of the main motif. There is hardly room for airiness and atmosphere. The photographs are dark and compact in form.28

Hopper’s Double Standard is flat yet full, typifying the closeness of buildings, people, and cars usually characteristic of dense urban settings. It is a counterintuitive closeness for, through Hopper’s legerdemain, it describes the frantic and tentacular liteness of Los Angeles’s urban sprawl while using the visual language of denser urbanisms such as New York, Boston, or Chicago. Similar to McCarthy and Hopper’s images, reflections play on and through the curving vitreous surfaces of an automobile in N. E. Thing Company’s Strip Mall, Toronto Ontario, making many images in one (Figure 2.9). The shot is one of several records of the Canadian urban landscape taken by the husband-­and-­wife team Iain and Ingrid Baxter, who made up Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 71

F i g u r e 2 .9 .

N. E. Thing Co., Strip Mall, Toronto Ontario, 1974. Courtesy of Corkin Gallery,

Toronto.

the Canadian conceptualist N. E. Thing Company, active from 1966 to 1978. A squinched, upside-­down version of bland, strip-­mall architecture reflects off of the car hood, while the actual architecture stands right side up out front within the background of the picture plane. The inversion registers as a blur of green, red, and white lights on the car’s dark hood. While prosaic, the greasy sheen of lights in the bottom of the foreground throws off the literalism of the image, creating an imbalance in what would otherwise read forthrightly as a featureless snapshot of a shopping mall at night. In photographing the strip mall seen through the car window, N. E. Thing Company appropriated the banal, performing an “ACT,” making what they called an “aesthetically claimed thing”—something ubiquitous, ugly, and informal that the artist-­team ironically deemed aesthetically important by making a photograph of it.29 The automobile was a central tool for the N. E. Thing Company, as they drove across Canada with their children and dog in tow, documenting the bland interstices of urban and suburban spaces. Together, these three images strike a play of to-­and-­fro with scenery and objects rooted in the reflective ambivalences of looking through the car window. Though beautiful in a deadpan roadhouse way, McCarthy, Hopper, and N. E. Thing Co.’s photographs are for the most part unremarkable. In 72 // Automotive Prosthetic

their banality, their aesthetic of ugliness, they strike an alternative form of appreciation best described as a “minor beauty.” They are photographs of commonplace scenery seen peripherally and in passing. Like Franz Kafka’s letters, which Deleuze and Guattari famously called a “minor literature,” the works of art at hand are ancillary to the conventional masterwork, but nevertheless inspirational and political in their representation of infrastructure and real estate development.30 Art historian Branden Joseph developed the related idea of a “minor history,” underscoring the radical outside nature of claiming minority status within history writing. Joseph links artists Tony Oursler and Mike Kelley’s experimental rock band–based installation at the 1997 Poetics Project to the mid-­twentieth-­century avant-­garde music of Tony Conrad, Henry Flynt, and John Cage. Joseph’s idea comes out of Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on a “minor science” and “minor literature.”31 Deleuze and Guattari do not so much pose “minor” in a hierarchical relation to “major,” Joseph points out. Rather, minor formations fall outside of greater hierarchical taxonomic systems. Minor works of art, such as the car-­based images that strike a “minor beauty,” appear at the fringe of major movements, opening up “categories to their outside onto a field of historical contingencies and events that is never homogeneous and that is always political.”32 The politics in our discussion relate the viewer to the mechanics of the car and new forms of urbanization, and by connections to the workings of a global economy of oil, and war for oil. These works of art further help us to rethink conceptual art in terms of perception and experience. Yet, because they lack obvious references to language, the three works at hand are not canonical examples of conceptual art. Difficult to categorize, they are in some sense of the word marginal and unusual distillations of a very central and usual mode of perceiving the world by the automobile in landscapes of automotive urbanism. In their minority status, the images reveal how we have matter-­of-­factly come to see the world through the car. As the car has become a prosthetic extension of the human body, these works are evidence of a new mode of perception rooted in automotive movement along roads and highways. Theirs a minority status that doubles over on itself, eliding inconsequentiality into inconsequentiality. They are seemingly inconsequential because their image and significance fall outside of linguistic paradigms of interpretation, but also because of intention. As photo-­text pieces and works of photoconceptual art they mimic the dumbness of amateurism, which in turn activates a mediating mode of criticism. Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 73

For Jeff Wall looking back on this work, they “signified, or expressed, the vanishing of the great traditions of Western art into the new cultural structures established by the mass media, credit financing, suburbanization, and reflexive bureaucracy.”33 They deploy a power not just of critical distance, but more precisely a strain of mediation that resides within the “picture” newly conceived. Wall brilliantly explains this work in terms of “art photography . . . [that] had already evolved an intricate mimetic structure, in which artists imitated photojournalists in order to create Pictures.”34 Operating between documentary and self-­critical conceptualism, the works of photoconceptualism “brought photography to the forefront of the new pseudo-­ heteronomy, and permitted it to become a paradigm for all aesthetically-­ critical, model-­constructing thought about art.”35 We find here mediation atop mediation atop mediation—the snapshot, documentary image, and photojournalism mediated by the conceptualist turn, a mediation that is further propounded at a base level by another force of technology in addition to the camera: the view to the road from the car and, thus, the logic of the automotive prosthetic. These images describe the shared mode of automotive space and time created by post-­WWII North American urbanism. In this context, center distinguishes itself from periphery in a visual dialogue about urban and suburban space, only to be homogenized, made largely the same, by the view out the window of the car. The logic of the automotive prosthetic is registered in the banality of parking lots, leftover landscapes of industrialization, seriality of residential form, and everyday life in the city as center and suburban edge. In these works, the automotive prosthetic describes perception in terms of the greater experiences of political economy—real estate and the development of urban sprawl. In both literal and metaphorical fashion, these artists distill the automotive prosthetic as the lived perceptual event of a cyborg-­percipient.

Entropy and Representing the Vast Defeatured Urban Landscape

I would like to turn our attention in this section to the matter of the picture plane: to the interior of the frames of the photoconceptual views to the road. Conceptualism has been, by far, thought of as a nonrepresentational strain of art bearing a function of pointing-­to rather than symbolically being-­ about. As a result, the contents of given conceptualist images—drawings, paintings, and photographs—have been overlooked. Here, thus, I want to 74 // Automotive Prosthetic

start with an analysis of representation—what is inside the delimitations of the photographs and photo-­text pieces—in the photoconceptual view to the road. Let us recognize what is represented inside the frame by beginning with Robert Smithson’s writings on the American landscape. For Smithson, the suburban American landscape, with its push and greater centrifugal pull created in large part by humans driving their cars, embodies the logic of entropy. By standard definition, entropy is the “quantitative measure of disorder in a system.”36 Bringing us back to systems and communication theory, entropy also refers to a related kind of nullity, or as Smithson put it, “The more information you have the higher degree of entropy, so that one piece of information tends to cancel out the other.”37 Used to describe cultural production, art and architecture alike, entropy formally signifies radical atomization, a mist of particulate form spraying in slow motion across the horizon. It brings past hierarchies of taste, status, idealism, and institution to an almost un-­budging gridlock, a slothful and slow-­moving decentralization of interconnected components. It redetermines the vertical standards contained in those hierarchies horizontally, as one thing after another, no sense of exclusion or judgment, along broad, level plains, similar to the low-­slung sprawl that registers cultural entropy in urban form. Writing in 1966, Smithson used the word “entropy” to describe the “new monuments,” artworks by Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Mark di Suvero, Dean Fleming, Peter Forakis, Robert Grosvenor, Anthony Magar, Tamara Melcher, Forrest Myers, Ed Ruda, and Leo Valledor. It was their oblivion-­to-­establishment sense of matter, their no-­ nonsense factuality, “inactive history . . . energy-­drain,” and the fact that they brought to mind the “Ice Age rather than the Golden Age” that made these objects proof of entropy.38 For Smithson, it was not just the art world that gave evidence of entropy, but the whole world around him. Like the blunt objects bearing a new monumentality, a new kind of dumb-­box, deadpan architecture had been spreading as part of suburban growth in the postwar period. Such building “without qualities” formed a radical kind of pragmatism, structures of sheer fact, “free from general claims of ‘purity and idealism.’”39 The hard-­edge and impassive geometries of the new monuments showing in New York reflected the outer urbanism of anonymity spreading across North America, or what Smithson inventively called the “slurbs”: The slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of enMobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 75

tropy. Judd, in a review of a show by Roy Lichtenstein, speaks of “a lot of visible things” that are “bland and empty,” such as “most modern commercial buildings, new Colonial stores, lobbies, most houses, most clothing, sheet aluminum, and plastic with leather texture, the formica like wood, the cute and modern patterns inside jets and drugstores.” Near the super highways surrounding the city, we find the discount centers and cut-­rate stores with their sterile facades. . . . The lugubrious complexity of these interiors has brought to art a new consciousness of the vapid and dull.40

In declaring the entropic landscape of suburban space in such pragmatic terms, as but the factual outcome of manifold processes, Smithson’s position is simply descriptive and amoral. Unlike the usual negativism with which the academy greets suburbia and urban sprawl, his judgment of the urban landscape is neither harsh nor generous, but rather, productive of new ideas. As though science fiction made real, suburbia and urban sprawl are an extension of city space as well as the intellectual problematic of the city. No neutral observer, though, Smithson sees the process of urban development along the edge as but a matter of building upon accident after accident. In a related vein, Smithson would describe the disastrous dialectical domino effect of certain engineering interventions (rerouting the Colorado River, Salton City, the Salton Sea) in terms of excitement: “These mistakes are all curiously exciting to me on a certain kind of level—I don’t find them depressing.”41 Before excitement, however, there is base acceptance. Smithson tells us, “We have to accept the entropic situation and more or less learn how to reincorporate these things that seem ugly.”42 Building on the breadth of Smithson’s definition of the “entropic,” we find that the entropic landscape exists as a continuum of objects beyond the windows of the car and, more precisely, by way of the car. The automobile is instrumental in creating and filling the field of structures that appears through its windows. Insomuch as suburban landscapes have been made largely with the car in mind, the car literally motivates its formation. Yet seeing the city—both its edges and center—from the car makes for a certain kind of framing of experience that is specific to the automobile. What I am getting at here is the manner in which perception through the car window transforms the diversities of urban form into an environment of sameness. They become views to the road first and foremost; what one sees beyond the window frame might be unique in each context, but the car makes that uniqueness commonly, and entropically, the “view to the road.” At the same 76 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e s 2 . 10 –2 . 13 .

Bill Vazan, Highway 37, Montreal, August 7, 1970, 159 silver gelatin prints

and plan, varying dimensions. Courtesy of Bill Vazan and VOX Photo Contemporaine, Montreal.

time we look to this entropic content in terms of a new and unique kind of representation. We take heed of what is inside of the frame, looking to that contents as so many vestiges or records of the phenomenological experience of the car and road together. Representation bears an outward face here in a fashion far different from that of classical iconography: it is a matter of extensions, relations, intensity, affect, and the embodied experience of the car on the road.43 I would like to posit here a reading of conceptualism based on this notion of representation, that is, according to an interrogation of physical forms that are at once the registration and calling forth of sensual responses. We look to Canadian conceptualist Bill Vazan’s Highway 37 (1970) for an example of work that shows the car as a force of such entropy, changing the differences of cities into the likenesses of seeing the world through the car (Figures 2.10–2.13). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Bill Vazan amassed an archive of snapshots documenting his movement by foot, bus, subway, and car around the city of Montreal. As part of this greater penchant, Vazan took the photographs that make up the series Highway 37 while driving along the motorway that loops around the dense city center of Montreal, itself an island (Figure 2.14).44 They are for the most part bland black-­and-­white shots of street corners, sidewalks, and road signs. Pedestrians are rare. There is an Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 77

F i g u r e 2.14 .

Bill Vazan, Highway 37, Montreal, August 7, 1970, Island Contoured. Courtesy of

Bill Vazan and VOX Photo Contemporaine, Montreal.

occasional allusion to the interior of the automobile made by way of the rearview mirror intruding into the frame, as though the accidental effect of an amateur photographer. Like the island of Manhattan, the island of Montreal is famous for being the densely packed center of a large walking city. It is an urban context made friendly to people on their feet by large sidewalks, ample subway routes, and a complex underground tunnel system. Yet, when photographed from the car, this pedestrian-­friendly city looks simply like any other entropic landscape. From the car, the center of Montreal could also be its periphery. The views to the road along Highway 37 do not show the dense city center of Montreal, crowded with people on their feet. Text and postcards configured collage-­like on maps create a Proustian moment-­ as-­document, giving memory in cartographic form to Vazan’s movement around the island (Figures 2.15 and 2.16). The contents of these photographs are remarkably similar to those of Younge Street Walk, another documentation project centering on Toronto from the same period, but seemingly dif-

78 // Automotive Prosthetic

ferent in that the scenes have been distilled by Vazan on foot, not behind the wheel. Taken in 1969 and 1972, the color photographs of Younge Street Walk nonetheless show a similar urban landscape: open streets partially covered in snow aligned with low- and mid-­rise buildings in a moderately dense urban context where pedestrians mingle and vie for space amid cars. The images tell of time unfolding slowly. They function like a time capsule, as so many anonymous accounts of movement and glacial change within an urban landscape made up of buildings, broad streets, ambling people, and automobiles. The streets of Toronto in Vazan’s Younge Street Walk are, though architecturally denser than the views onto Montreal, almost absent of people. There are, however, cars—school buses, utility trucks, and sedans rolling along in the sludge of melting gray snow. Both sets of images show a landscape made entropically similar, homogenized by the car. Yve-­Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss revisited the cultural construct of “entropy” in art in the mid-­1990s, taking it up as part of their discussion of the “informe”: a collective effort to re-­canonize the canon—to give space to

F i g u r e s 2 . 15 a n d 2 . 16.

Bill Vazan, Plus ou moins. Specific project by Bill Vazan in the

catalog Montreal, Plus or Minus?, edited by Melvin Charney. Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1972. Courtesy of Bill Vazan and VOX Photo Contemporaine, Montreal.

Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 79

objects made by central and not-­so-­central artists that, like those discussed here, fell from purview because of their anomalous, extra-­canonical qualities.45 To be more precise, Bois and Krauss revisited Smithson’s “entropy” to bring to bear the anti-­retinal, Duchampian, Barthesian (death of the author) nature of a list of objects that fell between the cracks of connoisseurship and institutional ism-­making in the twentieth century. In this instance, the automotive prosthetic connects to the role entropy played in displacing classical humanism—its productive denial of a centered subject who sees clearly and properly, according to the precepts of classical visual heritage. In the section of Bois and Krauss’s “A User’s Guide to Entropy” devoted to the “zone,” Bois connects the anti-­visualist rhetoric of Smithson’s entropy to the city. Similar to Smithson’s nimble jump from the art world to urban matrix, Bois writing in the name of entropy explains, “As an organism, the City always, of course, tries to combat entropic proliferation at the same time that it generates it: as a capitalist enterprise, it always invents new means of recycling waste.”46 Entropic “zones” are the leftover urban spaces of capitalism, spatial waste or detritus that incarnates in interstitial areas, such as the run-­up along a highway or fence between owned and abandoned lots where plastic bags, empty Big Gulp cups, and dirty diapers tumble, toss, and turn up as so many accidental heaps, and planned and once-­planned spaces such as parking lots and abandoned big-­box discount retailers. For Smithson, like Bois, the work of Ed Ruscha captures the zones of entropy. Describing the landscape of Los Angeles as a “pointless phenomenon which seems inhabitable, and a place swarming with dematerialized distances,” Smithson turned to Ruscha’s 1966 book project Every Building on the Sunset Strip to exemplify what he called “spectral suburbs” (Figure 2.17): “Edward Ruscha records this pointlessness in his Every Building on the Sunset Strip. All the buildings expire along a horizon broken at intervals by vacant lots, luminous avenues, and modernistic perspectives.”47 In calling Los Angeles “pointless,” Smithson literally describes the diminished single “point” of urbanism. The city center becomes one point among many, and the commanding authorial presence of planner and architect are gone. What’s left is endless, authorless urban sprawl, a landscape through which circulate anonymous automotive-­citizens, crossing in unblinking and harum-­scarum fashion spaces where public is no longer so easily discernible from private. Seeing the world at a glance, drivers experience the public as a massive continuity of everything that is out there—the street, sidewalk, and architecture—or as so many spectacles of the once intimately known and today anonymously known, while the private is in here— 80 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e 2.17 .

Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966. Courtesy of Balch Library of

Special Collections, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; licensed by Art Resource, New York.

the familiar space where one plugs in and zooms off. The private sphere is a space of security enclosed by the carapace of the car. Ruscha’s conceptual book project Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) was in its creation anything but entropic. It was a carefully planned project enabled by layered technological extensions—the camera atop the car. Ruscha made Every Building while driving with a 35mm camera mounted on the car. He attached a motor drive, a “device that advances the film automatically to allow for rapid-­fire exposures.”48 The final result of Ruscha’s cinematic connection to the car was a strip of monochromatic motion-­picture film with street numbers corresponding to each building and lot. He shot at noon, so the sun would have been directly overhead, making the buildings appear flat, like signboards. Ruscha explains, “It’s like a Western town in a way. A storefront plane of a Western town is just paper, and everything behind it is just nothing.”49 The book unfolds in accordion fashion, revealing the images of eclectic architecture along the road in seamless fashion. It is a deeply hybrid work, at once depersonalized and collective, like photography and film, and highly personal, like a document to be held in the hands. For Sol LeWitt, Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip exemplified the logic of the new movement, conceptualism. Using Ruscha’s Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 81

book to illustrate his “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” from the summer 1967 issue of Artforum, LeWitt describes conceptualism in terms of the “idea” cybernetically conceived: “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”50 In Jeff Wall’s Landscape Manual (1970), the car is likewise a prism through which to experience the urban landscape while in motion, in this instance that of Vancouver, British Columbia (Figures 2.18 and 2.19). We find Wall performing in photo and text as automotive flâneur. Like the car movement that it documents, it is a mobile work. A manual to be held by the hands, then folded and tucked in the back pocket, Wall’s Landscape Manual sold for a quarter in Four Artists, an exhibition of work by Wall, Tom Burrows, Duane Lunden, and Ian Wallace held at the Fine Arts Gallery at the University of British Columbia in February 1970.51 It is a throwaway feuilleton describing Vancouver’s then largely low-­slung peripheral city-­lite in seemingly indiscriminate photos and typewritten text. Wall intended for it to be disseminated to a mass audience, handheld, viewed, and read alone and on the run. The fifty-­six-­page handbook unites image and word: stream-­of-­ consciousness photos and asides, serious comparisons of car movement, the landscape and linguistic structures, and critical perspectives on the sprawling urbanism of Vancouver. It has a low-­tech, anti-­design appearance. Photographs show from fore- to background the dashboard, the hood of the car, power lines, apartment buildings, and houses. Readers of the manual find photos from inside and outside of the car: shots from inside looking outward, showing the road and repetitive single-­ family homes through the frame of the car window, and views captured outside the car, back onto the reflective surfaces of car windows that mirror the sky and urban surrounds. Many photos taken from the car’s interior show a sagging side mirror upon which play images of yellow lines on black asphalt rolling under wheel and hindsight landscape. It is a work in progress that, though somewhat diaristic, is written in third person from the critical perspective of a conceptual artist on the go. Typewritten text is blacked out here and scribbled over there. Some photo captions are handwritten. Style and substance—its ad hoc, deadpan nature coupled with photos of and text about the road—reveal the perceptual experience of the human-­becoming-­ automotive. Beyond photojournalism, it is a record of sensual knowledge and transformation. Dennis Wheeler, a critic writing about the work in the exhibition, explains, “The Landscape Manual is not an objective description of the environment we live in. It is a construction, a revealing of discovery of events and object situations.”52 82 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e 2.1 8.

Jeff Wall, Land‑

scape Manual, 1970, frontis‑ piece. Courtesy of Jeff Wall and the Jeff Wall Studio, Vancouver.

F i g u r e 2 .19 .

Jeff Wall, Landscape Manual, 1970, pp. 34–35. Courtesy of Jeff Wall and the

Jeff Wall Studio, Vancouver.

The “vast defeatured region” before Wall becomes an ontological paradigm paralleling the entropic fullness of Smithson. Wall writes, “Toward a defeatured landscape on all levels, without any sense of loss, negation, subversion, etc.—reams of tiny photographs. . . . I myself sit here—or possibly ride in a car—and am somewhat more than just a ‘recording machine.’”53 The photos and text impart a directness related to the greater gestalt of the project. We imagine Wall making the work, rolling along streets, jotting down asides, taking photographs, perhaps speaking into a recorder, all together in one seamless graceful movement. Road becomes car becomes seat becomes clothing becomes body becomes hand becomes camera becomes image becomes text: Supplementary activity: make a photograph from a moving car (turn slightly to the right your cloth shirt or coat or your wool sweater or overcoat moving, crumpling, folding into irregular rumples reorganizing light pattern etc. against the silvery-­blue seats which give slightly under your weight—slight reorganization of periphery of shadow/light interface on the gleaming leatherette—both your feet firmly attached to the floor of the car); raise the camera slightly and—without sighting or framing—that is, “naturally”—press the shutter switch and get the picture.54

The car, road, human, and text create a systematic whole, a feedback loop in which one acts upon the other, forever transforming it. The work brings to life the road as more than itself: it is what McLuhan called “the highway as city.”55 The highway is integral to a new urban cosmos rooted in the transformations set in motion by Gutenberg and replaceable, movable type. Over half a millennium ago, the printer set and alternated moving metal type. Today’s driver plugs in, and off she goes. The road and text are homologous. Bringing together transportation and communication, the highway and language, he tells us: “Each form of transport not only carries, but translates and transforms, the sender, the receiver, and the message. The use of any kind of medium or extension of man alters patterns of interdependence among people, as it alters the ratios among our senses.”56 Body moves, car rolls, and text communicates—each a technological heir of Gutenberg, each an extension of the other. As these extensions become normalized, so too do they become banal. There is a similar banality—a frank matter-­of-­factness—to the automotive prosthetic as illustrated in John Baldessari’s The Backs of All the Trucks Passed 84 // Automotive Prosthetic

While Driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, California, Sunday 20 January 1963 (1963). This work also distills the commonplace social emptiness of the photoconceptual view to the road (Figure 2.20). Once again, the viewer assumes the position of the driver. She looks through the windshield, out to the red hood of the car, and beyond to the back of various trucks directly ahead. Telephone poles, high wires, white highway lines diminish into a frontal, varying-­point perspective that is cropped and abutted by the backside of semis, pickups, and dump trucks. A few of the photos show an old rearview mirror clipped to the right side of the hood of the car. There we see reflected a blurry semblance of the driver behind the wheel, hunkered over with hands steering the machine. Baldessari shows his skills as master of the forthright. Later describing his process in another context, he says, “I tend to pick out things that are obvious.”57 The will of the automotive cyborg, the subject of the artist and viewer, is deflated. Her volition deliquesces into the becoming wholeness of the car directed by a human rolling through a changeful continuum of scenery. Instead of photographs, Baldessari’s images were originally slides, celluloid sketches for landscape paintings and archival visual information that we might assume the artist intended at some point to be projected before an audience. Distinct from the isolated experience proffered by looking at an individual photograph hung on a wall, the result of Baldessari’s use of slide film lends the work an air of filmic collectivity. A year prior, Baldessari had integrated slide projection into his stage designs and intermission production for the special event Jazz at Art Center #5 in La Jolla, California. An integral part of an overall “total work of art,” the slide projection in La Jolla was at once ancillary and necessary. For the jazz performance, Baldessari created an abstract set design that consisted of “four large flesh-­colored painting-­constructions, hanging from the ceiling of the stage, each of which was divided into a painted X-­shaped structure above a grid of compartments containing gourd-­like phallic shapes.”58 When the musicians exited the stage during intermission, Baldessari’s thirty-­minute slide show began. It was a photomontage of words and images from the mass media. In the program, it was titled Experiment #1: “Surreal Painting from National City.” Poem by John Baldessari.59 Experiment #1 was not the main show of the night, but something extra, a visual dalliance and paean to National City, Baldessari’s hometown in California. The slide show was there for the taking, but not necessarily of central importance to the audience. The casual nature of Baldessari’s intermission slide show parallels that of Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 85

F i g u r e 2 .2 0.

John Baldessari, The Backs of All the Trucks Passed While Driving from Los Angeles

to Santa Barbara, 1963. Courtesy of John Baldessari and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

a larger project, the National City Series (1967–1968), mentioned early on in this chapter, where Baldessari similarly deploys his artistic volition asymmetrically (Figure 2.1, above). That is to say, the final product—the grainy black-­and-­white, and later color, images of National City’s automotive landscape—are the product of willed happenstance. They come out of the artist’s skewed intentionality and the removal of his hand and gesture from the process. These photographic images distill the automotive prosthetic literally, as they register perception in the car, and figuratively, as they distill the greater flattened ambience and lifestyle of urban sprawl. With respect to the former, the question of perception, the authorless quality of the National City series describes the deadpan, impassive experience of the automotive prosthetic. Baldessari explains how he went about making the photographs that eventually became the silk screens of National City: I drove with one hand and pointed the camera out of the window with the other, not looking where I was shooting pictures. Then I would stop the car and just write down the location, and that would be it—for instance Econ-­O-­Wash, 14th and Highland, National City, Cal. or looking east on 4th and C. Chula Vista, Cal. I wanted things the way they were, with ugly wires and telephone poles, without beautification, and with the quality of newspaper photoreportage, which the photoemulsion images resembled because of their grainy quality.60

Baldessari’s haphazard use of the camera mimics the haphazard development of the urban landscape through which he drives. The ethos of “chance” permeates the urbanism under his tires as well as the process and product of his art. An untitled photo-­text work by artist Richard Prince from 1976 shows two photographs set in a similar type of anonymous anyplace (Figure 2.21). A picture of the back of a car-­transport truck sits above the photograph of the back of a passenger bus. The text below the two photos reads: “In the second place it was possible for my car to ride on that truck. In the first place it was possible for me to ride on that bus.” The photographs record banal passages of thought, ideas rolling through the artist’s brain as the roadway rolls beneath his tires. Something like Russian nesting dolls, Prince very well might be in his car inside of the car-­transport truck. In another passing refrain of thought, he also might be passenger on the bus instead of driver of his own car. Photo and text together catalyze well-­established tropes of postmodernity, namely Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 87

F i g u r e 2.2 1.

Richard Prince, Untitled, 1976. Courtesy of the Richard Prince Studio and

Gagosian Gallery, New York.

a staged sense of the unintentional and weak artist’s will. Nancy Spector has connected the banality of these images to Prince’s later appropriation work. For Spector, the photographs of the road have little to do with perception, and are rather ciphers. Like the appropriated images inspired by his stint of employment in the tear-­sheet department at Time Life, the photographs of the road are symbols of a “kind of photographic unconscious . . . bringing to the fore suppressed truths about its meaning and its making.”61 Lisa Phillips contemplates an earlier set of related photographs from 1975 88 // Automotive Prosthetic

that Prince took through the front window of his car. In this set, we see the blurry circles of gauges on a lit dashboard, a sliver of road up ahead, and yellow trail lines of a traffic sign that suggest the movement of the artist’s hand. Beneath that there is another blurry shot of the highway through the window: a rainy view of an overpass bearing a green highway sign up ahead. Phillips argues: This is a work about time, travel, about passing from one point to another, dislocation and relocation, about charting one’s course and losing one’s way. . . . In a semiotic sense, it is about the difficulty of reading signs when legibility often depends on the usage of language; it is an allegory of the contingency of signs.62

Though persuasive in their theoretical interpretations, Spector and Phillips overlook the most obvious quality of the work: the content and what is inside the photograph. Prince may have been experimenting with the haphazard nature of shooting photographs from the road, but he did so from the car. It is the car, the automotive extension of his camera and hand, which enables the existence of these photographs, drawing our attention to the both commonplace and eldritch perception of the road and the “contingency of signs.”

Tropes of the Car in Photoconceptualism: Martha Rosler’s Rights of Passage

In thinking through the tropes of the photoconceptual view to the road, we return to the more routine expectations of conceptual art: its pointing or deictic sensibility and how it is, prima facie, about something other than what it seems to be. It is the car inside and outside of the photoconceptual view to the road, its role sometimes as an object and more often as a lens, which triggers an extra layer of analytical splaying, plunging the work of art into an ever deeper sense of intentional debasement. The car activates a wily and ironic sense of degradation further heightened by quotation of the documentary photograph and the evolution of a hyperreal image. These photographs bring rhetoric and image together, deploying the car as a trope for documentary everydayness and its deconstruction. There are two photographic projects by feminist, theorist, and conceptual artist Martha Rosler in which the artist deconstructs the documentary Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 89

image, the first a language and socially critical project executed in the mid-­ 1970s, and second a car-­and-­road-­based series from the mid-­1990s. They launch our examination of the tropological nature of the car in photoconceptual views to the road. Separated by a little over two decades, they are the quasi-­documentary photo-­text project on the famous New York skid row, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1975), and a series of photographs Rosler took while driving on the roads in and around New York City, Rights of Passage (1995). Though separated in time, the two projects function reciprocally with the logic of the former, Rosler’s project on the Bowery in New York, aiding in the explanation of the latter, views to the road from the 1990s. Dialectically moving between these two works we find an unfolding of the “banally profound,” to use Rosler’s words: that which is powerfully significant in the making of our quotidian practices and mores, hidden in plain sight. In this instance, the hidden forces—programs, technologies, and objects—are, on the one hand, a matter of the construction of stereotypes through photo-­documentation and, on the other, the blunt and omnipresent object of the automobile as it is present in photographs. In bringing these two words together, the “banally profound,” Rosler makes us think surgically, calling upon us to extract the world-­transforming images and objects lodged organ-­like in the greater body of everyday life. The coupling of the words “banally profound” comes from an essay Rosler wrote in 1979, “For an Art against the Mythology of Everyday Life,” in which she deconstructs certain components that frame the capturing or distillation of “everyday life” in normative strategies of representation—the “rootedness in an I,” first-­person takes on the narrative in photography, and naturalism. Rosler exhorts her readers to think critically when faced with such constructions of everyday life, indeed many of which are common to documentary photography. Writing in a classical Marxist vein, Rosler invites us to pull back the ideological veil of “everyday life” in order to find a semblance of truth behind. There are “myths of everyday life stitched together [to] form a seamless envelope of ideology, the false account of the workings of the world,” that, though false, also host “banally profound issues of everyday life . . . revealing the public and political in the personal.”63 Rosler began her sharp-­edged investigation of the construction of everydayness with her 1975 photo-­text project—forty-­five black-­and-­white photographs coupled with blunt yet derogatory text (Figures 2.22–2.24). Each photograph sits next to a card of the same size containing a text, both of

90 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e 2.22 .

Martha Rosler, The Bowery in

Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, 1975. Courtesy of Martha Rosler.

which are photographs. Striking a picture-­word lyricism in its total form, each frame of image and text tells of the stereotypical vagrant. Instead of passed-­out drunks on the sidewalk, the images show no people but only their traces. We see empty alcoves, derelict makeshift shelters along the dirty street littered with empty bottles, lighters, and cigarette butts. Typed in unaligned columns, the words on the cards—boozehound, juicehound, rumhound, loopy, ossified, blotto, stiff, groggy, boozy, flooey, liquored up, juiced up, bloated—offer components of a formulaic description of a bum, a person living in an SRO, or, due to the closure of the SRO, a homeless person. This project, as Eleanor Heartney explains, augurs Rosler’s subsequent focus on homelessness in the late 1980s.64 In framing would-­be documentary photographs without people but with language, Rosler reveals how photo-­documentation and words function together to create a mythos of homeless people, a prefabricated stereotype made from a structure of supposed truth-­telling photographs and a grammar of terms. Building on this artwork, in 1981 Rosler devoted an essay specifically to the photo-­documentary construction of the Bowery as an “archetypal skid row.”65 From the documentary film On the Bowery, made in 1956 by Lionel Rogosin, to the book Flophouse: Life on the Bowery, written by David Isay and Stacy Abramson, with photographs by Harvey Wang, published in 2001, the New York Bowery has been a spectacle-­like preoccupation for many an auteur. This is in part because of its rich cultural and architectural history, which goes back to the seventeenth century. Always a lively place, the Bowery, the oldest traffic artery in Manhattan, became a ghetto in the twentieth century and thus a magnet for documentarians. Rosler makes a penetrating analysis of the documentary image, focusing on the voyeurism of documentary filmmakers and photographers in the construction of the Bowery as a site of dereliction and poverty and arguing that the documentary image functions as a palliative rather than a transformer. Anodyne device rather than social catalyst, photo-­documentation functions to maintain

Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 91

F i g u r e s 2 . 2 3 a n d 2.24.

Martha Rosler, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems,

1975. Details. Courtesy of Martha Rosler.

the status quo rather than change it. “Documentary photography has been much more comfortable,” she explains, “in the company of moralism than wedded to a rhetoric or program of revolutionary politics.”66 Photoconceptualist works of art often quote the document, appearing like a document while not being one, in order to reveal a similar set of hypocrisies and to set in motion a cycle of doubt and cross-­examination. Photoconceptualism brings with it an analysis that reveals social institutions as serving one class by legitimating and enforcing its domination while hiding behind the false mantle of even-­handed universality [that] necessitates an attack on the monolithic cultural myth of objectivity (transparency, unmediatedness), which implicates not only photography but all journalistic and reportorial objectivity used by mainstream media to claim ownership of all truth.67

I have italicized Rosler’s “unmediatedness” because it cuts to the core of the rubric of the automotive prosthetic, as its goal is to tell us of the mediation—the technological framing and construction—of a given image, object, or idea. In seemingly anonymous photographs and technocratic language, Rosler’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems operates through mimesis of the document. It looks like an evenhanded, objective, and unmediated conveyance of information about the Bowery in order to tell us that any such proposition is bias, framed, and mediated. If we apply this mode of criticism to the later body of photographs by Rosler, the 1995 views to the road in Rights of Passage, we find not a simple and objective series of photographs relaying life on the road, but a critical analysis of roadway urbanism and our dependence on the automobile (Figures 2.25–2.27). It is a suite of color panoramic photographs of the road, highway, and other cars taken from the perspective of the driver’s seat as Rosler drove through New York City. They tell of the naturalization of the automobile, how it has become a prosthetic extension of the human body. None are cropped but seem asymmetrical nonetheless. Some are blurry. Any objectivity emanating from their straight snapshot quality is undermined of course by Rosler’s previous writings, but also more poignantly here by their form—the intentional deployment of amateurism. Similar to the way Rosler’s work on the Bowery looks like a documentary but is not, they are setups intended to look like something they are in fact not. In this instance, rather than mimicking a documentary, however, they are a mimesis of bad, amaMobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 93

F i g u r e 2 .2 5.

Martha Rosler, Delancey & Bowery, New York, from Rights of Passage,

1995. Courtesy of Martha Rosler.

F i g u r e 2 .2 6.

Martha Rosler, New Jersey Turnpike, 1995. Courtesy of Martha Rosler.

F i g u r e 2 .2 7.

Martha Rosler, Prospect Expressway, Brooklyn, 1995. Courtesy of Martha

Rosler.

teur photography. In quoting the amateur, as with quoting the document, Rosler activates the automotive prosthetic as a reality and subjective position. The trope of looking like a “bad photograph” functions as a mode of productive deference and refraction of artistic intention into manifold nodes of mediation that are technological (the car) and theoretical (the joke of the amateur) in nature. The photos look “low” both because of their shoddy nature and because they have been shot willy-­nilly through the car window. They were also shot with a toy camera that had a fixed, plastic lens while in a car moving at speeds of up to sixty-­five miles per hour.68 The photograph Delancey & Bowery, one from the series, makes a return to the Bowery in order to send a new message about life lived through the car. The image is crowded with cars. There are no people or sidewalks in sight. A fragment of building can be seen in the far background of the image, out in front of the car. A quick glance at the photograph makes the building in brown brick and a water tower to the left seem automotive in form. Only careful scrutiny reveals that they are other, architectural and not cars. Closer, toward the foreground of the image, there is an undistinguished yellow Ford cab. To the right, there is a long backside of a semi carrying cargo covered by a gray tarpaulin. The white rectangular box of a truck with “BOWNE” in bright red letters pops up in front of the yellow cab. In addition to the cars out front, windshield wipers in the bottom of the frame tell us we are looking lens-­like through the front windshield of a car. If the sense of irony is subtle in the image, it is overt in the title of the series—Rights of Passage—as art historian Alexander Alberro and architectural historian and theorist Anthony Vidler point out. In most of the photographs in the series, movement has come to a halt. The inertia can be read in several different ways. The car is a literal and metaphorical means of movement and “passage,” to use Rosler’s word. It is how you get to work, about town, and around the country. It is also a sign of class mobility. The nicer, newer, and more prestigious the car you have, the stronger your outward appearance of success becomes. Insomuch as the driver’s license is the primary form of identification in the U.S., the right to drive is coeval to the right to citizenship. All of this amounts to the “mirage of the road” that equally bears “the promise and precondition for the possession of ‘all good things.’”69 The inertia of the car in these images is testament to the stoppage of mobility, the obstruction of movement around town in one’s car, up a social ladder, and legally within a nation. Vidler homes in on the congestion in Rosler’s images, linking the impediment of mobility to the homogeneity of highway Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 95

urbanism: “All such freedom of movement, real or conceptual, is blocked: by traffic, by the endless process of road work, by deteriorating surfaces and margins, by the inexorable sameness of the modern highway landscape that turns all travel into arrival at the same destination.”70 That Vidler’s comment hinges upon the aesthetic, a description of the ugliness and sameness of highway urbanism, does not so much detract from his position as it does enhance and richen our understanding of the “aesthetic.” An aesthetics of urbanism, not unlike Vidler’s, is a system of formal judgment linking beauty to political economy, the formalism of the landscape and urban planning to the global communication between countries and corporations. The car becomes precisely the connector here—linking aesthetic experience, both perception as the unmitigated intake of sensual knowledge and the construction of how one approaches the world, to politics. Rosler highlights the relationship between her photographs and political economy in the one-­page essay opening the catalog of photographs: “Created by entwined economic and political necessities—the material distribution of commodities and the free flow of military armaments—the road system of American Cold War capitalism helped engineer the social and the cultural.”71 At the same time, however, Rosler negotiates this critique of political economy by way of the trope of “amateurism”—in particular as the car, both object and aperture, reinforces the amateur nature of the photoconceptualist image.

Photoconceptualism through the Framework of the Posthuman Cyborg Subject

Though bearing a sense of relativism, the photoconceptual works discussed here are not arbitrary. As Rosler makes clear in comments on the political economy of the car, each work is a testament to the specific situatedness of being in the world with the car. In this section, we look to the formation of the cyborg subject position as it coalesces around the photoconceptual view to the road, and more precisely the artist and viewer alike as kybernetes-­ driver. We are not lost or disoriented while looking at these photographs. We recognize the position of the driver, looking through the window out onto the highway and the back of other cars. It is a familiar view to us. We know we are looking at landscapes of the city center and suburbs in North America framed as banal cultural wastelands. It is the outlook of the partici96 // Automotive Prosthetic

pant viewer: seeing is corporeal in the dual sense of the human and automotive body. The embodiment of the photographer’s eyes, and by relation the viewer’s when she looks at the photos, may be understood in terms of what the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-­Ponty describes as “that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement.”72 In How We Became Posthuman, the writer N. Katharine Hayles invokes Merleau-­Ponty’s concept of the “embodied eye” in the framework of cybernetic history. For Hayles, Merleau-­Ponty’s phenomenology of vision foregrounds the integral role that the specificity of place and “context” play in any experience. In fact, Hayles’s primary goal is to reinforce the contextual specificity of informatics by way of physical embodiment. Hayles argues that Merleau-­Ponty’s thinking forges the incorporation of information, or to be more precise, the forthright embodiment of cybernetics and the machine-­mammal relationship.73 Hayles largely engages the discourse of cybernetics in terms of digitally intelligent machines, or computers, and not analogue machines, such as the car. Her goal is to reinforce the situatedness and materiality—the gendered, economic, environmental nature—of virtual, computer experiences. This is no doubt far different from describing the embodied nature of the human bearing the technological extension of the car. But, I have borrowed the argument of embodiment and contextuality from Hayles for two reasons: in order to, first, reinforce the embodied and perceptual nature of the experience of conceptual art, in particular the group of art works that are the subject of this book, and second, the idea that, like other digital technologies that have transformed the human sensorium, the mechanical automobile has changed the way humans relate to the world, both perceptually and politically. In short, the car has, like computers and digital technology, contributed to the creation of the posthuman subject. In experiencing the automotive prosthetic, the human being enters the realm of the “posthuman.” The eye is embodied, as with Merleau-­Ponty’s phenomenology, but it is embodied in a mechanically cybernetic body, which is distinct from both Merleau-­Ponty’s biological body and Hayles’s digitally cybernetic body. While today many cars are in fact “intelligent machines,” that is, they have many computers embedded in them, including global positioning systems and the manifold bits and digital devices that constitute their greater electronic apparatus, the cars of the past, those from the period of certain of the photoconceptual artworks at hand, were hulking machines. What is of interest here is the car past and present: both today Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 97

and, more precisely, the cars of the mid-­twentieth century, the machines that connected humankind to car by a wheel-­and-­piston umbilicus. As her body mutates from biological to mechanomorphic, the human who experiences the automotive prosthetic, the person who sees the world through the car window, becomes “posthuman.” The subjectivity of the posthuman carries with it from classical humanism the belief that life is precious and the will to self-­improvement, while leaving behind the explicitly hierarchical belief that “life” refers first to humans, or humankind, to be more accurate, and that this life stands separate from and lords over nature. Her prosthetic-­ being, to refer to McLuhan, auto-­amputates her “self ” in the re-­creation of a new subject position as cyborg. Reinforcing Hayles’s materialist thesis on infomatics, Robert Pepperell explains: There is the posthumanism of embodiment, which recognizes hitherto concealed continuities between realms that were once held distinct and bounded, such as mind and body, or human and machine. This includes . . . the continuity between humans and everything else in the world, with a consequent loss of the human supremacy implicit in more extreme tendencies of humanism.74

The posthumanist is distinct from but allied to the posthuman cyborg subject. They both offer a critique of classical humanism, but the latter does so explicitly through technology. The posthuman cyborg predetermines the perceptual experience of the works of art here, recognizing the role technology has played in the transformation of putative “human nature.” She no longer refers to her way of being in the world in terms of human nature, recognizing that it is but a soft science and potent social construct. Replacing one potent social construct with another that is more persuasive, Donna Haraway tells us that the cyborg is a creature in a post-­gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-­ oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labor, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense—a “final” irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the “West’s” escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space.75

98 // Automotive Prosthetic

Beyond manifesting a mechanical fetish, the human-­becoming-­car, or the posthuman condition, bears broader existential repercussions. The ontological paradigm of the posthuman lends itself to greater openness of origins, ends, and means: “Rather than proceeding along a trajectory toward a known end, such systems evolve toward an open future marked by contingency and unpredictability.”76 The photoconceptual views to the road frame the automobile less in terms of its objective existence as an owned object and more in media res, that is, as it is part of a system of flows and interconnections. In the cybernetic paradigm set forth by Hayles, we would thus identify the human-­car relationship in terms of the “pattern/randomness” dichotomy. For Hayles, information bears a pattern/randomness relationship, which itself coincides a move away from absence/presence and the “shift of emphasis from ownership to access.”77 The absence/presence paradigm gives rise to the valuation and ownership of private property and the dyad of public/private, whereas information is based on open access and the fusion and melting away of distinctions between the public and private. We find ourselves with what would seem to approximate the mechanical/cybernetic divide. On the one hand, the car as a literal and disparate object roving through systems of infrastructure functions within an absence/presence paradigm while on the other, the ecological machine ensemble, the related theory of the automotive prosthetic, and conceptual car art operate according to the pattern/randomness paradigm. Hayles explains further: Presence precedes and makes possible the idea of possession, for one can possess something only if it already exists. By contrast, access implies pattern recognition, whether the access to a piece of land (recognized as such through the boundary pattern defining that land as different from adjoining parcels), confidential information (constituted as confidential thought the comparison of its informational patterns with less-­secure documents), or a bank vault (associated with knowing the correct pattern of tumbler combinations).78

This is not to suggest that the human-­car relationship is not fundamentally founded upon ownership, but rather that it is constituted by ownership and access at once. Hence the political hot button of the automotive prosthetic. Thus, rather than a divide, let these differences be linked together. Access

Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 99

is key here, for to be denied access to an automobile is to be denied mobility. But access is rooted in ownership, the presence/absence paradigm that Hayles seeks to move beyond by way of virtual technology. The automotive prosthetic, by its very mechanical character, fluctuates between old and new paradigms of technological enabling—between pattern/randomness and absence/presence. From this perspective, the car is part of a system of flows creating sublime and alienating aesthetic experiences while it is also brutally pragmatic, facilitating and obstructing participation in work- and leisure-­time social collectivity. To live and be a full citizen in the majority of North American cities one must own an automobile. The necessity of owning a car creates a surtax on citizenship. Connected to Hayles’s reinforcement of the embodiment of this cyborg subject, new media theorist Hansen has written about the affection-­body, the emotional experience and feeling connected to the embodied experience of digital technology. I would like to fold this logic back onto analogue and mechanical technology, the car in art, by bringing it to bear on a work of art by Edward Kienholz. In the work Sawdy (1971), assemblage and mise-­ en-­scène artist Kienholz created a theatrical setup, a sculptural view to the road that hangs on the wall like a painting (Figure 2.28). He combined car parts, the door of an orange truck, and photography in order to make a scene that connects violence and bigotry to the workaday world in the form of a view through the window of a Datsun pickup. A license plate bearing the words and numbers “Brotherhood 71” and “Sawdy 04” accompanies the door with an open window showing a crime perpetrated by racists. It was one of a series of fifty sketches in which Kienholz used the car door as a frame for the photograph Five Car Stud (1972), which depicts a gory surrealist scene in three dimensions in which a group of white men castrate a black man (Figures 2.29–2.32). Exhibited publicly for the first time at Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany, in 1972, Five Car Stud is literally at the center of Sawdy.79 The car door functions as a picture and window frame: a black-­and-­white photograph of Five Car Stud is the view one sees out the open window of the car door. A leading figure of the post-­WWII Los Angeles neo-­avant-­garde, Kienholz was a proverbial car man. The automobile book-­ended his life, with Kienholz having sold them early on in the used-­car business and finally having been buried in his favorite car, a 1940 Packard, on family property in Idaho.80 More than any of his dealings with cars, including the famous installation depicting a rape scene, Back Seat Dodge ’38 (1964), Sawdy links 100 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e 2 .2 8.

Edward Kienholz, Sawdy, 1971. © Kienholz. Courtesy of LA LOUVER,

Venice, California.

the viewer to an ethics rooted in the medial ecology of the car-­viewer-­road because of its delineation of the view—the way Sawdy frames the framing of our perception by technology, here the analogue and mechanical technology of the automobile. In framing the frame, as it were, Sawdy collapses the conventional space of subject and object, viewer and viewed, forcing the viewer into a mode of self-­reflection as she ruminates over the naturalMobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 101

F i g u r e s 2 . 2 9 –2.32.

Edward Kienholz, Five Car Stud, 1972. © Kienholz. Courtesy of

LA LOUVER, Venice, California.

ized practices of bigotry. She is an ontologically manifold “viewer” in this instance, as she is an art percipient, a car passenger, and, thus more pointedly, a being-­in-­the-­world. A black-­and-­white photograph of Kienholz’s large installation Five Car Stud is mounted in the side window of the door in Sawdy. The original installation of Five Car Stud took place under a giant thick tent of dark green canvas outside of the Fredericanum, a palace erected in homage to Frederic II in Kassel.81 As further proof of the collapse of the conventional subject-­object dyad, the viewer becomes part of the installation while at the same time looking at it. Looking-­at becomes being-­in. As French philosopher Jean-­François Lyotard points out, the installation transforms the voyeur into a full-­blown participant: “You went up close in order to try to make out the scene; when you succeeded, it was too late: you were part of it.”82 Four cars and a pickup truck shine penetratingly bright headlights on a group of six white men wearing eerily jaunty Halloween masks and a prostrate, drip-­pated black man with an open mouth that seems mid-­scream. The white men are castrating the black man, whose chest is an oil pan filled with a black liquid in which floats the shifting letters N, I, G, G, E, R. Two of the 102 // Automotive Prosthetic

white men have tied the black man’s legs with a rope, while two of the other white men stand by with shotguns. Acting as hack surgeon, another white man takes to cutting off the black man’s penis, a spigot-­like “shank . . . made of a piece of three-­quarter-­inch steel shaft” providing the fluid to the torso oil pan.83 A white woman, presumably the black man’s date, sits in nauseated awe in the pickup with her head down and mouth covered as she vomits, while a white boy, the son of one of the torturers, looks on dazed and fear-­ struck from another car.84 The scene having been recounted to him by a student at the University of California, San Diego, Lyotard pictured the installation in his mind’s eye, interpreting the mise-­en-­scène as a playing ground for the repetition of imperialist power struggles between the overlord-­State and colonized-­Other. Lyotard sees the violence portrayed by Five Car Stud as “symbolic of minority strivings in the world today—provinces, subjugated nations, métèques [resident foreigners], the history of the Cesarist West.”85 For Lyotard, Kienholz compressed global space into the microcosm of an art installation under a tent, representing in three-­dimensional still-­life form the battle between center and periphery, where the “center . . . turns them into inhabitants of a no-­man’s land, a frontier.”86 The related car-­door sketch Sawdy functions as a similar type of ethical message, both in its forthright contents, by way of the photographic reproduction of Five Car Stud, and through the programmatic transformation of the viewing experience, as it is a view to the road. Five Car Stud places the viewer in a position of self-­reflexivity that bears down on her relationship to racism, culpability, and unwitting participation in the cultural violence of bigotry. When reproduced as an image and placed as the view to the road in Sawdy, layers of mediation complicate the anti-­racist message, transforming an unvarying thesis on bigotry into a multifaceted commentary on the techniques of bigoted mores within everyday thinking and their capacity as virulent social constructions. Indeed the message still concerns the banality of evil, to reference Hannah Arendt; however, in placing it as the view through the car window, Kienholz lays bare the construction of the visual experience and, more importantly, its naturalization by technological extensions. The car is not a neutral form of technology but rather another seminal player in the creation of naturalized cultural practices. Its material vectors, including access or denial to the car, the urbanism it creates, the social semiology, as well as the wars over natural resources it propagates, constitute our customs as a people. The car is an instrument in our everyday practices as racists in our own neighborhoods as well as on a global forum. It is a maker, a denier, Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 103

and perpetuator of racist practices and thus also a connector and divider of people. Sawdy programmatically reinforces the fact that seeing through the car window is a bodily act. The mise-­en-­scène of Five Car Stud is relayed as a photographic document and, thus, propped up as an actual event taking place outside of the car window, making the viewer a full-­body actor in her would-­be car seat. The purely optical practice of viewing is here revealed to be haptical, seeing through the body as it is situated in time and space, implicating what Hansen describes as the “affection-­body.”87 Hansen inscribes the experience of virtual media in art not as transcendent or disembodied, but rather according to the affection-­body at the center of “enaction,” that is, with respect to knowledge and understanding gained through the action of a moving body that is interactive with the world. Enaction, or embodiment, “yields a specific, technical (but not technicist) conception of interactivity.”88 Within this matrix of motion between points, the “affection-­body” bears “a center of indetermination within an acentered universe.”89 “Affectivity,” he explains, “is precisely the experience of one’s own incongruity with oneself (one’s excess in relation to any fixing of identity).”90 I bring Hansen’s thinking on digital technology to bear on the earlier, analogue and mechanical, technology of the automobile, here in the interconnected viewer-­artwork binary of Kienholz’s Sawdy, because it reinforces the ontological transformations wrought by technology broadly understood both within art and beyond. In its most basic meaning, Hansen’s “affection-­ body” reveals the ethical repercussions of the broadened idea that perception is infra-­sensual, based on the power and importance of proprioception as well as the entire rubric of the five senses. Hansen’s emphasis on the affective side of perception develops a materialist take on the role of technology in art, which in turn situates the body in a specific context, here the car on the road in the world. The affection-­body further reinforces the fundamental disjunction of self and identity brought on by the naturalization of technological tools, both mechanical and digital. While I do not agree that, simply put, “hope for humanity can be found in this gap,”91 I do agree with Hansen’s take on the embodied experience of technology within art, in our case the automobile within conceptual art, and related psycho-­phenomenological shifts (propounded in the very term “affection-­body”). Hansen looks to the writings of Giorgio Agamben to find “redemption understood as the opening to potentiality,” discussing such potentiality as it emerges in the “gap between image and body” within the new media artist Keith Piper’s 104 // Automotive Prosthetic

video game Caught Like a Nigger in Cyberspace. From this gap emerges “hope that comes from the emptying-­out of the image by capitalism.”92 Ultimately, the incongruity of self inherent in the affection-­body brings on, for Hansen, Christian-­like redemption through a critique of capitalism. This is not how I see the affection-­body functioning with respect to the automotive prosthetic. I do not see it as redemptive of anything, only an accurate description of a new ecological condition. My goal here in elaborating a theory of the automobile within conceptual art is to better understand the connection between conceptualism, technology, the automobile, and the viewer. The affection-­body provides ballast for a unique take on the actual and implied experience of conceptual car art as something other than just cognitive: it brings to bear a perceptual frame of understanding to artwork that goes otherwise overlooked in conceptualism as it is structured solely around language and semiotics. Hansen’s affection-­body makes the cognitive ontological core of conceptual art hairy, thorny, emotional, changefully becoming and situated in the world—here with and inside the car. Though Hansen’s discussion is geared toward practitioners, historians, and critics of new media art, I argue that his take offers the most relevant and meaningful ontological understanding of the art at hand. Hansen’s thinking on new media art underpins the posthuman and posthumanist take on the arts largely conceived, insomuch as it offers a new paradigm of the technologically mediated and calibrated individual. Hansen describes the affection-­body in conjunction with new media art; it is part of the phenomenologically rooted “body schema”—the body as a vector in the experience of virtual reality. The corpus of the body schema is “a flexible, plastic, systemic form of distributed agency encompassing what takes place within the boundaries of the body proper (the skin) as well as the entirety of the spatiality of embodied motility.”93 It is an extended body, constituted by the five senses, proprioception, and technological accentuation. Kienholz’s Sawdy, like the other views to the road discussed earlier, is premised on the viewership of the affection-­body, the roving percipient whose unified sense of identity is shattered by the experience of the scene of Five Car Stud through the open window of the car door. Hansen places the affection-­body at the center of a newly rethought sense of collectivity—­ technological affinity as the fount of “affective universalization.”94 It is from here that I would like to tighten the link between the driver, car, and world and, by relation, underscore an important function of the theory of the automotive prosthetic: that it is a way of understanding ourselves through Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 105

works of art as technologically mediated citizens of the world who, by way of the everyday act of driving, become global actors, contributors in various global travesties, including war and ecological breakdown. Hansen rethinks collectivity according to technologically mediated individuation, in which “individuation [is] an ongoing process continuously stretched between the domain of the preindividual metastability and the never fully achieved constitution of the individual.”95 The viewer never fully realizes her identity and individuation, but rather experiences such identity formation and individuation as a perpetual unfolding of the affection-­body interacting with the world. The individual is not born ex nihilo but is becoming throughout life. Since the affection-­body of the viewer is “out of phase” with herself, always comprised of multiple identities, collectivity here becomes an experience beyond identity.96 The affection-­body is mediated, perceptually realized through technology in a process that is parallel to the mediation of the artist and artwork central to the conceptual turn discussed in the previous chapter. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin developed the theory of “remediation” to describe processes of representation and experience conducive and correlative to the mobile affection-­body. “Remediation” is a term central to discussions of body enhancement, communication technology, and the greater field of new media studies. For Hansen, the concept of remediation is corollary to the fundamental principle that “media have become thoroughly and bidirectionally interchangeable.”97 The artist and critical theorist Joseph Grigely connects “remediation” directly to the prosthetic as an actual thing and metaphorical social connector. “A prosthesis remediates,” Grigely explains. “It fills, it extends, and supplements,” and by correlation, is a means of enabling social belonging.98 Bolter and Grusin structure the concept of remediation around a triadic logic, looking first to practices of representation from the Renaissance rooted in the transparency of one-­point perspective and window-­like “immediacy,” then to those of current web page design, which, due to their layering and nested windows, are opaque and constitutive of “hypermediacy,” and finally to the challenges of contemporary cultures habituated by the channeling of old and new technology that is central to “remediation.” In rooting remediation in a temporal loop, looking backward to mount a cutting-­edge theory of the digital picture in the present, Bolter and Grusin bestow their idea with a fundamental sense of elasticity. That is to say, remediation describes new media art and web design, as well as the photoconceptual views to the road discussed above 106 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e 2.3 3.

Robbert Flick, SV014/80 Manhattan Beach, Looking West from Vista, 1980.

Courtesy of Robbert Flick and Rose Gallery, Los Angeles.

and Kienholz’s mixed-­media Sawdy. Bringing the old standbys of postmodernism such as seriality, the copy, and mass producibility into art in the age of technological mediation, the process of remediation replaces photography as the “wrecker of unitary being.”99 Photography may have been an originary wrecker of such unison, but we find with remediation the wrecking to be more a mise-­en-­abyme than finite: an ongoing and implanted project of technology within art. Remediation is in short “representation of one medium in another.”100 Robbert Flick’s gridded photographs of Los Angeles streets offer an instance of biomechanical remediation, with the logic of walking on a sidewalk embedded in that of mechanically rolling down the street in a car. Flick’s SV014/80 Manhattan Beach, Looking West from Vista (1980) shows a grille of one hundred small black-­and-­white images of the street taken while walking (Figure 2.33). It is maplike in its documentation of the quotidian surrounds, with images of the beach giving way to streets and house frontMobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 107

F i g u r e 2 .3 4.

Robbert Flick, Pico Looking North, from Appian Way, Santa Monica, to Central

Avenue, Los Angeles, 1994–1999. Courtesy of Robbert Flick and Rose Gallery, Los Angeles.

age, cars and garages.101 Almost two decades later, Flick made a similar set of small images of roadside scenery, multiplying the number of the original grid and realizing them in color. In triplicate, Flick’s Pico Looking North, from Appian Way, Santa Monica, to Central Avenue, Los Angeles (1994– 1999) series jumps with a frenetic energy by comparison to the grid from 1980 (Figure 2.34). While similarly documentarian in nature, the images are smaller, brightly colored, and, as there are many more, almost cinematic in feel. For the Pico Looking North series, Flick mechanized the experience of the Southern California walk. Reminiscent of the mechanization behind Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), for Pico Looking North Flick attached a Hi8 video behind the driver’s seat of his own car in order to capture roadside architecture as a single continuous flow of kinetic experience. He then remastered the images digitally at his computer. The symbiosis between roving citizen and city is remediated here from pedestrian to car, with the photographic image as a constant while changes are evidenced in the shift from foot to car, and analogue to digital technology. For Bolter and Grusin, the translation of reality through pictorial representation as Flick has done is the basic form of mediation and is thus the 108 // Automotive Prosthetic

most transparent, while, by contrast, “the logic of hypermediacy multiplies the signs of mediation and in this way tries to reproduce the rich sensorium of human experience.”102 The affection-­body is one of many layers and modes of intercession at work here, with the body in space serving as a fundamental type of psycho-­sensual filtration. The physical embedding of one technological mode of mediation within another reinscribes “medium” according to a paradigm of making that is mutable, manmade, and a posteriori. The message this brings, that is, what remediation points to, is the inveterately structured and fabricated nature of art. Remediation tells us that art by definition is mutable and always fluctuating, like the medium through which it is channeled. By connection, remediation is cause for the unforeseen outcome of the mobile affection-­body. Affection and the body work together always already as templates of mediation: “Affection mediates between the other material aspects of subjectivity, namely perception and action—the very interval that allows body qua center of indetermination to delay reaction and thus organize unexpected responses.”103 The bi-­ directionality of remediation, that it occurs within the work of art and by way of the affection-­body of the percipient, “naturalizes the technological modifications of the world” while also initiating a potential dis-­alienation of such naturalization.104 That is to say, remediation is another form of framing the frame, revealing the technological midwifery of the sensual experience of the work of art. From Jeff Wall’s Landscape Manual to Kienholz’s Sawdy, the nested framing of remediation bodies forth an awakening to the automotive prosthetic—a realization and, in turn, critical understanding of what being-­in-­the-­world-­with-­the-­car causes in terms of ecology and global political economy. Homing in on its inherent discursiveness, Brian Rotman tells of writing and related modes of remediation, arguing that “it engenders a clutch of interconnected discontinuities in the milieu of what preceded it: a disruption of the previous space-­time consensus of its users and an altered relation between agency and embodiment giving rise to new forms of action, communication and perception.”105 In closing, I would like to discuss remediation’s twofold process of naturalization-­denaturalization in two digitally based views to the road: the British painter and conceptual artist Julian Opie’s Imagine You Are Driving (1993) and the New York–based new media artist Cory Arcangel’s Japanese Driving Game (2004) (Figures 1.2 and 2.35). In translating the graphics of yesterday’s video games, Opie through the hoary medium of painting and Arcangel through a video loop, Opie and Arcangel focus on the role early Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 109

F i g u r e 2.3 5.

Cory Arcangel, F1 Racer Mod (Japanese Driving Game), 2004. Courtesy

of Cory Arcangel Studio, New York.

video games played in naturalizing the car, in particular the view to the road, as a bodily extension. Both artists rechannel and recycle form and medium, shooting an old signifying system of past technology through new in order to accentuate the making of this naturalization—to denaturalize the view to the road. The value of Opie’s remediation of form is not only the extinguishing of boundaries between new and old mediums, in this instance video and painting, but also in his invigoration of the act of mediation. The work tells us that the world is not simply available through unidirectional perceptual experience. The world putatively understood is “the world” created by our technological negotiation with it. Opie mediates the world through his work in all of its technologically layered manifestation. His is a technological mediation that functions like Duchamp’s first unassisted readymade some century ago, triggering manifold questions about the nature of art and reality. The potency of Opie’s recycling of old into and through older mediums stems from the manner in which the act itself shifts the focus within artis110 // Automotive Prosthetic

tic practice from static and literal medium to the performative and layered act of mediation, from accepting art as an a priori given to fundamentally querying its nature and definition. Arcangel catalyzes a similar set of questions in his Internet-­based art practice. The bright graphics and opaque forms of Opie’s paintings and video are similar to those in Arcangel’s video Japanese Driving Game. An almost three-­minute video loop shows a moving and digitized view to the road in bright neon colors in Arcangel’s video. Though no car is visible, the road rolls along before a viewer at center placed outside of the screen. The automobile’s presence is implicit in the movement of the road ahead. The viewer becomes gamer: a driver in an “infinite picture,” to quote Opie again, that rotates and changes in color but never fundamentally changes its view to the road and landscape. With the exception of evolving colors, the picture like the landscape of which it is the semblance is standardized, similar to the forms within Opie’s Imagine . . . projects. Green gives way to yellow which then gives way to bright purple, pink, and orange. The landscape becomes white and the sky blue. Mountaintops in similarly shifting colors loom in the horizon at the center where the road recedes into one-­point perspective. To the right is a billboard with “Nintendo” blazoned across it. Like Opie’s landscape, there are no people. It is a desolate, desert landscape made by an artist manipulating video games for personal computers of a different era. Arcangel’s intention here is to recycle old technology in order to make new art in the present that is available en masse at his website. There he explains the work of art in the broken prose and punctuation characteristic of the Internet badinage found in responses to videos posted at YouTube.com and Facebook: This is a simple mod I did of the old Japanese famicom driving game F1 Racer. Basically I just took out the game, cars, etc, and left the road. Check below for the ROM and source code. . . . ps—sometimes I also refer to this project as “Japanese Driving Game” . . . which isn’t such a good title, but . . .106

In a discussion with the video artist of an earlier generation Dara Birnbaum, Arcangel explained that his manipulations of old software deform if not defy otherwise cloying notions of nostalgia. Because information is available through the Internet all the time and in real time, the temporality of the Internet, one of Arcangel’s primary platforms of dissemination, is completely different from the temporality of art realized in the space of conventional Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 111

studio practices and distributed in galleries. Internet art exists in a suspended and nonlinear Jetztzeit, the now-­time that the philosopher Walter Benjamin described as existing outside of historical time.107 Arcangel takes advantage of the pregnant temporality of the Internet where, as Benjamin defined history, “time [is] filled by the presence of the now.”108 For Arcangel, technological time, inclusive of the Internet, runs counter to the time of the art world: The nostalgia question is difficult to elude because technological time is so fast. If I have a first-­generation iPod, it’s just a few years old, but people laugh at it now. If, on the other hand, I’m wearing a Polo sweater from twenty years ago, nobody laughs at all. And culture runs in technological time, while the art context runs in whatever warp time it runs in. When you implant technological time with art time, people don’t know what is nostalgic and what isn’t.109

Bringing the two temporalities together, that of the art world and technology, Arcangel sets out to create an unforeseen experience of art that is built on that which is obvious, hidden in plain sight, a layering of out-­of-­date video game software onto the Internet both of which are shot through the prism of the utterly banal machine-­made-­natural view to the road from the moving car. We find here in both Opie and Arcangel’s appropriation and rechanneling of the graphics of old video games a powerful engagement with everyday life in the form of pop culture. While appropriating everyday life for art was set in place as an avant-­garde pattern over a century-­and-­a-­half ago by artists bucking the French academy, first the Realists, then Impressionists, and then cascading -­isms up until the 1960s when such -­isms gave way to art-­in-­general,110 Arcangel reinvigorates the proverbial collapse of art into everyday life for a new digitally based world of perceptual experience. Yet, Arcangel’s reinvigoration has a certain automatism about it. It is a naturalized reflex, constitutive of the conceptual turn. Birnbaum underscores the importance of her video work from the early 1980s precisely in such terms of “getting inside of popular culture as opposed to the frameworks of institutional art spaces.”111 Arcangel recharges this avant-­garde pattern of enveloping high culture into low that has been with us for some time now by way of layered mediation, showing old views to the road in the present fabricated from yesterday’s digital bits by way of the most cutting edge of technology, the platform of the real-­time technology of the Internet. Consciousness of the naturalization of the view to the road in this in112 // Automotive Prosthetic

stance leads to personal interconnection. And, the “ultimate purpose of media” is “to transfer sense experiences from one person to another.”112 The word “transfer” instantiates action and distancing, bodily movement and the opening up of psycho-­social space. Corroborating what Tony Smith intimated in his Turnpike drive for art historian Pamela Lee, Bolter and Grusin’s definition of medium is fundamentally a matter of the middle connection, or movement between zones. It is a matter of connecting disparate problematics, bringing them together through uses, references, and representations of various technologies. The authors explain medium fundamentally in terms of an un-­boundaried and limitless matrix of protean possibility: “a medium is that which remediates. It is that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real.”113 Reality is a matter of the mediation, or more precisely, remediation channeled through technology as well as the affection-­body that is the base of the automotive prosthetic.

Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 113

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The Affective Time of the Car I often show the car in my work as it represents being in between, neither here nor there. G r e g o ry C r e w d s o n, “A r t i s t Ta l k : G r e g o ry C r e w d s o n ”

Cars are extensions of our body and our ego . . . When we see an automobile destroyed, in a way we are looking at our own inevitable death. This moment is, because of its inherent speed, almost invisible. We have slowed the event via film and video but only from a camera’s perspective. . . . This piece offers the viewer the ability to examine in three dimensions the collision of these cars. A moment that might take a fraction of a second in an actual collision will be expanded to take days. . . . This piece by changing one of

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the key variables removes and changes the nature of the event. What was life threatening is now rendered safe. What was supremely spectacular is now almost static. The wreck has been broken down to its Newtonian components. We are left to contemplate our own mortality our own Newtonian components. J o n at h a n Sc h i p p e r , d e s c r i p t i o n o f S lo w I n e v i ta b l e D e at h o f A m e ri c a n M u s c l e : S lo w M ot i o n C a r Cr a s h

The car ran into stalled traffic before it reached Second Avenue. He sat in the club chair at the rear of the cabin looking into the array of visual display units. There were medleys of data on every screen, all the flowing symbols and alpine charts, the polychrome numbers pulsing. . . . He used to sit here in hand-­held space but that was finished now. The context was nearly touchless. He could talk most systems into operation or wave a hand at a screen and make it go blank. D o n D e L i l lo, C o s m o p o l is

The most common conception of temporality with respect to the everyday uses of technology is linear speed. It is the time of instrumental use, which in space unfolds according to two nodes: beginning and end, A to B. There is little consideration of the time in between, the temporality that is described above in the descriptions of works of art by Gregory Crewdson and Jonathan Schipper and in the literary prose of Don DeLillo. We use technology expecting direct utilitarian effect, and often, at least stereotypically and on the surface of experience, without great rumination about the tool at hand. We use it not so much mindlessly but in automatic fashion, with our emotions as an unconscious response to malfunction, the unforeseen, and, at times, the travails of life as they simply impinge on daily activity. From cars to computers, these technological tools are intended to make life easier. It follows thus that technology enhances the efficiency of life. “Life” from this perspective is constituted by a rote set of exercises and duties to be completed efficiently. Understood according to a checklist of things to do, life as such is markedly bereft of emotions—absent the rich and depthless fount of affective response and expression. One walks into a room, flicks a switch, and the room is lit. One starts a car, pulls out of a driveway, enters the road, and proceeds to move from point A to point B. One opens a laptop, waits impatiently for the web browser to appear, and instantaneously roves about digital space, moving between various portals and pages of information in layered 116 // Automotive Prosthetic

real time. We prize the unidirectional swiftness and seeming affectlessness of these experiences, and have come to expect them without question or doubt. We have naturalized our relationship to the switch, wheel, and keyboard, relying on them to work effortlessly. The interruption of their clean-­line aerodynamic promise of function, that is, their failure to work as expected, sets in vivid relief the spatio-­temporal complexities of the machine-­human matrix. When they do not function as expected, the seeming affectlessness veers into affect, and the emotional experience of living with technology becomes palpable. In catalyzing emotions of rage and frustration, technology’s failures show us not simply that we are angry when things do not work as we want them to, but rather, that more broadly speaking we exist emotionally with technology. Rage and frustration are just two sentiments within an infinitely complex psychosocial spectrum of affect. They are but two of the many expressive responses to which humans are predisposed, and more precisely, ones that they have cultivated in a life collectively habituated and formed by various technological tools. In the car, for example, we find a bifurcated sense of time, wherein motion between points in space is at once effective and affective, causal and linear while also emotive and nonlinear. If the time of the car’s wheels is a matter of the linear beeline of getting-­there, then that of its steel-­cased womb is a matter of several nonlinear emotional expressions of the “now.” While movement of the automotive carriage underneath is reducible to wheels and macadam uniting in the utilitarian thrust of the car, movement up top in the pod of its interior is mental and emotional: it is irreducible, occurring in and by way of a plenum of human existential response. In the most basic and literal sense, a similarly bifurcated experience of time occurs with the airplane. While flying through the air at over five hundred miles per hour, humans inside the cabin experience what feels like slow time, the temporality of workaday life that one experiences at home or in the neighborhood. In the specific context of being up in the air, it is that time, the open fullness of time without direct utility, which hosts extreme emotional responses to flying. The phobias of flying take place, similar to the emotions experienced in the car, in a nonlinear affective now-­time distinct from the linear getting-­there time characteristic of the plane’s rapid movement in the high altitude of the sky. Since movement in the car is far more prevalent than movement in an airplane, the emotional affect in time and space is more developed, nuanced and complex. In short, the nows of the automobile are variegated and many. The “nows” of the automotive prosthetic, to be more precise, are the The Nows of the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 117

various emotional responses constituting temporal experience within the automobile as one present after another. While these nows can occur in the interior or the exterior of the car, for example, when it is brought to an abrupt halt, they are always distinct from but connected to the temporality of moving from place to place in a given geography. Thus, though connected to the wheels moving underneath, they are unique and disconnected from strict utility. As opposed to the machine moving along to get there, the nows are the moments in which demonstrative human affect emerges. The now is the instance in which, fueled by road rage or psychotic violence, as with the Texas highway sniper in Don DeLillo’s Underworld, a driver pulls a gun from the glove compartment and aims it at the driver one or two cars over.1 It is also an elongated extensiveness filled sometimes with Zen rumination, as evinced in videos by Ant Farm, Charlotte Posenenske, Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine Richards, and Nic Nicosia, and at others with paranoid self-­ needling, as with the character of David Mann played by Dennis Weaver in Duel, Steven Spielberg’s first film, which aired on television in 1971. The now can also be radically transformative, occurring when the function of the car is abruptly stopped, thwarted, and turned topsy-­turvy by way of, for example, a couch sliding into the freeway in Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), a logjam of cars in Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down (1993), or in commemoration of fallen soldiers as in Yael Bartana’s video Trembling Time (2002). For photographer Gregory Crewdson the car often works to bring home a sense of incompletion, or in closer keeping with his own words, the time “in between” events and places. The result of large-­scale cinematic productions, Crewdson’s photographs seem more like film stills than photographs, images cut away and appropriated from an ongoing stream of celluloid intended for viewing by a filmic audience rather than holistic projects complete unto themselves. He deploys large film crews, replete with lighting departments, gaffers, grips, makeup artists, and stylists, in the creation of heroically scaled, shiny images that come across as moments in media res, time disjunctively extracted from a linear narrative. Viewers receive only tidbits, eldritch non sequiturs in visual form, and never a full story. In several of the photographs from the series Beneath the Roses (2003–2005), a car is stopped in the middle of the fog-­stricken intersection of a small town, probably Pittsfield, Lee, or Adams, Massachusetts. Its door almost always hangs open as though someone has fled the scene or fallen out of the car a street over (Figures 3.1–3.3). The cab is lit by a low-­wattage bulb or LED and is often empty save for the occasional solitary woman inside. Crewdson’s cars are not 118 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e s 3 . 1–3 . 3 .

Gregory Crewdson, images from the series titled

Beneath the Roses, 2003–2005. Courtesy of Gregory Crewdson and Gagosian Gallery, New York.

luxurious, high-­end sports cars, but usually ugly old American-­made cars in puce and muted gold tones. They are not fetishes of speed, freedom, and mankind’s power, but rather symbols of uncertainty within the useless life of old mill towns in western Massachusetts, regions made obsolete by shifts in global trade and manufacturing. The slack-­door cars are beacons of the ambiguity of space and time emotionally lived and fathomed. “The cars parked in these scenes, whether they are old beaters barely making it to work everyday or well-­cared-­for favorites,” explains Katy Siegel, “do not come from prop departments or collectors, but are driven every day by real people.”2 With an open door, mysteriously lit, and situated in the unpeopled environs of a small town’s old Main Street, the car unites realism and dark fantasy, the grittiness of hardscrabble life in old northeastern towns and the unknown temporal disparateness of being redundant within the global economy. The setup of two cars colliding into one another over a six-­day period, Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle: Slow Motion Car Crash (2008) is young Brooklyn artist Jonathan Schipper’s parallel manner of interrogating the temporality of the human-­machine interface (Figures 0.2–0.4). In slowing down the crashing of two cars, Schipper dissects time, breaking it down into “Newtonian components” in order to force confrontation with the violent death of a car crash and, in turn, lay bare the individual penchant of voyeurism. Reminiscent of Swiss kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely’s self-­destructive machines, Schipper’s mechanized sculpture focuses on the perverse, sexualized pleasure of time associated with the dysfunctional and disfigured machines, here crashed-­up automobiles. In making works of kinetic art in which the machine is integral, Tinguely and Schipper propagate a systems aesthetic run amok. Their works mimic smooth-­running mechanical systems only to upend and thwart them. Like Crewdson, Schipper does not celebrate the car as a beacon of power, speed, and the open road. The car is rather an instigator of rebellious, uncanny, and sexualized emotions of pleasure coupled with pain. Beyond both utility and the ecstasies of limitless speed, these artists have framed the car as a morbidly subjective device, a technological tool with which the rational-­emotional human negotiates the world. There is a related temporal fracturing bound to technology (the car once again) in DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis (2003), the riches-­to-­rags story of twenty-­eight-­year-­old asset manager Eric Packer, that unfolds in a car stuck in Manhattan traffic over a twenty-­four-­hour period. In DeLillo’s novel, the car, a white stretch limo with computer screens, surveillance monitors, a 120 // Automotive Prosthetic

toilet, and full-­service bar, is the site of sexual, medical, and economic fantasy. There, protagonist Packer trades international currency and receives a proctological examination from his doctor, to cite just two events of many. The car is a mechanical enabler, a mediator of business, sex, and brute biological function: it is the filter through which Packer dominates and becomes dominated by the world in the twists and turns of one full day of traffic on the island of Manhattan. Mark B. N. Hansen describes this unique thickening of present time within technological experience as the “time of affect.”3 Hansen brings Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-­Ponty’s phenomenological thinking on time and duration to bear on the embodied digital experience of the computer and new media art. I would like to expand Hansen’s elaborations on the time of digital technology, opening it up to include the temporal experience of the mechanical and analogue technology of the automobile in order to focus attention on the unique aesthetics at work in an array of moving-­image works (both film and video) and to, in turn, understand the subjective emotional experiences of the automobile. Here I have strategically invaginated the text, folded and turned Hansen’s work on the affective time of digital technology backward and inward onto an older, mechanical technology. Though the universalizing aspect of the phenomenological writings of Husserl and Merleau-­Ponty might draw criticism for being narrow and reductive, I would like to argue here that it lends it a flexibility, nuance, and breadth, which, in turn, give credence to my arguments about the phenomenological experience of the automobile. At the same time, the current predominance of digital technology lends a broad relevance to Hansen’s work on the embodiment and temporality of digital experience. Combining the work of philosopher and neuroscientist Francisco Varela and phenomenologists Husserl and Merleau-­Ponty, Hansen builds his theory of digital temporal experience on the “thickness of the present.”4 Hansen launches his discussion by looking back to the now decade-­old event, the Dutch Electronic Art Festival in 2000, which exhibited an array of new media art projects and included a small catalog with poignant essays on the experience of “machine times.” An introductory statement by organizers of the event at the beginning of the anthology explains this pluralized and simultaneous temporality: As cognitive research into the phenomenon of time progresses, it is becoming more and more obvious that time is not an objective quantity The Nows of the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 121

which can be measured by chronometers and divided up into seconds and everything beyond. Time is a personal and therefore emotional experience—controlled by social rhythms—a process which starts in the womb. Time is never only natural or only historical, only subjective or only objective: it is always both at the same time.5

The last statement, that time is always both subjective and objective, brings us back to the aforementioned bifurcation of time at work in the automobile and the airplane. We begin to see that perhaps all technology bodies forth an empirical, objective time attached to its functionality and an emotional, subjective time that comes out of individual experience. Looking to Paul Virilio, the authors describe two types of related temporality: extensive and intensive time.6 Extensive time describes the temporality of “durability and presence, the time of archives and memory, the time also of the city with its spatial and historical continuity.”7 By contrast, intensive time is rapidly accelerated, the “time that exists only in machines and between them, the context of the slow human ‘now.’”8 The neuro-­cultural reading of technological time offered by the organizers of the Dutch Electronic Art Festival can be successfully translated into the realm of the automobile and moving-­image works that reflect the car as a prosthetic device because, as mentioned above, it is rooted in the phenomenological idea of the relational body, which exists both before and after the advent of digital technological extensions. Phenomenologist Merleau-­Ponty describes the epistemological experience of time unfolding in a matrix of one body moving among other bodies: “Time is . . . not a real process, not an actual succession that I am content to record. It arises from my relation to things.”9 Within this field of perception, actions unfold in a nonlinear “thickness of the present” as a sequence of now instances. Careful to distance himself from the potential relativism of so many freewheeling nows, Merleau-­Ponty looks to Husserl’s development of what Hansen calls the “complex texture”10 of the present, in particular as it unfolds in “retention” and “protention.” Retention and protention describe the subtle temporal breakdown of the current instant into connected, overlapping, and layered moments, retention being the just-­past and protention springing forth as the immediate-­future that becomes the just-­now and then the just-­past, or back to being retention once again. They “do not run from a central I, but from my perceptual field itself, so to speak, which draws along in its wake its own horizon of retentions, and bites into the future with its protentions.”11 The im122 // Automotive Prosthetic

plications are thus that the mobile percipient replaces the static viewer: one takes in information, or knowledge, not as an unmoving subject-­viewer looking at or focusing on similarly unmoving object-­viewed, but rather as percipient roving within an interconnected field of mobile and changing vectors. Perceptual experience is a matter of ecological relationality. “It is here,” Merleau-­Ponty reinforces, “that we see a future sliding into the present and on into the past.”12 We glean from the phenomenological take on temporality, thus, an overlapping, even a simultaneity of past and present: “‘In’ my present, if I grasp it while it is still living and with all that it implies, there is an ek-­stase [standing out or away from] towards the future and towards the past which reveals the dimensions of time not as conflicting, but as inseparable: to be now is to be from always and for ever.”13 Merleau-­Ponty’s elaboration of Husserl’s account of phenomenological time offers an apt means of describing the rich temporal experience of life lived emotively in the automobile and, more precisely, as it is reflected back to us and critically analyzed in a body of films and video art. In scrutinizing these works, we do away with what is prima facie a simple and straightforward concept of unidirectional technological time in order to develop the subjective time, the emotional experiences, unique to individual devices, here the automobile. It is the basis for what Hansen calls “affective time.” Hansen defines affectivity in terms of “the capacity of the body to experience itself as ‘more than itself’ and thus to deploy its sensorimotor power to create the unpredictable, the experimental, the new.”14 Hansen is careful to associate the mediating role of affection, how it “structures or ‘sculpts’ the dynamic temporal flows” of technological experience with the “protentional dimension of time consciousness” characteristic of digital technological experience, and not the “machinic registration of time.”15 Locating affectivity in the protentional experience of digital technology allows Hansen to argue, based in part on the writings of Bernard Stiegler, for an “intrinsically technical basis of time-­consciousness,” or in other words, that “affect must lie at the very origin of time.”16 Returning to the phenomenological basis of “protention” outlined by Merleau-­Ponty above, we can understand protentional time, however poignant or central it might be to the temporal experience of walking through a new media art installation or surfing the Internet, in more broad terms—inclusive of both mechanical and digital technology. The expansion of nowness outlined in phenomenological time enlarges the way we approach technological experience globally speaking. The bounty of Hansen’s thinking lies within his powerful recognition of how affectivity, as The Nows of the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 123

revealed by the opening up of current time, holds, to repeat, the “capacity of the body to experience itself as ‘more than itself,’” and by connection its related “power to create the unpredictable, the experimental, the new.” From here we see ourselves anew as vectors becoming-­other and linking to other vectors and not solitary or inert beings in the wide spectrum of aesthetic experiences, from the view to the road experienced while inside of a car to photoconceptualist and moving-­image mediations of such views. We play interactively with our environments, leaving in our wake change for better and worse. In thinking carefully about the affective nature of technological time, we return to the question of the prosthetic. Hansen’s affectivity implies an ecological connectivity between viewer and context, percipient and environment, which reinforces the prosthetic quality of the tools from which this time emanates. Because we have naturalized the relationship between our bodies and cars, for example, we biologically coexist with, protect, and nourish them as though they were animated, living beings. Similar to the animation of pictures about which W. J. T. Mitchell writes, we cathect vibrant life, a vitalism, into our cars.17 We act—we drive—as political agents through and for our cars.

The Deep Now of the Long Perpetual Road

Admittedly, there is an enticing awkwardness to the pluralization of an adverb in the word “nows.” In choosing such a neologism, my intention at base is to name many things at once, and thus to give useful, descriptive verbiage to the simultaneity and overlapping of acts and responses characteristic of the multi-­tasking that is driving itself. Multiple things happen, forces unite, to make driving feasible. Here I describe these many things from the seat of human perception and proprioception. A foot moves on and off the pedal in conjunction with the hands that intermittently change position on the steering wheel while playing with an array of plug-­in devices, such as geographical positioning systems, iPods and MP3s, and, of course, cell phones. Eyes and ears synchronize in the intake of the full view of the world outside the glass carapace of the surrounding car windows. They guide the hands and feet in directing the movement of the car along the road. As the Doppler effect of an ambulance or police car’s siren wails in and incrementally passes, the ears signal the eyes to look into the rearview mirror and locate the source of the sound. Then hands and feet follow in the coordination of momentarily 124 // Automotive Prosthetic

pulling over the car onto the shoulder of the road. Olfactory senses kick in, smelling skunk spray or chemical processing from outside along the road or, worse yet, the burning of oil within the car that signifies engine malfunction. These mutable, flowing, and braided signals and responses are part of the “compresence” of the car. The analytical philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell defined “compresence” in terms of the layered experiences of seeing and hearing and their concomitant temporalities: “At any given moment, I am seeing things, hearing others, touching others, remembering and expecting yet others. All these percepts, recollections are happening to me now; I shall say that they are mutually compresent.”18 The compresence—concurrence and overlapping—of qualities, or “bun‑ dled tropes,” can be used to describe a given object.19 We understand, for example, an apple as it is at once red, round or heart-­shaped, juicy, and edible. Red, round or heart-­shaped, juicy, and edible are compresent qualities. Tacking on a verbal and active sense to the term, the use and function of a machine are its compresent qualities: the automobile is, for example, a machine the driving of which implies its use and full condition of existence. One wholly describes the “car” by the compresence of actor, machine, and context, by way of a sensate and mobile human driving a car along a road within a landscape. Insomuch as it defines a given object, Russell’s thinking on compresence inscribes all objects as they are motivated by action: the objects that make up the car-­driver-­landscape matrix are together a performative promise and realization of movement through space. The concept of “object,” in particular the technological object, dilates in both space and time to include its potential movement, change, and action as well as what is contiguous to it.20 The compresent and bundled qualities of an object exist, even fan out, in space and time, making it, similar to the way Hansen describes a person, more than itself. The spatio-­temporality of a given object according to Russell’s notion of compresence is, though not identical, homologous to—let us say, open to—the experience of affective time. We find the compresence of the car in, for example, the sound piece The City (1999), by the English artist Julian Opie. The artist recorded four people driving through London in a car. The four were assigned individual tasks in describing what they saw as they drove: one person described people passing by, someone else the houses they were driving past, a third read off the text on signs, and the fourth named the brands of cars. In terms of form and meaning, this piece works at many levels. The City can be understood solely as an aural work, The Nows of the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 125

F i g u r e 3.4.

Julian Opie, Roadscape, 2000.

Courtesy of Julian Opie Studio, Artists Rights Society, and Lisson Gallery, London.

with its audio properties scrutinized according to relay and contents; it is a white noise of voices spouting various but numerable nouns and adjectives. The work can also be understood in terms of the compresence of the automobile, with each voice describing a set of perceptual possibilities and objective qualities extending out from the car, connecting it to the landscape. The City is a uniquely auditory work of art within a broader oeuvre of two- and three-­dimensional and moving-­image car-­based projects by Opie in which he lays bare, as with Crewdson’s photographs with the open-­door cars, Schipper’s slowly crashing muscle cars, and DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, the dichotomy between the temporalities of the objective blacktop of the road and subjective organ of the car. This body of work includes, from 1993 and 1996, Opie’s carefully customized technocracy of signs, which brings to mind the isotypic work of Otto Neurath and Gerd Arntz in the 1920s and 1930s. In Opie’s Roadscape (2000) and Imagine You Are Driving (1993), the artist deploys a grammar of isotypic form [International System of Typographic Picture Education] blown up into three dimensions in order to reinforce the construction of such “natural” communication (Figures 1.2 and 3.4). The automobile functions in both of these series as a cipher in a world of ciphers that have been naturalized by a pictographic language invented some eighty years ago by Otto Neurath and Gerd Arntz. Opie’s The City, from later in the decade, was broadcast in Other Rooms, Other Voices, an exhibition of sound works curated by Daniel Kurjakovic for Swiss National Radio Broadcast Channel 2. As Kurjakovic notes, “the otherwise undifferentiated flow of perceptions is linguistically unraveled . . . four voices are superimposed and cannot keep up with the speed of the moving car, with the flood of information in the urban environment.”21 Opie’s sound piece shows the split between the objective ongoing time of the car moving down the road—slogging or speeding—and the subjective now-­time of the interior

126 // Automotive Prosthetic

of the car. This distinction is evinced by way of the presence of mechanical-­ speed versus language-­speed, or verbal time lag. Bringing “compresence” to bear on the realm of art, the automobile, and urbanism tempers the implicit metaphysics of Russell’s idea, that is, his belief that compresence offers an expression of the monadic realization of the universal in the particular.22 With The City, Opie does not so much tear asunder the monadic trait of compresence as he makes the monadic infinitely complex and inherently materialist. With each unique and succinct materialization of time according to a given technology there is a transformation of any such conception of the universal—or collective—itself. Compresence, the layering of qualities through varying temporalities, in the realm of the car shows us a fundamental bifurcation between subjective and objective times rather than a seamless connection between the universal and particular characteristic of monadic thinking.23 I would like to diagrammatically tilt Russell’s “compresence” further toward its ecological tendency, reinforcing it as a means of understanding any object in terms of a network of relations rather than as a succinct and disparate form. Offering for Hansen the neural linchpin linking Husserl to his own take on the affective temporality of technology, neuroscientist and philosopher Francisco J. Varela, with his similarly conceived “object-­event,” describes the perception of objects through the lens of phenomenological time.24 As with an ecologically tweaked concept of “compresence,” the inert thing here becomes an active object, connected contiguously in space and time to its holder and user and other actors and objects. The object-­event according to Varela’s thinking appears in the second level of a tripartite phenomenological structure of temporality, with the first level being “proper to temporal objects and events” and basically rooted in ordinary computation and physics, and the third, offering in its absolute “flow of consciousness” a baseline to the other two forms of experience.25 One becomes conscious of the object-­ event, according to Varela, within this “complex texture” of lived time in the second level with the advent of phenomenological reduction, or bracketing [epoché]. Varela describes the consciousness that coalesces with reduction, or bracketing: “Reduction starts by a disciplined suspension of one’s habitual attitudes, a bracketing of what we seem to know. This bracketing provides the opportunity for a fresh look at phenomena, in this case temporality as it appears directly to our flesh-­and-­bone selves.”26 In order to avoid the metaphysical tendencies of such a term, let phe-

The Nows of the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 127

nomenological bracketing be an experience of time that is, for the sake of our study, much more common than not. Not entirely different from that of daydreaming, the temporality of the phenomenological reduction is, simply put, irreducible in nature. What is important for our reading of the now-­time of the automobile is that the phenomenological time of the epoché is not reified into utility: “Lived time is not physical-­computational.”27 Within this field-­like sense of time, the object-­event is a “complete act that covers a certain span . . . The entire act is a continuous process in the course of which moments of nowness are articulated, not as a finished unity but in a succession.”28 Varela’s related idea of the “deep now” gives language to the uniquely nonfunctional time of the automotive experience as witnessed and recorded in four works of film and video art: World’s Longest Bridge (1970), by Ant Farm; an untitled three-­and-­a-­half-­minute film clip of the Dutch landscape taken from the car by German conceptual artist Charlotte Posenenske (1968); Artlab’s Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine Richards’s Road to Parchman—Internal Cinema (Cinema of the Mind) (2001–2002); and Nic Nicosia’s 9.5 Hours to SaFe (2003–2004). On first blush, we find in this succinct taxonomy of moving-­image pieces, all of which are recordings of the view to the road from the interior of a moving car, the deadpan deployment of the trope of documentary coupled with amateurism, which, similar to the photoconceptual pieces discussed in an earlier chapter, communicates an ironic sense of the “real” and a flat debasement of form. In further similarity to the photoconceptualists using the car as a frame, each artist negotiates the documentary setup by way of the car, adding an extra dimension of significance through the midwifery of technology. The car is a naturalized attachment of the body, a sign of the artificiality of the landscape. In each work, the car fundamentally mediates the world of experience in order to convey a play between the lived and objective, the singular and reified, experiences of time. With this distinction of temporalities, we arrive once again at the bifurcation between subjective and objective times. The videos reflect an existential dilation of time and space, showing the lived time of the phenomenological reduction—the epoché—as it is made possible by the rote and serial functioning of the machine, here the car. The work offers a viewing experience that “is simultaneously first-­person and third-­person. It’s simultaneously something that has a lived quality and an objective quality.”29 It is nonetheless from within the former, the lived or subjective time, that we find what Varela calls the “deep now” of experi128 // Automotive Prosthetic

ence. The deep now is a subjective temporal zone in which the present is unbound by quantification. We must be careful, however, in calibrating our understanding of the “deep-­ness” of Varela’s “deep now.” As with the four road-­based moving-­image works, the deep now functions as an imaginative zone of distracted rumination. Rumination here can be conventionally “deep” and calming, that is to say, meditative in quality. It can also be an ongoing frisson, where concentration occurs slapdash, fizzing forth along the surface of things like the mental crack and sizzle that are correlative to the mechanical hum of the wheels rolling within the chassis. The “deep-­ness” of Varela’s “deep now” is thus bent on, at base, the fact that it is noncomputational time while, at the same time, ruminative in diverse ways. Time becomes spatial in the deep now: “The now is not just here; it is in the process of this slow arising of combinations which forms the complex assemblage. This allows you to understand the moment, not in the trivial sense of tick-­ tick-­tick, but as a process of very complex assemblaging that according to the watch takes a while.”30 While the four videos as a group share a strain of poker-­faced monotony in the recording of the view to the road from a moving car, they come from different moments in the history of art. With thirty years separating the first two from the last two, it is the historical context of each pairing that plays a crucial role in their understanding. In the breach of thirty years of time, there was an improvement in handheld mobile video technology. The videos from the new millennium come in bright colors and, even without the aid of heavy editing, sharper contrasts, and more vivid pictures than the earlier works. Consistent throughout the four pieces, there are two levels of expression, one intended and the other unintended. They show a willful aesthetic of accidental image making coupled with an instinctive love of the road. In keeping with the doctrines of art-­world criticality, their collective intention is to critique the conventions of heroic authorship. Framed twice over, the view to the road seen through the camera and the car makes any sense of authorship circuitous, watered down by technological mediation and debased by the ad hoc sense of any-­ technology-­at-­hand. Viscerally, however, the works register a fascination for the view to the road. The four moving-­image works show contents-­wise virtually the same thing—the view out the window of a moving car—taken in disparate locations. We might attribute this shared fascination with movement on the road, by four different groups of artists working across thirty years of time, to an intuitive love of rapid movement on the road. While this would The Nows of the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 129

F i g u r e 3 .5 .

Ant Farm, still from World’s Longest Bridge, 1970, from Ant Farm Videos,

Studio Arts, Berkeley, 2004. Courtesy of Chip Lord.

be a reduction of the concept and intention of the work to the exhilaration of a roller-­coaster ride, the basic rush of recording movement on the road is undoubtedly an element present in these works. More interesting, however, is yet another unintended consequence of the four works of art: the registration of the affective time of the car. We find here an oscillation between the exhalation of openness and the dumb mental thud of the deep now characteristic of being in a rolling car moving quickly through landscapes. The four moving-­image pieces reveal the mental time of the road moving between outside and inside, in which passengers take in roadside architecture outside only to ignore it in the disquieted reveries of personal ecstasy or angst inside the car. The World’s Longest Bridge (1970), by Ant Farm, and the untitled 1968 piece by conceptual artist Posenenske, a work of video art and Super 8 film transferred to 16mm respectively, are early experimentations in the medium of moving-­image art. World’s Longest Bridge is a twenty-­four-­minute video taken from the car window by members of the roving architectural avant-­ garde Ant Farm (Figure 3.5). It was made as they crossed the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in Louisiana.31 On its own, the piece reads like an exercise in blandness, deflating the heroic artistic gesture by way of the rote and automatic recording of a long drive across the flat roadway of the below-­sea-­ level bridge connecting the southern end of New Orleans to the town of Mandeville. When seen in light of the larger body of car-­based work by Ant Farm, it becomes part of a broader, more cohesive and consistent statement on the centrality of the car in North American culture. It is one of a group of car-­based projects that includes Truckstop Network, which was part of Media Van (1970–1972), a tour of college campuses around the country in a van customized with a video portapak and bubble-­shaped skylight from which trailed an inflatable solar-­heated shower unit; Inflatables (1971), also part of Media Van, where the group drove across the country in the tricked-­out van 130 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e 3 .6 .

Ant Farm, Media Van, 1970–1972. Courtesy of Chip Lord.

making architecture happenings with make-­shift and temporary pneumatic forms; the sculptural piece Cadillac Ranch (1974), involving the totemic placement of ten mid-­twentieth-­century Cadillacs nose first in the ground in Amarillo, Texas; and Media Burn (1975), a performance in which Ant Farm members, dressed as astronauts, drove a customized, futuristic Cadillac into a wall of burning televisions (Figures 3.6–3.8).32 As one work among a small catalog of car-­based pieces, World’s Longest Bridge is a statement on the naturalization of the car—its biomechanical evolution into a prosthetic of the human body. Posenenske’s untitled three-­and-­a-­half-­minute film is a forthright exercise in documenting the banality of the road and the low-­slung Dutch landscape. In it we see blurred views to the road, the flat blue horizon line of seawater, a roadway up front, reflections of the driver in the rearview window, and the steel filigree of large infrastructure in the form of a bridge overhead. Posenenske wrote to Art & Project, the Amsterdam-­based art magazine connected to the gallery of the same name, explaining the videos she made with friends documenting the Dutch landscape: “The trips to Zeeland and Flevoland were unforgettable. I like the artificial, the produced and maintained qualities there. Our films are so terribly amateurish and boring. For example: Beginning of the Dam—Dam—End of the Dam. Or forty-­seven identical trees.”33 The Nows of the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 131

F i g u r e 3 .7 .

Ant Farm, Media Van (interior), 1970–1972. Courtesy of Chip Lord.

F i g u r e 3 .8 .

Ant Farm, Network of Media, Media Van. Courtesy of Chip Lord.

Like World’s Longest Bridge, the work evokes a feeling of unskilled amateurism. Banality pairs with the free imagination. Both video and film register in terms of low-­tech excitement, a collective fascination over the new mode of registering mobile perception. It is a later chapter in what began in the nineteenth century and unfolded in the twentieth with the camera, namely the massification and normativizing of the technological experience of recording-­while-­moving: capturing in real time the awe-­inspiring perception of movement through the landscape in a freewheeling, non-­ track-­bound vehicle, the automobile. In a burst of democratized creativity, everyone can be a cineaste, or so it would seem. Unintended, however, is the recording of technological time, what Varela describes as the “deep now.” Both moving-­image pieces, like the two discussed below, register the mesmerizing opening up of time that accompanies long road trips. The deep now bodies forth sometimes in a calming, meditative concentration, while at others in a mind-­altering, speed-­driven frenzy. Made some thirty years later, Cullinan and Richards’s Road to Parchman—Internal Cinema (Cinema of the Mind) (2001–2002) and Nic Nicosia’s 9.5 Hours to SaFe (2003–2004), forty minutes and nine and a half hours in length, respectively, are longer than the two moving-­image road pieces by Ant Farm and Posenenske. While the extended time of each would seem to suggest a sense of narrative, there is no overt or conventional sense of story line in these videos. Their narrative sensibility functions indirectly, in terms of a story told, like Crewdson’s photographs, disjunctively and by disruption. London-­based British artists Cullinan and Richards’s Road to Parchman is one of four short films made in collaboration with four prisoners—James Baldwin, Henri Broadway, Willie Russell, and Howard Neal—on death row in the United States. The artists made Road to Parchman while driving from Angola, Louisiana, to Parchman, Mississippi; Baldwin and Broadway were on death row in Angola, and Russell and Neal were on death row in Parchman (Figures 3.9 and 3.10). The view to the road is accompanied by music, the sounds of a song chosen by inmate James Baldwin. In crediting authorship of the film to the four death row inmates, Cullinan and Richards reframe older conventions of authorship the unraveling of which began decades ago, in particular with Roland Barthes’s seminal essay “The Death of the Author” (1967). They developed the project “because it addresses issues of authorship and the potential role of art and artists,” their greater goal being the deconstruction of the structures of authorship and creativity within the art world.34 The moving view to the road in Road to Parchman reads like a The Nows of the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 133

F i g u r e s 3.9 a n d 3.10.

Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine Richards/Artlab, Road to Parchman—

Internal Cinema (Cinema of the Mind), 2001–2002 stills from video. Courtesy of Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine Richards/Artlab, London.

low-­tech paean to the damp, kudzu-­covered tumbledown roadside architecture and signage of the deep American South. By contrast, Nic Nicosia’s 9.5 Hours to SaFe comes across as a smooth rolling, high-­tech documentation of the subtle shifts in the landscape of the American West, from the green leafiness of North Texas foliage to the burnt umber and tan flat of West Texas, and then the cragginess of the New Mexico desert. Nicosia filmed the trip in real-­time with three cameras inside of the car (Figure 3.11). “One is mounted facing the front of the car, one mounted facing the rear as well as a hand-­held camera.”35 Though Wagnerian in length, the contents of Nicosia’s 9.5 Hours to SaFe are bromidic and flat save for the brilliant blue skies and bright sun. “There was never a moment when at least one camera was not running,” the artist explains, “whether driving, stopping to change tapes, to fill-­up with gas or simply to take a bathroom break.”36 The four moving-­image documentations of the view to the road bring to light Bernard Stiegler’s proposal that “consciousness is cinematographic.”37 It is in this cinematographic sensibility that we find, once again, the elasticity of time, or what philosopher William James called the “specious present.” Formally, James’s specious present approximates the logic of the persistence of vision, the phenomenon of vision by which an afterimage is thought to persist for a nanosecond on the retina. In turn, the persistence of vision further parallels the technology of film itself. Similar to Varela’s “deep now,” which emerges from James’s thinking, the specious present “has a vaguely vanishing backward and forward fringe.”38 It is a temporality characterized by “constant flux, events dawning into its forward end as fast as they fade out of its rearward one, and each of them changing its time-­coefficient from ‘not yet’ or ‘not-­quite-­yet’ to ‘just gone’ or ‘gone’ as it passes by.”39 134 // Automotive Prosthetic

If in these four moving-­image works of art the recording of the view to the road shows the specious present, what Varela calls the “deep now,” as revealed in the quietness of a meditative distraction, then in Spielberg’s Duel, a Hollywood production (1970), a similar set of circumstances (a man driving down a long desert highway in Southern California) gives way to deep now’s propensity to harbor a frenetic paranoia. In short, we discover that the affective time of technology is a many-­headed beast, unfolding sometimes as mollifying quiet contemplation and then, as with the character David Mann, as an uncannily frightening experience. Played by Dennis Weaver, Mann is the protagonist and participant in a metal-­to-­metal ruckus that becomes, in turns, mental between himself and a trucker, his car, and a long-­haul truck (Figure 3.12). Mann’s identity, here anthropomorphically connected to his nebbish red Plymouth Valiant, is attacked by a lone and menacing trucker. The film opens with a dark screen and the sound of a car starting. The audience watches as the view to road moves from suburb to downtown to freeway through tunnel to the tan, sandy hills of the desert. All the while, Mann listens to the radio tuning in an out intermittently. The static noise of an unclear frequency gives way to the sharper sounds of a phone-­in radio show in which a man asks a woman for clarification on how to complete the census survey. His question concerns whether or not he should tick the box stating he is head of household. The ensuing brief discussion of declining gender parity, in this instance as evinced by the caller’s claim of being emasculated by his wife, is a leitmotif of the movie. The small red Plymouth Valiant that Mann drives is miniscule, perhaps like

F i g u r e 3.11.

Nic Nicosia, untitled landscapes from 9.5 Hours to SaFe, 2004 view of installation.

Courtesy of Nic Nicosia and Talley Dunn Gallery, Dallas.

The Nows of the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 135

F i g u r e 3 .12 .

Film still of Dennis Weaver behind the wheel in Duel, 1970, made-­for-­TV movie

directed by Steven Spielberg. Courtesy of Universal Studios, Los Angeles.

his masculinity, in comparison to the large, rusted behemoth of a tanker truck, a Peterbilt 281, which follows him on the desert highway. Driven by an anonymous and marauding driver, the truck menaces Mann throughout the movie, making the deep now of the human-­car interface a terrifyingly unpleasant experience. The little red Plymouth Valiant gets dented and beat up as Mann increasingly doubts himself and loses his sense of identity, fearing at one point that he is hallucinating. The temporal experience of the car in this instance is aggressively subjective—wild and unpredictable. The car in Duel is ultimately the mechanical accoucheuse of the darker, scarier side of the existential time of technology.

Road Time as Transferable: Between Image and Story, Episode and Narrative

German filmmaker Wim Wenders describes a temporally based tension between images and stories in his work, a dialectic of the episodic figure and linear narrative that comes to full fruition in the time of the car rolling along the road. The episodic time of the view to the road ultimately wins 136 // Automotive Prosthetic

out in his work because Wenders is apprehensive about story.40 “My thesis,” he explains, “is narrative involves forcing images in some way. Sometimes this manipulation becomes narrative art, but not necessarily. Often enough, the result is only abused pictures.”41 His apprehension emerges in part from his own movement between disciplines, his mediation of information and ideas through the grammars of still images in painting and moving images in film. The shots in his first film, the film-­short Silver City [Schauplätze] (1967–1968), were “like the paintings and watercolors I’d done previously, only in a different medium.”42 Leaving behind his university studies in Germany, he moved to Paris, where he enrolled in the École des Beaux-­Arts and began painting in 1966.43 As a painter, Wenders was interested in space, painting cityscapes and landscapes in order to capture things as they were in and for the moment. Soon he found that “painting lacked something, as did my individual paintings.”44 Film proved to be a more powerful mode of capturing the mutation and deliquescence of things. The “camera sees it and records it. The thing itself may no longer be there, but you can still see it, the fact of its existence hasn’t been lost.”45 In a classical invocation of the medium-­specific polemic given body by the Horatian simile ut pictura poesis, meaning “as it is in painting so too in poetry,” time was missing from painting for Wenders. According to one take on the concept of medium-­ specificity, for example, the eighteenth-­century German philosopher Gott­ fried Ephraim Lessing argued that painting is more spatial than temporal.46 As Wenders explains, “When I began filming, I thought of myself as a painter of space engaged on a quest for time.”47 In Wenders’s films, there are subtle moves from long, open-­ended shots suggestive of the abstraction of art house cinema to the quick-­switch figural moment in which people interact and events happen. The restless temporal sensibility of Wenders’s films comes in part out of his beginnings as a painter, but this ambiguous time blossoms in full, steady form in the director’s penchant for the filmic distillation of movement along the road. “My stories start with places, cities, landscapes and roads,” Wenders says. We can identify the fluctuating temporality that is present across many of Wenders’s films as the time of urban space embodied in particular in the open-­ended unresolved ramblings of the road. Unlike Hollywood road movies such as The Cannonball Run, Smokey and the Bandit, and Thelma and Louise, in which the car functions to bring home a linear tale of the overcoming of life’s challenges, Wenders’s road movies often do not end in resolution.48 In Alice in the Cities (1974), the first in Wenders’s road trilogy, The Nows of the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 137

the film ends with an aperture, an opening up into something that is potentially completely different. It closes with a train ride, with the main character, the writer Phillip Winter, and young Alice heading back to Munich to eventually go their own ways after days spent driving through small German towns looking for her grandmother. Kings of the Road (1976), the third of the trilogy, ends with flaccid determination after two of the main characters, the film-­projector repairman Bruno Winter and the melancholic hitchhiker Robert Lander, have parted ways. In the end, though, Winter runs his truck into a lake. A film in part about the photographic construction of place, Paris, Texas (1984) is a series of disjunctively connected long shots of highways, road places, and open swaths of the desert in the American Southwest and Los Angeles.49 Wenders uses episodic vignettes sequentially that, though interconnected, function individually as “autonomous units.”50 There is an out-­of-­ joint immediacy in such a filtration of time and space. Story lines shift and change as though will-­o’-­the-­wisp, with quiet deliberative dialogue upturned by a truck stopping, a train missed, or an arrival to a new mise-­en-­scène of skyscrapers and wide open plazas. These shifts reflect the chaos and “inexplicable complexity of the events” of everyday life, which, for Wenders, are “unrelated to each other.”51 Temporalities fluctuate and change equally from film to film, moving between the loosely unstructured and ad hoc productions of what Wenders calls his “A-­films” and highly structured and controlled productions of his “B-­films.”52 In the former, several of which are road films, Wenders diligently set out to expose himself, the crew, and the actors to new situations. Kings of the Road, an unstructured A-­film, started without a screenplay, went forward with the reshooting of the first week’s footage after discovery of faulty film stock, and continued with the director, actors, cameraman, and the director’s assistant alternately writing the next day’s script into the early morning hours.53 As in Paris, Texas, a misleading and twisted photograph functions as a proverbial carrot leading the cart of action in Alice in the Cities, ultimately bringing the main characters to a false penultimate ending before they split up and go their own way in life. If the traditions of narrative storytelling imply an arching line of movement from exposition through rising action to the pinnacle climactic event down to the unraveling or dénouement, then the episodic time of the car rolling down a highway is sequential and nonlinear, opening up to expressions of the chaos and chance-­like events of life in general. The episodic time of the road as evinced in Wenders’s road films is host to the unforeseen 138 // Automotive Prosthetic

nows. Episodes arrive out of sequence and unexpectedly; they are ancillary to the expectations of careful planning and predictable function. Though descriptive of technological experience in the late twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, episodic time is nothing new. As Donald J. Wilcox explains, the episodic sense of time was normative for ancient history writers. As distinct from the absolute time that emerges with early modernity, in the analytic geometry of René Descartes (1596–1650) and the systematic charting of time and space by Isaac Newton (1642–1727), episodic time appears in the form of discontinuity in the writings of Herodotus and Thucydides, “emphasizing process rather than progressive building of events on one another.”54 The study here of episodic time in Wenders’s road movies functions much like Wilcox’s investigation of episodic time in ancient history writing, namely in that they reveal the historical construction of “space” and “time.” Shifts in the experience of time occur with technological transformation, here with film and the automobile: in the rising use of the car and, in turn, as that regularity of movement is ruminated on and reflected back onto contemporary life in the movie theater. Because of their haphazard and maze-­like sensibility, Wenders describes the non-­road films Summer in the City (1970) and The State of Things (1983) also as A-­films. What makes them A-­films comes out of Wenders’s penchant for the urbanism of the road and, concomitantly, its existential time. The to-­and-­fro of time in Wenders’s A-­films, the shift between episode and narrative, image and story, is intrinsic to the experience of the moving car. The episodic time of Wenders’s films bodies forth parallel to the subjective side of time in the car. We return once again to the bifurcated, subjective-­objective temporality of the automobile discussed above. It is a moveable and translatable time insomuch as we find Wenders using the subjective temporality of driving the car along the road in, for example, Summer in the City (1970) and The State of Things (1983). The time of the road provides insights into another mode temporal experience, which is, like episodic time for the historian Wilcox, alternative to absolute time. Here a machine often seen as absolutist for reasons of oil consumption, manufacturing, and urbanism—the car—can be reframed alternatively, not necessarily in terms of “freedom” and the blithe open road, but rather as a site of indetermination. The time of the road, based on Wenders’s personal articulation of the affective time of the moving automobile, is, moreover, transferable to other modalities of experience and expression. It is a hyperreal aesthetic applicable as a process to other forms of art, as we find with Hubbard and Birchler’s video art. The Nows of the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 139

The video installations of the Irish Teresa Hubbard and Swiss Alexander Birchler strike a stuttering sense of narrative that, subtle though the references may be, come directly out of Wim Wenders’s films. In many ways, the artist duo comes to video in a paradigm of moving images that is an inversion of Wim Wenders’s. If Wenders makes fully produced, at times Hollywood-­ esque films that flirt in contents and form with the abstraction of art house cinema, then Hubbard and Birchler make high-­art videos the polish and high production of which finger the fault line of Hollywood films. Like the fine art film of Matthew Barney, the video installations of Hubbard and Birchler are hybrids. The artist-­team makes iconographic references to Wim Wenders in the photographic series Filmstills (2000) and the video Grand Paris Texas (2008). The Wenders-­esque underpinning of the photographs in Filmstills is only distinguishable, in fact, after watching one of their video installations, all of which bear the temporal dialectic between the episodic and narrative. The title of the series Filmstills is on its surface an ironic play on the literal word. They are large shiny photographs of the desolate facades of movie theaters, and literally the stilted architecture for the showing of film. Some are large-­scale American movie theaters with fourteen screening rooms. Others are the wretched one-­room movie houses of small towns in Europe. Between images of American multiplexes and old derelict theaters in Europe, bombastic reds and blues contrast with muted olive greens and browns. While the film houses are literally “stilled,” the photographs are not actually film stills.55 The title Filmstills references the central role of the old movie theater in Wenders’s Kings of the Road. Bruno Winter, the main character of Wenders’s film, drives a truck along the border between East and West Germany, stopping in small towns to repair film projectors. The film came to Wenders while he was driving on the autobahn between Frankfurt and Würzburg, where he drove between two trucks competing for the highway, but the leitmotif at work here in Winter’s role as a traveling film projection repairman is the rising obsolescence of the single-­room cinema in small towns across Europe.56 Hubbard and Birchler play out a similar thesis, bringing Wenders’s position into confrontation with the big-­box architecture of American movie theaters (Figure 3.13). The obsolescence of the small movie theater in Europe is further propounded by comparison with the enormous new theaters of American suburbia. Making even more overt references to Wenders, Hubbard and Birchler’s video Grand Paris Texas pays homage to Wenders’s film of almost the same

140 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e 3.13 .

Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler, Filmstills, 2002. Courtesy of Teresa

Hubbard and Alexander Birchler.

title, Paris, Texas. The video centers on the abandoned movie theater of Paris, Texas, the East Texas town that figures in Wenders’s film in almost apocryphal fashion, that is, in terms of a photograph of a sandy old lot that looks very little like any space of the leafy green topography of the actual Paris, Texas. In fact, no action ever occurs in Paris, Texas, in Wenders’s film. By connection, Hubbard and Birchler’s Grand Paris Texas is a fifty-­four-­minute documentary on the town’s real movie theater. Scenes from interviews with the theater’s prior owner and citizens of the town are spliced with old photographs of the theater when it was still in use and the real-­time movement of the two artists wearing protective masks while roving around the inside of the theater. Viewers follow Hubbard and Birchler as they carefully walk, like space-­age anthropologists, through the fetid, ramshackle, pigeon-­infested interiors of the old theater. By 2008, the movie theater of Paris, Texas, had become a fossil of another time—a romantic ruin and the fount of imaginations, similar to the town in Wenders’s film. The trajectories of time are manifold in Hubbard and Birchler’s video: There’s not one specific story told here, rather, there are several narrative trajectories followed, interwoven, and implied. You are not given a conclusion about the destiny of cinema, the destiny of this cinema, the destiny of the residents of Paris, Texas, or anything like that. Grand Paris Texas presents layered scenarios.57

The Nows of the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 141

F i g u r e s 3 . 14 –3 .19.

Film stills from Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler, Single Wide, 2002.

Courtesy of Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler.

A related temporal tension of the episodic playing against the narrative subtly charges the greater body of Hubbard and Birchler’s video work. In short, the temporality of their videos, which most often do not engage the road, is the affective and episodic time of the road as seen in Wenders’s films. Here we find the most palpable instance of the transferability of the road time central to Wenders’s film aesthetic. Single Wide (2002) is a six-­minute, seven-­second loop in which the artists displaced the affective road time to the site of a single-­wide trailer (Figures 3.14–3.19). The camera revolves in unflinching steady movement around the trailer. A woman rolls up in a pickup truck and enters into the front door of the trailer as the camera slowly pans across the trailer’s interior. The camera moves from bedroom to living room to bathroom and then back to the bedroom, where we see the woman sitting with blood on her head in front of the mirror. The camera continues to pan around the house, deliberatively moving from scene to scene, and 142 // Automotive Prosthetic

room to room. Explosively crying, the woman frantically drives the truck into the front of the trailer, and viewers discover the origin of the blood on her forehead. The camera cuts to the obverse side of the trailer, where viewers see the bashed-­in interior of the living room, which only moments before had been intact. The panning of the camera continues, returning to the bedroom, and back to the living room, only this time, it is intact, orderly, and quiet. We have returned to the beginning of the loosely connected vignettes. A similarly disjunctive temporality plays out in House with Pool (2004), a polished, tightly edited set of instances about a party, a mother, a runaway daughter, and nature encroaching on the private poolside of a modern suburban house. It is a “set of instances,” similar to the moments in Single Wide, rather than a full-­fledged narrative story with a beginning, middle, and end. They are interconnected filmic bits, episodic in nature and suggestive of the affective time of the road. Here, Hubbard and Birchler transfer the technological time of the car to their video installations, which vary in contents, from slowly braided together views onto single-­wide trailers and suburban homes to passing, dreamlike discussions of police in the cab of a police car and a high school marching band playing “Johnny Comes Marching Home.”

Jetztzeit: The Now-­Time of the Car

In the short essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin wrote about Jetztzeit, the “now-­time” of history. He said, “History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit].”58 From this perspective events and ideas of the past could be “blasted out of the continuum of history,” charged into the present with a vivid sense of revolutionary learning and transformation.59 In its most basic sense, the now-­time of history was one component of Benjamin’s critical analysis of historicism, part of an evolving philosophical bulwark against the practice of writing history as a linear succession of events moving forward in the progress of civilization. Through now-­time, he “rejects the idea of history as a rational process.”60 The idea is part of Benjamin’s greater sense of temporal infinity, a means of thinking history similar to affective time in that it “abandons the merely quantitative concept of time.”61 Looking out onto his own current moment, directly responding to “progress as pictured in the minds of Social Democrats . . . [as] the progress of humankind itself,” Benjamin developed The Nows of the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 143

what Ronald Beiner calls a “historical materialist historiography.”62 His intention was equally to unhinge the Marxist tradition of historical materialism from any sense of hardbound causality and continuous, fluid movement. He sought to decouple time from the premise that it is “dialectical movement with a purpose” in order to counter the naturalized metanarrative of a master race propagated by the Third Reich, which was ordered by a related logic of linear, preordained progress.63 In the idea of now-­time, Benjamin countered the reduction of time to a hard, rote, and mechanized causality, tempering it in his own fashion with what he described as a “weak Messianism.”64 Now-­time is time’s transcendent promise of inversion and flexibility, its tendency toward out-­ of-­jointness, which for Benjamin posed a form of redemption, a means of reversal, and, more precisely, a cognitive opening onto alternative ways of being in the world. It is a flash of time, broken and interrupted, where time comes to “a standstill—an epoché—with the relation between at least two disparate Now-­points” marking the displacement from “any further historical course.”65 Once again, we find ourselves in the realm of Varela’s phenomenological bracketing, the epoché, and the paradigm of affective time. And by connection, we cannot underestimate the metaphysical leap into transcendence embodied in the “discontinuous historical cognition” that is Benjamin’s now-­time.66 As with phenomenological bracketing, I would like to mitigate the metaphysics at work here to redirect the thinking on now-­time toward a series of car-­based events in film clips and a work of video art. Admittedly, my appropriation of Benjamin’s now-­time is an act of what the literary critic and exegete Harold Bloom famously called “poetic misprision,” an intentional act of creative misinterpretation.67 I would like to extract Benjamin’s now-­ time from its metaphysical context, tweaking it, or in closer keeping with Bloom’s paradigm of the Epicurean clinamen, swerving it into the realm of film and art, where we find it activating radical turns of events on roadways. Showing kinship in form and suggestion to episodic time, now-­time in the realm of the road materializes in the obstruction and inversion of the anticipated function of the human-­car interface. It offers a parallel sense of metabole, the ancient Greek temporal understanding of “dramatic and sudden reversals of fortune,” for better and worse.68 Leaving behind the metaphysics articulated in the Messianism of the now-­time, we maintain its nonlinear quality and, more importantly, the critique of progress that it is its intention. Brought into the realm of technology and urban infrastructure—cars, high144 // Automotive Prosthetic

ways, overpasses, cloverleaf interchanges, airports, and bridges—it bodies forth yet another way of understanding the finicky nows of the automotive prosthetic. The car is not always host to limitless freedom and the bounty of speed, but often a bearer of failure, disruption, and, by connection, emotions of frustration, anxiety, and fear. Benjamin embarks on his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” with a parable about an automaton: a puppet in Turkish clothing with a hookah sitting in front of a chessboard set atop a table with seemingly transparent sides. While for Benjamin the automaton represents historical materialism, let that automaton translate into the car for the sake of the discussion at hand. As with Benjamin’s automaton, which in lieu of autopoetic action is in fact guided by a “little hunchback . . . expert chess player,” cars are not self-­animated but created, driven by, and the responsibility of humans.69 The first two films in which we find instances of now-­time in the form of an inversion of the streamline function of the freeway and car are Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) and Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down (1993). Though Nashville is not a road movie per se, the events of the film take place in Nashville, Tennessee, the urbanism of which has been largely formed by the car. Scenes unfold all around the capital of country music—at recording studios, hotel rooms, the fairgrounds, the motor speedway, on shoulders of four-­lane highways, at the airport, on a highway (Interstate 65, which is also intrastate and intracity), and the Parthenon, a to-­scale replica of the original in Greece and the city’s most important civic monument. Typical of Altman’s films, there is wide cast of characters, each following a separate path of dramatic action simultaneously in the film, the underlying current uniting them all being the rabid, corrupt, and perverse capitalism of the country music industry and national politics. The movie opens with a scene at the airport, where Barbara Jean, a hothouse-­flower version of Loretta Lynn, is greeted by fans. After she passes out from exertion and is taken to the hospital by ambulance, the crowd disperses into the airport and many head to the parking lot for their cars. As they line up in egress from the gated car park, Altman pays subtle homage to a similar scene in Jacques Tati’s film Mon Oncle, where a vignette in a parking lot finds an impatient driver plowing his car through the automated lever of the parking gate. In Nashville, a line of vehicles roll through the gateway, dodging the gate arm until a small passenger bus smashes through it. Drivers head out to the Nashville highway, where smooth movement on black asphalt is disrupted in the now-­time created by a couch falling into the middle of the freeway from the back of a movThe Nows of the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 145

F i g u r e 3 .2 0.

Film still from Robert Altman, director, Nashville, 1975. Courtesy of Paramount

Pictures, Los Angeles.

ing pickup truck (Figure 3.20). An inversion of the freeway’s usual function ensues as traffic backs up and people emerge from their cars. The roadway turns into a pedestrian-­way—a makeshift open public space for walking— as people amble from car to car and mingle in between. An ice cream man vends sweets from his truck. Some sing and play guitar. Others are angry and feel claustrophobic. The opening up of time, the now-­time created by the couch in the freeway, transforms the technological function of the highway. Its urbanism shifts from being a zone of atomized and rapid automotive circulation to an elongated yet cramped piazza that is host to the phlegmatic socializing of pedestrians. Tied to the trope of multiple story lines developing all at once, so characteristic of Altman, the jam-­up on the highway is just one disconnected vignette among many in the film. By contrast, a traffic jam is the signal event on which the drama of Schumacher’s Falling Down is built. The movie opens with a close-­up of the sweaty upper lip of William Foster, a divorced, unemployed defense engineer who is the main character of the film, played by Michael Douglas. He is buckled in his small, deteriorating green Chevette, stuck in traffic under an overpass on the Los Angeles freeway. As a fly buzzes around his head, his frustrations grow. Tension increases further as his air-­conditioning ceases to work. A bus full of giddy and obnoxious children, with an American flag hanging from its side, looms over him. The camera slowly pans across a phantasmagoria of reflective surfaces. A man picks his nose inside of a car. The camera closes in momentarily on the grinning, fang-­like maw of a stuffed-­ 146 // Automotive Prosthetic

animal version of the cartoon character Garfield the cat, which is stuck ornamentally to the interior of a car. A palpable glut of sensorial expression rains down on the audience. The weight of the stench of exhaust combines with the sounds of people chattering and horns honking, which in turn collide with the silent verbiage of bumper-­sticker wisdom. Foster abruptly opens his car door, grabs his briefcase, and heads by foot for the landscape beyond the freeway. It is a badlands of anarchy and moral turpitude where the pedestrian, carless Foster ultimately dies in a gun-­slinging standoff after his anger devolves into the stalking of his ex-­wife. The now-­time instrumental in this turn of events opens up not with the traffic jam on the freeway, but with the moment Foster leaves his car to walk through the agglomeration of Los Angeles. Time opens up and Foster, a man dangling on the parapet of sanity, is pushed over the edge. The yawning forth of time into the subjective realm of affectivity results from a chain reaction of dysfunctional forces: a clogged freeway, a broken air conditioner, and an alienated man who exits his car to walk through Los Angeles, a city for the most part unfriendly to pedestrian activity. It is a mise-­en-­scène of entropy—a falling down and out of technology, society, and mental balance. In Trembling Time (2001), Israeli artist Yael Bartana’s rumination in video on the confrontation of different temporalities, the now-­time is staged not by a movie director but rather by an artist and the state of Israel (Figure 3.21). From within the interstices of the technological time of the highway and the historical time of the state, the layering of which is distilled in the stammered time of Bartana’s video, the now-­time occurs as a political mandate. It arrives in the obstruction of the fluid circulation of cars on a freeway, in this instance, in Tel Aviv. We find the functional getting-­there time of the freeway stopped in the now-­time created by a national holiday: Soldier’s Memorial Day. The video shows a stuttering of time and overlapping of images, as people stop on the highway and emerge from their cars when a tocsin rings in homage to fallen soldiers. Filmed in slow motion, the footage dematerializes cars and people, transforming them into wraith-­like presences.70 Drivers come out of their cars and stand in the freeway, creating a temporary monument out of the standstill of the road. Bartana frames the now-­time of the freeway, its momentary shift from use to disuse, in order to bring home two adverse forces of communication: the authentic sadness of a people meditating loss of life made somewhat routine by the disciplinary nature of nationalism, in particular as it takes form in Zionism. From this perspective, the halting of the highway creates a quiet theatrics of state-­ The Nows of the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 147

F i g u r e 3 .2 1.

Still from Yael Bartana, Trembling Time, 2001. One-­channel video and sound

installation. Sound track by Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec. Duration: 6:20 min. Courtesy of Yael Bartana and Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam.

coerced meditation. Bartana’s slowing of the clip, her filtration of the event and tinkering with its documentation, gives it a sense of double exposure, which, in turn, catalyzes a certain temporal nesting. She opens up time on top of already opened-­up time. Bartana slows down the recording of cars that have stopped while on the highway for a national moment of bereavement. With the footage in slow motion, we ruminate over the implicit nationalism of the stoppage, but also over the embattled and persevering state of Israel, its vexing position as a democratic Jewish state at once hemmed in by foes and, itself foe-­like, hemming in the ever-­decreasing land of Palestine. The manipulation of movement within the video, Bartana’s slowing down that in turn melts the objectivity of both person and car, suggests a reciprocal melting away of identity. This staged deliquescence corroborates the artist’s public statement: “It feels to me like the end of Zionism.”71 In distilling the unique circumstances of this instance of automotive now-­time, that is to say, people stopping their cars and exiting them to stand on foot on the highway 148 // Automotive Prosthetic

on a day of national remembrance, Bartana’s video functions deictically, pointing to the complicated politics of Israeli citizenship. In the Jetztzeit of the car we have seen abrupt transformations, if not the absolute thwarting of the functionality of the car-­human-­road synthesis, with each instance underscoring a unique quality of what Hansen, who once again brings the thinking of Varela to bear on his own, describes in terms of “enaction,” or the embodied perception of technological experience.72 The enaction of experience shows subjective time opening in order to create social space in Altman’s Nashville, antisocial space in Schumacher’s Falling Down, and ultimately, quiet thoughts about the irredentist politics of a nation in Bartana’s Trembling Time. Writing in terms of the computer, Hansen explains that with enaction, “emphasis falls less on the content of the virtual than on the means of access to it, less on what is perceived in the world than on how it comes to be perceived in the first place.”73 Bringing the concept of enaction to the mechanical realm, we find that we arrive at the subjective zones of each space—social, antisocial, and the political space of a particular nation-­state—through the technology at hand, namely the car. Enaction is thus part of the fundamental naturalization of technological modifications. As I have shown here through several works of moving-­image art—both film clips and video art—enaction is equally an organic instrument within the “decoupling or deterritorialization by which the body’s habitual intercourse with the world gets disturbed and (potentially) expanded.”74

The Nows of the Automotive Prosthetic \\ 149

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The Haptic Unconscious of Dan Graham’s Urbanism The spread of suburbia after World War II correlated with [the] automobile’s alteration of American life. The new, middle-­class, suburban family was more transient than ever before, more willing to pack up and move quickly to another location. Corporations spread and decentralized, shifting their staffs from branch to branch throughout the country. The suburban automotive period also saw the rise in drive-­in cinemas and shopping malls. It was the use of the automobile for leisure and decline of the urban cinema that led to the many highway theme parks, of which Disneyland is the best known example. Da n G r a h a m , “G a r d e n a s T h e at e r a s M u s e u m ,” Da n G r a h a m : B e yo n d

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The automobile has an elusive presence in the work of Dan Graham. As what is arguably the primary force behind the formation of American suburbia, it is an implicit component of the foundation upon which Graham’s suburban-­themed art projects have been fabricated. The suburbs do not exist without highways and cars, and thus Graham’s suburban-­based work is couched in an automotive network of architectural development. Graham interrogates the relations between perception, technology, and the formative role of the generalized suburban context in works such as Homes for America (1966–1967), Picture Window Piece (1974), Alteration to a Suburban House (1978), Video Projection outside Home (1978), Clinic for a Suburban Site (1978), and Video View of Suburbia in an Urban Atrium (1979– 1980). While transportation by the car is a central motivator of the suburban template of life set in relief spatially by these projects, the car remains simply inferred, an unconscious consideration. Its presence is often marginal, materializing for example in the words “Car Hop, Jersey City, NJ,” handwritten beneath a color photograph of the interior of a roadside fast-­food restaurant in the framed and collaged version of Graham’s magazine piece, Homes for America (1966–1967) (Figure 4.1).1 A form of marginalia, the words propound Michel Foucault’s destabilizing exegesis of the “work” as a matter of both periphery and center: the “work” is aphorisms, rough drafts, and “the notes and deleted passages at the bottom of the page” that exist outside of and in counterpoise to the “masterpiece” and finished work of art.2 As the title of a single photograph within the piece, the words set off a fury of suggestion about Dan Graham’s “work” of art called Homes for America. We understand the project to be fundamentally about double, triple, and quadruple intentions: a loquaciously self-­reflexive interrogation of the “subject” conceived multidimensionally—as artist, viewer, work of art, art world frame, magazine structure, suburban landscape, and automobile infrastructure. The prodigious chattering that is internal to Homes for America strikes a mobility of form akin to electronic noise. The self-­reflexivity of the piece is a frenetic force, one of the varied trajectories of communication space: a zone within Graham’s work delimited by human and technological relations—the prosthetic connection that links urbanism, house, dweller, car, and electronic gadget. In another photograph taken at the same roadside restaurant, the automobile is just beyond the frame, there on the road but unseen (Figure 4.2). Used as part of an exhibition of projected slides that is a component of Homes for America, the photograph sets in play the car as an unnoticed motivator of 152 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e 4.1.

Dan Graham, Car Hop, Jersey

City, NJ, from Homes for America, layout for Arts Magazine, 1967. Courtesy of Dan Graham and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

F i g u r e 4.2.

Dan Graham, untitled slide

image from Homes for America, 1966– 1967. Courtesy of Dan Graham and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

F i g u r e 4.3.

Dan Graham, untitled slide

image from Homes for America, 1966– 1967. Courtesy of Dan Graham and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

urban form. Though there are no cars in the split second of Graham’s snapshot, one imagines cars before and after the picture driving swiftly along on the highway strip just outside the window in front of a family of three sitting on swivel-­top stools. The viewer sees their backs in front of a large glass pane as they look out onto a momentarily car-­less roadway running at an oblique angle. Perhaps making a stop while out for a Sunday drive, they are dressed in their best. The son wears a checkered suit coat, the mother a red coat and yellow ribbon in her hair, and the father a dark tweed suit. In another shot from the same slide-­projection series, the viewer sees a woman sitting inside a tour bus (Figure 4.3). She is ensconced in the pill-­shaped window of the backdoor of the tour bus. Here the automobile is a mode of collective transit and sightseeing for the roving mass in miniature. In another ancillary reference, the car emerges as part of Graham’s retrospective gaze onto American Communication Space \\ 153

life some forty years after Homes for America. It is an assertion similar to that in the epigram above concerning the built-­in obsolescence and ephemeral nature of the suburban house and automobile alike. Referring to suburban tract homes in a 2006 interview, Graham claims: “I like the fact that they were very temporary and wouldn’t last for very long. It’s the kind of culture that we still have. And John Chamberlain talked about it a lot. His early work was about the fact that you buy a beautiful automobile and then it’s junked very quickly.”3 The car functions homologically to Graham’s interests in pop art, creating another instance of what Brian O’Doherty called “Pop phenomenology.” The car is an instrumental element in the creation of everyday life in suburbia and a consumer product omnipresent in the post–World War II American market. Similar to the function of the single-­family home in Graham’s work, the car and automotive landscape are counter-­elements, bastions of low, common culture, both of which are unleashed in opposition to the highness of fine art conventionally conceived. In what follows, we will see in related fashion that Graham connects the thinking and artifacts of the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, the postmodern and pop architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and the arch-­modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the creation of a heady brew of opposing ideologies. It is lurking from within and around this infusion that we find the automobile functioning as a bearer of what I would like to call the “haptic unconscious.” The haptic unconscious of Dan Graham’s suburban and architectural-­ based work is borne on the automobile and, in its most basic and general sensibility, refers to the full-­body and tactile experience of driving the automobile that is their epistemological basis. The interpretative rubric is based on Walter Benjamin’s well-­known reference to the camera’s creation of an “optical unconscious,” the way in which the photograph captures things— events, objects, and passing moments—along the periphery of vision, the things that otherwise go unnoticed.4 “The camera,” Benjamin explains, “introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.”5 In coupling the two words “unconscious optics,” Benjamin articulates the underbelly of the eyes and Freudian unconscious of the visual experience. Rosalind Krauss connects Benjamin’s designation of a mechanized enlargement of vision to Freud’s citation of “technological advances . . . as a set of ‘prosthetic limbs’ that expand the power of the individual,” which he outlined in Civilization and Its Discontents.6 In reading Benjamin and Freud closely together, Krauss devises an alternative category of modern 154 // Automotive Prosthetic

art, one not so much rooted in the imagination as a prosthetic, but rather in which the certitudes of sight—truth, clarity, and autonomous form—are set into grave doubt. If for Krauss the phrase “optical unconscious” refers to artists who worked out an alternative path within modernism, one in which the truth of clear vision was not its earmark, then the haptic unconscious refers to artists in the postwar period who deploy the automobile, among other forms of technology, to extend the body—from the skin to senses—as a means of inscribing another subject position in which language and ideology function alongside of technology as forces of a priori formation. What we begin to see emerging here in the concept of the “haptic unconscious” is an alternative understanding of Dan Graham’s conceptualism. In replacing the camera within Benjamin’s rubric, the car is the bodily attachment—the extension—whereby habits of mobile aesthesis, the perception of space-­time in transit, and entanglement within a global political economy of oil are the undercurrent, or more precisely, the unconscious of the haptic experiences of daily life. The haptic unconscious further tweaks and transforms the forceful link between technology and the mass audience that is central to Benjamin’s essay. While for Benjamin, the celluloid technologies of the photograph and film bear the potential for political emancipation, the technological basis of the haptic unconscious tells only of the brute experience of driving and its powerful connection to the world, the way in which driving is a political act. The haptic unconscious promises no freedom or redemption—either of the individual or of avant-­garde art. In fact, it tells of the opposite: the way in which the automobile ties citizens ever more tightly into the biopolitical matrices of global capitalism. The collective and concentrated mass audience of cinema vaunted as revolutionary by Benjamin and of which the camera was the seminal forebear, gives way to the shifting mass of mobile drivers on the road. Benjamin’s promise of revolution from the mass audience of cinema gives way to the flaccid agency of the dispersed lone driver on the go. The formalism of the disintegrated mass of drivers undulates and moves, changing from beeline and hive-­like formations along the freeway to the radically individuating and intersecting vectors of movement, so many free-­form drivers obeying the rules of traffic according to their own cognizance. In replacing “optic” with “haptic,” I give name to the tactile experiences instrumentalized by technology, in this instance the automobile, which are the basis of so many daily activities. It is intended to describe the experiences of driving the car made normative— going fast, slow, and in between as but a series of nonchalant daily acts. ConCommunication Space \\ 155

necting driver to world, consumer to a global network of petroleum-­based war and trade, they are acts that empower people to move while also binding them irremovably into a biopolitcal network of subjugation. In this chapter, the haptic unconscious functions in a threefold fashion. First, the haptic unconscious refers to the role of the automobile in Graham’s work, its mode of being present and invisible, evident as it skirts along the edge of his work and implicit in its role as founding technological force in the making of decentralized American urbanism. Second, the haptic unconscious within Graham’s work points to the general condition discussed above, namely the automobile as a force in the formation of our collective reality, that is, American urbanism, the space-­time of commuting, and global interconnection in the form of trade and war. Third, I present the haptic unconscious as a paradigm of thinking—making connections between disparate words, objects, and events—which is modeled after Dan Graham’s way of thinking and process of making art. In this instance, the haptic unconscious refers to the extended connections between objects, broad elastic matrices and the far-­reaching points of cultural production that Graham makes in his writing and works of art. Proof of his open, nimble, and risk-­friendly imagination, Graham has, for example, linked the American Shaker tradition to the rocker Patti Smith, suburban tract homes to conceptual art, surveillance cameras to performance art, Mies van der Rohe to Robert Venturi, and, in the essay from which the epigram above comes, the eighteenth-­century English garden to Disney World in order to explain the root thinking behind his own sculptures, rendered from the fusion of corporate glass architecture and the conventions of the classical French garden folie. He is a thinker of dialectical opposites, colliding antithetical cultural icons with finesse, as exemplified by the opening quote, which comes from “The City to the Suburbs” section of the essay “Garden as Theater as Museum.” Originally published in the exhibition catalog for Theatergarden Bestiarium in 1989, the essay both proves the power of Graham’s mental acrobatics while giving form to the template of the haptic unconscious.7 Graham links classical European garden traditions to American car culture to Venturi, Rausch, and Scott Brown’s plan for Freedom Square (1980) in Washington, DC, and Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette (1984–1987) in Paris, all by way of the tourism of Disney World. This passage of thought, the mental hopscotch from form to form, thought-­space to thought-­space, leads to Graham’s explanation of two works of outdoor sculpture, his Octagon for Münster (1987) in Germany and Two-­Way Mir156 // Automotive Prosthetic

ror Pergola Bridge (1988–1990) in Lisson, France. The two landscape folies mark the culmination of Graham’s thinking on garden design, populist mobility, tourism in the United States, and postmodern architectural practice in the late twentieth century. In the workings of Graham’s mirrored and interactive outdoor sculpture and the accompanying catalog essay we find a strain of funky, bristly thinking—the intellectual tetchiness, ambiguity, and body-­in-­motion that is here the catalyst of a certain intellectual mirroring. From this perspective we find that the haptic unconscious, the connection made between Graham’s suburban-­themed work and the automobile, is modeled after the artist’s very own thinking. The haptic unconscious reflects Graham’s cheeky obtuseness.

Architecture as Outering and the Makeup of Communication Space

The automobile is one formative vector among several in the mind-­bending sense of spatiality at work in Dan Graham’s oeuvre. This unique spatiality arises in part from the collision of high and low, or what the artist calls the “merging of realism and irony” that takes form in the mixture of architectural coding, the low commercial vernacular with high architectural modernism.8 It is an “approach,” Graham says, that “parallels . . . Pop art.”9 In the shelter of the word “spatiality” we find further suggestion of such complexity, insomuch as to unpack it is to yield the following within it: urbanism, architecture, and the interstitial zones of technological mediation and performance combined. The curator Gloria Moure sees the hybridity and metaphorical remove of Graham’s work as an omnipresent condition that is evident throughout, and not merely in the spatiality of his work. “He rarely has recourse to narrative,” Moure explains. “His way of avoiding reductionist approaches is coherent with . . . the ‘third discontinuity,’” or the tendency in his work toward “experience and interference with the environment in the psychological, sociological and historical ambits.”10 The architectural historian Alain Charre describes the singularity of built form and space in Graham’s work in terms of an “unplaceable architecture” that similarly arises from a broad interdisciplinarity and almost endless heterogeneity of sources. For Charre, it is the diversity and incongruity of influences—from pop art to rock music to architectural theory—which lends an irreducibility to Graham’s work. It proves stubborn to interpret. Charre explains, “Because it springs from an ongoing survey of diverse fields of knowledge. . . . Dan Communication Space \\ 157

Graham’s work can remain coolly and adroitly balanced on a razor’s edge of inappropriable criticism, exalting the hybrid and the ambivalent.”11 The word “architecture” carries within it the heterotopic nature of Graham’s work. Similar to the word “spatiality,” it is both a bearer of multiplicity and a node within a network of technological mediators. Take for example the theme and material substantiated by “suburbia,” a type of architecture and one signifying system among several within Graham’s work. Prima facie, North American suburbia seems an odd grammar of form and culture by which to develop conceptualism, a strain of art that thwarts standard traditions of representation and mimesis. It is strange not so much because suburbia is strange, but, in spite of its utter banality and omnipresence, it strikes a sense of being a non sequitur—an unannounced and atypical set of references, especially insomuch as Graham’s earliest invocation of it was in part a response to minimalism in the form of the “flat-­footed humor” of Homes for America.12 A matter at once of his upbringing in New Jersey suburbs and a pop-­art-­based entrée into an art-­world context where the minimalist art of Carl André, Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Robert Smithson was prominent, Graham’s foray into suburbia pivots around the form of the single-­family home, indeed most directly in works such as Homes for America (1966–1967), Picture Window Piece (1974), Alteration to a Suburban House (1978), Video Projection outside Home (1978), Clinic for a Suburban Site (1978), and Video View of Suburbia in an Urban Atrium (1979–1980). The single-­family home is so extensive in his work that it includes the “expanding subject” of the angry, anxious, and rebellious rock-­n-­roll obsessed teenager of the baby-­boom generation. While it is the fount of a semiotic and techno-­genetic system of broad engagement within Graham’s oeuvre, a unidimensional perspective of suburbia—the idea that it begins and ends with provincialism—limits its standard interpretation.13 There has been little deep interrogation of the mosaic of relations surrounding suburbia and of which suburbia is a conduit in his work.14 Its infrastructural raison d’être embodied in the automobile, for example, goes unnoticed and unannounced by historians and critics. Rather, suburbia is understood flatly, as though singly a picture of the suburban ranch house. I would like to argue here for a rich and diversified understanding of the suburban ranch house as a representational and conceptual sieve in Graham’s oeuvre. It functions as a picture, a building, and more: a prop-­like filter for the multiple forces of transfer within “communication space.” We begin by looking to the three colorful maquettes of glass-­sided ranch 158 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e 4.4 .

Dan Graham, Alteration to a Suburban House, 1978. Courtesy of Dan Graham and

Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

homes in Alteration to a Suburban House (Figure 4.4). With this project, I would like to reverse the aforementioned negativity about the suburban home in his work, the hinge of which is moral judgment against the ranch house and urban sprawl. In this light, one misinterprets the models of Alteration to a Suburban House as simply components of the stereotypical suburban neighborhood, deployed here pejoratively and aped in terms of suburban architecture and urbanism. They become mistakenly a mechanism for the critique of suburban life, a prism through which to see their suburban context as simply the serial repetition of low-­slung rectangular boxes separated by driveways and small green plots of grass. Suburban life here is intellectually vapid, solemn, and humdrum. This point of view is something of an intellectual cul de sac, which reduces the suburban home and its culture to a dumb vernacular. The propounding of a mind-­numbing life in the context of strip highways, strip malls, big-­box discount retailers, and fast-­food restaurants in many ways goes against the amoral pop sensibility that is the root of Graham’s spirit. Graham’s goal is not to cast suburbia in a negative light, but rather to play out the complexities of urban, and in particular, suburban, space. We begin to get another glimpse into the idea of the entropic subCommunication Space \\ 159

urban landscape. It is entropic not so much in terms of its blandness, but its sheer and literal particulation—its light-­streaming motherboard urbanism and one side of Norbert Wiener’s definition of “cybernetics.” Quoting Roy Lichtenstein, Graham sees the function of pop, and thus by correlation his own materializations of the banal suburban home, as “it appears to accept its environment, which is not good or bad but different—another state of mind.”15 What goes lost in the reductivist understanding of Graham’s suburbia, the perspective by which “suburbia” begins and ends with the commonplace single-­family home, is the wealth of connotation, denotation, and performativity propagated by the form itself, that is, the way in which the suburban home might also function structurally and, by turns, technologically in his oeuvre. Similar to the video camera, surveillance camera, and TV in Graham’s work of the same years, the single-­family home functions as a mode of dilation, an aperture and extender out onto the world: it is a vista of relations, creator of communication, and node within a network between people and places. Situated in an urban matrix formed by the infrastructure of the automobile, the suburban home is one constituent among several others in a list that includes video and surveillance cameras, the TV, automobile, and the proverbial picture window of the suburban home, in a broad, intricate matrix of communication space. Architecture in Graham’s work, of which the suburban ranch house is a single element, is one of an array of McLuhan-­esque technological extensions, a form of what McLuhan scholar Richard Cavell calls “outering,” or exteriorizing the flow (intake and outtake) of information.16 An often overlooked influence on Graham, the media theorist Marshall McLuhan describes housing in terms of a similarly quasi-­organic externalization, as though a form of clothing and integument: “housing as shelter is an extension of our bodily heat-­control mechanisms—a collective skin or garment.”17 Housing outers—extends, invaginates, and turns inside out—the human body. In McLuhan’s theoretical matrix on the media, the words “utter” and “outer” are connected; they relate for reasons of syntagmatic and functional closeness. To speak and to deploy language is equally a matter of extending oneself into the world beyond the human body. For McLuhan, outering and extending knowledge, or what Bernard Stiegler calls “exteriorizing,” occurs by way of the supplement of technological tools.18 In Understanding Media, McLuhan frames the technological tools of the mass media according to the organic-­cum-­biological human will to speak and a long list of enabling devices. For McLuhan, the spoken and written word, roads, housing, 160 // Automotive Prosthetic

cars, telegraph, telephone, movies, radio, TV, and weapons are extensions of the human body; each is a matter of “our uttered and outered senses.”19 For McLuhan, architecture from this perspective functions ecologically and skin-­like, connecting human to ground, city, and a globally interconnected world: By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and teeth and bodily heat-­controls—all such extensions of our bodies, including cities—will be translated into information systems.20

Architecture is a combined structural layer and mediating mechanism, one among several others within the greater space of communication, or what McLuhan describes here in terms of the bevy of “information systems” that make up the city and greater reality. A force of mediation, architecture plugs into the greater information system of mass communication, a network that for Graham was outlined and given substance by the writings of McLuhan, as well as pop art and artists like Lichtenstein.21 This technologized wellspring functions similar to language as an a priori sedimentation of filters. Just as we exist through language, so we exist through the mediation of our extensions. We are interpellated into our subject positions, to use Althusserian language, by ideology, language, and technology.22 Graham’s spatiality points to this particular mode of architecture as a structuring device, or what I would like to call here architecture as a form of outering. Architecture functions as a means of exteriorization: in mediating the world, it creates it. In turn, architecture in Graham’s work—the suburban home, the high-­rise apartment building, the European shopping arcade—points outward to the greater field of communication space in which modes of technological connection collapse and transform space, giving body to a new understanding of the “city” as an information system inclusive of steel, concrete, brick, and mortar as well as the video camera, surveillance camera, cable TV, and today, the Internet. Alexander Alberro describes a related process of outering at work in Graham’s Schema, one of the artist’s earliest incursions into the “art” of magazine publishing (Figures 4.5 and 4.6). Appearing in journals such as Aspen and Art and Language and in variant forms in more mainstream magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar and Arts Magazine, Schema functions Communication Space \\ 161

F i g u r e s 4.5 a n d 4.6.

Dan

Graham, Schema (March 1966), 1969–1973. Courtesy of Dan Graham and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

as a bare-­bones form of self-­reflexivity, reducing “art” to a list of words that point outward analytically, speaking to the structure of the art magazine itself. The words in Schema not only refer back to the skeletal structure of the magazine qua magazine, but also to the greater overarching structure of art qua art. For the project, Graham published pages of raw information in magazines, the white pages of which were almost blank save for a list of data running in a column down the center. One version of Schema shows a list of words enumerating ways in which the print-­space of the magazine is filled. It includes the more obvious fillers of magazine pages such as nouns, adverbs, and adjectives, as well as the less obvious abstract mode of fillers, both negative and positive, such as “area not occupied by type” and “area occupied by type.” In Schema, Graham playfully deploys tautology—magazine print that describes the rudiments of magazine print—in order to set in relief the most basic terms of information production, namely that it is “externally predetermined.”23 The goal of Schema was to self-­reflexively point back to the basic structures that make up the mechanism of art’s bringing-­in-­to-­being, such as the art market and magazine publishing industry. It “outers” not so much in the sense that it is a technological tool instrumental in the causality of the intake and outtake of knowledge, but in that it literally points outward to the structures of art. Graham explained the process at work in the piece according to the reciprocal flows of capital and an artist’s need for recognition in a national and international forum: “Magazines specialize in a ‘field’ in a way which replicates other social and economic divisions—for instance, the specialized ‘world’ of art and artists termed the ‘art’ world.”24 In Schema, Graham is “less interested in subject matter than in how subject matter is made possible.”25 Graham’s Schema inaugurates a process within his body of work whereby structure functions as content. It is a working substitution in which the fusion of “content and context, subject and object” sets in place the centrality of flows—an inherent sense of movement that works something like a feedback loop—in his work. This to-­and-­fro is not only constitutive of the two-­dimensional magazine pieces that make up Schema; it is also the catalyst of event and meaning making in Graham’s architectural models, video installations, and performances.26 Graham’s Homes for America (1966–1967), another magazine piece appearing in Arts Magazine, operates according to a sense of outering in which structure does not so much become content but rather in which structure and content operate separately, virtually autonomously, but in sync in the work of art. Like Schema, Homes for America points outward to the world of Communication Space \\ 163

art house publishing, but it does so without sacrificing a more conventional sense of meaning making, that is, of being about representation and what is inside the frame. Pointing outward to the mechanistic configurations that uphold and create the art world, the work is about suburbia just as much as it is about the structure of the magazine. That is to say, the images within Homes for America are representational and thus an unlikely mode of communication within conceptualism, which has been codified as an art operating beyond the conventions of representation in its penchant for pointing outward. Homes for America is specifically “about” something because of the figural presence of the suburban landscape in what are otherwise seemingly arbitrary photographs. In Homes for America, Graham published photographs of suburban tract housing, organizing the images within a grid of information that includes the typical plan of a tract home and bland verbiage descriptive of the suburban landscape. The piece has a throwaway feel to it out of both intention and circumstance. With Homes for America, Graham sought to create a “fake think piece” that parodies the stereotypical journalistic account of suburbia as a disaffecting environment. Graham describes this negative portrayal of suburbia as “a great cliché.”27 In making the piece, Graham parodied the criticism of suburbia that had become standardized in the photo-­essay format: “Esquire magazine used to have articles about how alienating the suburbs were by sociologists, and then a good, a very well-­known photographer would take glossy photographs. . . . Bill Owens, people like that.”28 With respect to the personal conditions of his life, Graham made the piece in a time of penury, when he found himself out of work and back at home living with his parents in New Jersey after the closing of the John Daniels Gallery in New York, where he had been director in 1965. Shooting photographs and writing offered inexpensive modes of making art that were alternative to the more costly media of sculpture and painting. Graham first made the photographs that appear in Homes for America as slides, which he put in a show titled Projected Art at Finch College Museum of Art in New York City in 1965.29 In the final magazine piece, the photographs function rhythmically as formal blanks, so many slot-­filling counterpoints to the featureless verbal description of tract housing. Graham describes the project as a matter of “intuition,” inspired by the “relation between serial music and minimal art.”30 The photographs also function figuratively as specific illustrations of the text. Similar to Schema, the two-­page spread of Homes for America points outward to the structures of the art world. Distinct, however, from Schema, 164 // Automotive Prosthetic

Homes for America also points to the world of anthropology and the overlapping political and economic frameworks of suburban life, which are seemingly outside of the art world. “I wanted to show that minimal art was related to a real social situation that could be documented,” Graham explains. The photographs and flat descriptive prose do not so much morally comment on life in the proverbial edge city, but ironically mirror it in the sense of false documentation. In stressing the “real framework . . . the socio-­economic structure, the apparatus of validation,” Graham’s Homes for America functions both epideictically and in terms of symbolic form, that is, as a matter of pointing outward and according to its imagistic contents.31 For Jeff Wall, Graham infuses the representational emptiness of conceptualism with a “distinguishable subject-­matter” that is markedly the form of the city.32 The art magazine deciphers and filters the making of structures in the art world, while the suburban landscape, a constituent part of a larger plane of urban interconnection, fashions subjectivities. The image of the home here should be understood as pointing outward and inward, as a mode of ideological criticism of the art world and, beyond conventional interpretations of conceptual art, in terms of the actual thing inside the picture plane, that is, according to a new idea of representation. Like old paradigms of mimesis, iconography, and representation, this new mode of representation plays out according to inside and outside. But instead of mirroring the putative real evidenced through a window-­like frame, the contents inside of Graham’s work, both picture and performance, work through a tentacle-­like sense of expression: affectivity built on relations between art and world, object and urban site, person and person. The suburban landscape depicted in Graham’s Homes for America is part of a referential system catalyzed by difference insomuch as the tract houses refer to what they are not. They are part of a spectrum of technological and urban filters, including the automobile—a causal source of mass urban infrastructure in the form of the highway—that, in turn, connects center to periphery and town to town much like other seminal urban interconnectors in Graham’s work, such as video and surveillance cameras and cable TV. The suburban landscape describes, as Marie-­Paul MacDonald explains in reference to Graham’s architecturally based projects, “the contemporary metropolis [as] a web of systems relaying urban, suburban, and the ‘in transit,’ infused and glued together with the airwaves and broadcasts of the invisible city of mass media into a composite sandwich of experience.”33 The operation of difference also functions at a more intimate level within the Communication Space \\ 165

artist’s oeuvre between individual works of art, linking Homes for America not only to Schema but also to a bevy of works in which Graham uses the single-­family home as a feedback loop within performances and video installations. The home is a building through which to perceive the self and world. The logic of Homes for America is not succinctly bound to the suburban single-­family home as a static work of architecture, but rather as it is a vista of communication similar to other vistas of communication within Graham’s oeuvre. The space of communication in Graham’s work shows itself to be a matter of signs, semiotics, and structuralism as well as the technological shifts and flows of the feedback loop.

From Signage to Feedback Loop

In “Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel,” originally published in 1982, Jeff Wall writes extensively about the signifying functions of Graham’s work, in particular the references to glass architecture within high architectural modernism, in Alteration to a Suburban House (1978) and the factographic nature of Homes for America (1966–1967).34 What is of interest here is that, in keeping with Graham’s Robert Venturi–inspired penchant for looking to the form, footprint, and materials of architecture as a system of signs, Wall reads Graham’s references to architecture in terms of its sense of “about-­ ness.” In this somewhat awkward neologism, I refer to the semiotic play of signs in Graham’s work and the fact that Graham’s use of architecture makes meaningful references outside itself rather than being solely a matter of the audacious self-­reflexivity that is the signature modus operandi of most conceptual art. It is conceptual art that represents. Wall highlights that certain of Graham’s suburban-­based projects are in fact “about” a series of utopian avant-­garde promises made by the leading figures of architectural modernism and their failure to come to fruition. We begin here with Graham’s interest in signs, modern architectural signage, and the writings and design projects of Venturi, in order to initiate a certain interpretative slippage toward a different framing of space. Not only is architecture and urbanism in Graham’s work a matter of the logic of semiotics, but so too is it a matter of the mobile and transitory zone of communication space where information—people, images, and language—flows through technological vistas and tools, such as highways, automobiles, video cameras, and TVs. I would like to connect the seemingly disparate fields of 166 // Automotive Prosthetic

the semiotics of signage and cybernetics of the feedback loop in order to show how such signage is the material shuttling through conduits within a cybernetic field. Think here billboards on the mobile vistas of highways. The modeling of this logic is somewhat similar to Alberro’s understanding of Graham’s Schema as a work in which structure becomes content. In this case, signs in the city—from billboards to classical columns and pediments to corporate glass facades—are data-­flows along highways: abstract information coursing through channels that make up the communication space of Graham’s work. It is not, though, the feedback loop in Graham’s work, but his interest in architectural semiotics that substantiates Wall’s overarching thesis in the essay on Graham’s architectural projects. Wall looks to this work as an expression of the double bind of conceptual art. Conceptualism’s logjam takes form in a precise contradiction: though high conceptual art emerged in the mid-­1960s in the heyday of social critique, in fact as a form of social critique, it finds itself by 1970 unable to express poignant and meaningful criticism. This obstruction of expression gives rise to conceptualism reinventing itself as a form of “defeatism.”35 In the case of Dan Graham, Wall explains, the artist “begins from the failure of conceptualism’s critique,” and turns to a form of muted expressionism in the “countermonument” of Alteration to a Suburban Home.36 Wall links the “mirror axis” and curtain glass walls of the three small suburban houses that make up Alteration to a Suburban House to the revolutionary promises made by Bruno Taut and the proto-­ Bauhaus architects of the Glass Chain. Wall also makes long excursuses on the semiotic connections between the use of glass in Graham, Mies van der Rohe, and Philip Johnson’s work. From this reading, the materials of the small maquettes of ranch houses in Graham’s Alteration represent the failed and thwarted utopian ideals of modernism replayed through conceptual art. “The glass curtain wall, inherent in the steel frame construction, is from the outset an intensely symbolic element,” Wall explains.37 The symbolism of glass among early twentieth-­century German avant-­gardists was powerful and layered. Because of its literal sense of transparency, glass architecture embodied the rudiments of liberal democracy. As crystalline form, it also represented the potential for the revolutionary transformation of everyday life. Wall sees this bounty of references at work in Graham’s use of glass, linking it to the “revolutionary-­Expressionist fantasies of Feininger, Taut and Gropius,” and the “liberal ideal of openness and the quasi-­religious Expressionist tendency toward a mystical monumentalism.”38 Communication Space \\ 167

In parallel fashion, Wall explains the enframed facticity of Graham’s Homes for America by referencing once again the historic avant-­garde, here the Soviet constructivist practices of factography. In the early twentieth century, the intention of Soviet factography was to distill facets of everyday life by way of documentary with the intention of transforming it, whereas the factography of Graham’s work presents “an image of the miserable consequences of architectural thought in the postwar era, the barracks-­like tract house.”39 For Wall, Graham’s Homes for America is about the homology between art and urbanism, the linchpin of which is capitalism’s imposition in the form of the technocratic administration of everyday life. At the same time, though, Graham holds out for the age-­old consciousness-­raising tactic of collapsing high into low, the sure bet that this tactic will frustrate the bourgeois autonomy of the work of art by catalyzing the “process of its own reproduction as city.”40 Wall explains: In a single gesture Graham establishes both the primacy of social subject-­ matter as the historically essential problem to be posed by conceptualism, and he identifies at the same time the single grand subject which will remain central to the development of the movement’s historical self-­ consciousness: the city.41

Wall’s understanding of Graham’s Homes for America as it turns on the city bears a certain Janus-­faced quality pertinent to this discussion, for the city is at once a precinct of signage in the form of advertising and architectural styles and a system of flowing forces, exchanges, and information. The influence of the postmodern pop architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown on Dan Graham, however, ultimately outweighs that of the German and Soviet avant-­garde from earlier in the twentieth century. In his suburban-­themed work, Graham is especially influenced by Venturi’s mixing of vernacular architecture’s codes and signs, on the one hand, and his implicit alignment with the pop art position of moral indifference. Graham explains: In rejecting the reductivism and utopianism of modernist architectural doctrine, Robert Venturi and his collaborators propose an architecture that accepts the actual conditions, social realities, and given economics of a particular situation. This means, for commercial buildings in a capitalist society, taking the syntax of the commercial vernacular seriously, includ168 // Automotive Prosthetic

ing the building’s relation to the surrounding built environment, the program of the client on whose behalf it was built, and the public’s reading and cultural appropriation of the building.42

The work—architecture and writing—of Venturi and Scott Brown provides Graham the opportunity to popularize minimalism and conceptualism in order to not merely collapse their collective form and intention into the kitschy world of everyday life but also to create a radical new grammar of formal interrogation in which conceptualism becomes a progressive and critical form of kitsch. This is similar to Graham’s fascination with the play of high and low culture in Lichtenstein’s pop. Through Graham, the kitschiness of the suburban landscape folds back onto itself as a matter of irony but also to set in relief the perversity of its political economy, one vital component of which is the mandate to own a home and its relationship to the putative American dream. Given the centrality of signs and signage in this approach, the use of glass within Graham’s architectural project veers meaning-­wise more toward the realm of corporate capitalism—its simultaneous perpetuation and trumping—than toward the politics of utopian retrieval at work in the historic avant-­garde. Graham’s work mimics the embracement of the banal that is central to both pop art and Venturi and Scott Brown’s architecture. Graham embraces, pulls through, and inverts the prescriptions and proscriptions of corporate capital in order to create a thinking-­space that is akin to a “topological moebius strip.” It is deep inside the biopolitical matrix of corporate capitalism that it penetrates another dimension.43 The grounds for Graham’s own acceptance of roadside architecture are structured in part on the publication of Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas in 1972. In claiming that “billboards are almost all right,” advocating “architecture as symbol,” and asserting the primacy of the “architecture of the strip,” Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour catalyzed a turn toward an architecture based on what is rather than what should be.44 It would be an architecture of signs—in particular as they are viewed from the car window while driving down the highway strip—they argued, that would replace the volumetric and classical orders of ancient Roman architecture, which had been the mainstay of formal architectural training immemorial. Graham reproduced one such highway vista in the essay “Signs,” published originally in Artforum nine years after Learning from Las Vegas (see Figure 4.7). It is taken from Venturi, Rauch, and Scott Brown’s City Edges (1973– 1974), one of two road-­based design projects the architects conceived acCommunication Space \\ 169

F i g u r e 4 .7 .

Venturi, Rauch, and Scott Brown, photomontage proposal for City Edges,

1976. Courtesy of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

cording to the mobile perception of the view-­to-­the-­road from the car, the other being General Plan, California City, California (1970–1971) (see Figures 4.8 and 4.9).45 With City Edges, Venturi, Rauch, and Scott Brown proposed signs for use in 1976 along the highways in Philadelphia. In the image Graham reproduced, Venturi, Rauch, and Scott Brown photomontaged giant pictures of food—soft pretzels off to the right in the foreground and a giant hoagie sandwich in the background—onto a photographic view to the road. It is a view taken from the perspective of the front seat of a car, from the point of view of the driver and the person sitting in the adjacent passenger seat, while moving down a highway. It is one of several images in Venturi, Rauch, and Scott Brown’s project that play the billboard image of advertising off of classical and academic paintings held in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In Graham’s explanation we see evidence of the hybridization mentioned above—the segue of signage into flows of information by way of the billboard as a flickering image-­moment seen while the driver is circulating through the city in an automobile. Graham explains: In concept, they played off the standard modern design and iconography of existing billboards and road signs. Venturi’s signs represented food, buildings, art and other subjects that typify contemporary or his-

170 // Automotive Prosthetic

toric Philadelphia. Things to eat—for example, “HOAGIE” or “SOFT PRETZEL”—were depicted in both word and image; they echoed other roadside billboard ads for brand-­name food products. These Pop art-­like representations of food were contrasted with framed, billboard-­scale reproductions of paintings from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.46

Because of the implicit movement along the highway, I would like to argue for a shift of interpretation from signage to data-­flows here borne on the automobile. While the centrality of the car in this mediation is implicit

F i g u r e 4 .8 .

Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates, General Plan, California City,

California, 1970–1971. Courtesy of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

F i g u r e 4 .9 .

Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates, Roadside Flowers on Twenty Mule

Team Parkway, 1970–1971. Courtesy of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Communication Space \\ 171

in Graham’s embracement of the banality of the automotive landscape, it is explicit in Venturi, Rauch, and Scott Brown’s framing of post-­WWII architecture. This fluid understanding of the city—urbanism moving between its incarnation as a system of signs and a matter of the cybernetic feedback loop— is at the core of the work of Venturi and Scott Brown; indeed, the roving car is a forthright presence in City Edges and Learning from Las Vegas. The trifecta of the driver, road, and moving automobile is central to these projects, for without it they would not exist. We might also look to a little-­ known art exhibition from 1970 titled The Highway, for which Scott Brown and Venturi wrote the main essay, for further evidence of the fluid link between the semiotics of signage and feedback loop of cybernetics. Curated by Stephen S. Prokopoff, then director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, The Highway was an exhibition primarily of paintings focusing on the car and the view to the road from the car (see Figure 4.10). In their catalog essay, Venturi and Scott Brown write about the road in terms of the “expansion of the movement function,” which has transformed radically the way we understand the city.47 The two designers directly connect automotive mobility to communication space: And the communication function has moved its primary locus from Main Street downtown to the urban highway where more people pass and where communication has developed a special character in order to reach a driver traveling 50 mph in a complicated machine. This has changed the face of the highway.48

Billboards along the highway transform the landscape into “a series of events, more or less insistent, which swim into the driver’s ken and rapidly out again to be succeeded by the next.”49 The system of signage weaving around and through the city is dependent on the flow of the automobile. One flow of data, the automobile, integrates, interlaces, and interacts within another flow of data, the system of signs taking form as billboards, architectural design, and infrastructure altogether create a dense matrix of mobility, otherwise referred to here as “communication space.” Jennifer Light, an expert in communication studies, traces the origins of the city as communication space back to the Cold War period, when a bevy of thinkers working for the Pentagon, Rand Corporation, and MIT, or what Light refers to collectively as “defense intellectuals,” rethought the city ac172 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e 4.10 .

Cover of catalog for The Highway, Institute of Contemporary Art, University

of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, January 14–February 25, 1970. Courtesy of author’s archive.

cording to the science of cybernetics.50 In planning the city as a communication system, defense intellectuals such as Norbert Wiener, the scientist who invented cybernetics and the technology of smart bombs, recalibrated the urban template. Whereas the city was once understood in terms of a dense city center surrounded by ever-­more lightly populated rings of density, defense intellectuals rethought its form broadly according to the dispersal of information, both in the physical terms of landscape and in the technological terms of evolving tele-­technologies such as cable television and satellites. For Wiener “information” circulated in a variety of modes through the city, from cars driving down highways to data broadcast by way of these various Communication Space \\ 173

tele-­technologies. The umbrella idea for Wiener’s rethinking of the city was the field of communication engineering, or cybernetics. Wiener defined cybernetics according to the two-­tiered logic of feedback and entropy: “Just as the information in a system is a measure of its degree of organization, so the entropy of a system is a degree of its disorganization.”51 In linking feedback and entropy, Wiener mapped out movable field coordinates in which data bits enter in order to be entropically disseminated and made increasingly particulate across a field of action. The city is thus understood as a fluctuating mechanism based on a statistical science in which predictions articulated in the numerical changes of data result in transformations in the order of the city. Writing for Life magazine in 1950, Wiener introduced the cybernetic city of communication space as a means of national defense.52 The play between information and entropy materialized in this instance in Wiener’s suggestion that highway rings called “life belts” be built to hasten the dispersal of the dense city center and its manufacturing bases. Protecting against the event of nuclear attack, such dispersal would make it more difficult for the enemy, in this case the Soviets, to destabilize the country by way of detonating an atomic bomb and destroying what would otherwise be its concentrated nucleus of production and city life. As Light is wont to reinforce, the defense intellectuals are by no means the sole force behind the creation of the American landscape of decentralized urbanization in the post-­WWII period. As scientists connecting cybernetic engineering and emergent information technology to the conventions of urban planning, these defense intellectuals nonetheless had an important influence in the creation of the city qua “communication space,” the phrase I am using to interconnect the array of technological devices, including the suburban single-­family home, automobile, highway, picture window, and video camera, in Graham’s work. Needless to say, this network of information-­mediators proffers a new “image of the city,” to use the phrase of urbanist Kevin Lynch. Light refers to the way in which Lynch’s 1960 book The Image of the City revealed a yawning gap between the typical “laypersons’ image” of the city and “expert images from colleagues in the field” of urban planning. For Light, the disparity between Lynch’s images was evidence of the failures of mid-­twentieth-­century urban renewal policies. As part of what Light describes, in turn, as a call for a new image of the city in keeping with cybernetic flows, a book published by Lynch a few years after The Image of the City shows another type of view onto the city. Cowritten with Donald Appleyard and John R. Myer, Lynch’s The View 174 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e 4 .11.

Cover of Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John R. Myer, The View from

the Road. Courtesy of MIT Press.

from the Road is a distillation of the cybernetic experience of the city—­ specifically, the cybernetic image of the city—from the point of view of the car in motion (Figures 4.11–4.13). Published in 1963, it is a thin book with text, photographs, and small sketches in serialized and cinematic form of these views seen from the car window while the car is careening down the highways running through Boston. One sees the tips and edges of buildings Communication Space \\ 175

F i g u r e s 4 . 12 a n d 4.13.

View through car onto road from Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and

John R. Myer, The View from the Road. Courtesy of MIT Press.

captured while moving in snapshots amid fragmented views of sidewalks, people, other cars and drivers, and bits of infrastructure. In a shift from icon to stream, the cybernetic image of the city is a matter of perpetual flow while driving along the highway in and around the city of Boston. Replacing top-­ down administration and an attendant totalizing view of the city, it tells of an incremental urbanism. The city shifts from an inert whole to a moving montage of bits and pieces that mimics the process of thinking itself. In their preface, they explained the raison d’être behind the project: “This monograph deals with the esthetics of highways: the way they look to the driver and his passengers, and what this implies for their design. We emphasize the

176 // Automotive Prosthetic

potential beauty of these great engineering achievements, as contrasted with their current ugliness.”53 Though the authors have compiled the images and the text that constitute the book because they were “interested in the esthetics of highways out of the concern with the visual formlessness of our cities,” another message conveyed is that there is a new mode of perceiving the city: the city understood in movement by way of the car. The book thus foreshadows the 1972 publication of Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas, though without the ironic embracement of highway billboards and the bombastic signage of roadside architecture. Organized in three parts, with sections devoted to “the highway landscape,” “recording highway sequences,” and an “analysis of an existing highway,” Appleyard, Lynch, and Myer’s book, by contrast, intends to provide pragmatic solutions to what they conceived as the problems of an unsightly urbanism that had grown up around the highway and automobile. This is a far cry from the pop philosophy of embracing-­what-­exists at work in Learning from Las Vegas. Nonetheless, both books tell of a new kind of space: the communication space that is also evinced in Graham’s work. It is a space in which TVs, automobiles, cameras, electrical appliances, and radios interconnect, all of which, as Graham explains, are “transportable [machines intended to] provide means to private transportation.”54

Feedback City: Graham’s Mutable and Melding Subject-­Object

The fluidity with which Graham moves between modes of mediation—from car to house to picture window to video camera aperture—is pervasive across his work. It is evident in his art “about” suburban and modern architecture as well as in his time-­delay video installations and performance pieces. This flow of communication marks a reworking of the conventions of the subject and object within the paradigm of viewing art. Whereas the longheld practice of looking at and engaging a work of art presumes a distinct, disparate, and inert relationship between subject-­viewer and object-­art work, Graham’s fluid exchange rethinks the subject and object, transforming the two and the space between them into mutable and melding forces within a field of interaction. In this field, medium and message collapse and combine and give way to the infinite porosity of mediation: that is to say, subject

Communication Space \\ 177

and object swap spaces, momentarily unite, and disengage while becoming unique substances. It is the logic of a space the dynamism of which is rooted in the feedback loop. For David Joselit, feedback is “the figure of the actual interaction of medium and media.”55 The term implies movement between at least two forces, or poles. A feedback loop is defined by the parameters of exchange between these forces, in which input information changes the output information in the process of self-­correction. Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum on “hot” and “cold” media is based on the feedback loop, with a medium’s status as one or the other rooted in participant engagement. The logic of the “feedback loop” brought into the realm of art results in an object that is no longer static and unchanging but protean and variable. Joselit argues that in Graham’s projects for closed-­circuit video installations there is a mimesis of “the feedback loop in commercial television,” which Graham intentionally thwarts by way of “‘feedback interference’ founded in disidentification.”56 The feedback loop in Graham’s work not only reinvents the subject-­object relationship within art, but also reinscribes the human subject tout court as impure, decentered, and, perhaps most interesting of all, a cyborg amalgam of gadgets and objects. The cyborg percipient moves within a new urban paradigm where physical urbanism elides into digital urbanism, making the hierarchy of center and periphery increasingly vague and insubstantial. It is also a space in which participation requires ownership and rental of gadgets. Gadgets become an infrastructural utility; those without gadgets get left behind. Describing the intermingling of brick, mortar, concrete highways, and digital byways, Antoine Picon explains, “Whatever the means of transportation used, one passes frequently from one to the other in a single blow like science fiction characters teleporting from planet to planet.”57 As we have seen, Graham works out this fluid exchange between subject and object in his suburban-­themed projects implicitly as it is a matter of the automobile, highway, and landscape of edge city. Thinking micrologically, Graham similarly brings this fluidity to bear on the individual house, showing each suburban single-­family home to be a node within a nexus of porous exchange between urban center and periphery and self, home interior, yard, and sidewalk. From self to home to window to sidewalk to car to highway, and back again, this interconnected movement creates the landscape of feedback city in Graham’s work. Graham’s Picture Window Piece (1974) plays out this flow of information in a misleadingly condensed space (Figure 4.14). Graham works out the 178 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e 4.14 .

Dan Graham, Picture Window Piece, 1974. Courtesy of Dan Graham and Marian

Goodman Gallery, New York.

logics of framed and mediated perception, the technologized “self,” and the desiring subject in the tight go-­between created in the space demarcated by exterior yard and interior couch. Here Graham turns the prototypical picture window of the suburban American ranch house into an interactive aperture that makes a critical commentary on identity formation, technological mediation, and consumerism. The piece deploys several layers of technological and biological filtration: two people placed on either side of the picture window, one looking into the window from outside and another looking out of the house from the inside; the suburban picture window as a symbolic framing of the interior world of the house and individual self to the exterior and vice versa; two cameras and monitors, one functioning as a live feed showing the viewer looking in from outside, from the “natural” setting of the yard, and the other functioning as a live feed showing the home dweller inside looking out while sitting on the couch.58 In this setup, the suburban house, the picture window, video camera, and video/television monitors are homologous forces in the formative creation of one’s sense of “self.” Video screens and windows together function as mirror-­like self-­reflective surfaces. Yet instead of seeing herself in a one-­to-­one reflective relationship, Communication Space \\ 179

as with the traditional mirror, the viewer sees herself by way of the feedback loop of information flowing between apertures, the window of the home, the lenses of the camera, and the surfaces of monitors’ screens. The classical, centered self of Vitruvian man is reinscribed according to a set of relations in space and the dynamism of bits of data coalescing, dispersing, and recoalescing through the path of the feedback loop. In short, Vitruvian man gives way to the cyborg. Graham claims that “mirrors are metaphors for the Western concept of the ‘self’”; we can connect, by extension, the to-­and-­fro of images in the video, screen, and picture window to the creation of individual identity.59 “The video feedback of ‘self’-­image, image, by adding temporality to self-­perception, connects ‘self’-­perception to physiological brain processes,” Graham argues, connecting the technology of video feedback to the cultivation of the self.60 The literal self-­reflexivity of Graham’s Picture Window Piece, its playing out and replaying of the formation of the self through modes of mediation, is but one side of the work. As it focuses on a central component of suburban architecture—the picture window—the work also points outward to the history of the symbolic value imparted by way of this architectural element. The suburban picture window emerged in the 1930s as an amenity offering “broader vistas” and clear expanses of transparency, opening the interior of the home to the exterior world of nature with the invisible protection of a large pane of glass.61 With the transparent shield of glass, dwellers could experience all the wonders of nature—denaturalized, that is, without the nasty bother of cold, heat, or insects. It also functions something like a personalized storefront widow in which the middle class might purvey its sense of propriety. The aperture onto the home interior might frame a large expensive lamp for most of the year while during Christmas show an electric-­light-­bedizened Christmas tree to the world outside. By the 1960s, the picture window had come to symbolize the poor taste and solipsism of suburbanites, in particular their will to follow the herd in order to feel loved. Architectural historian Sandy Isenstadt connects sociologist David Riesman’s “other-­directed personality,” and the need for individual validation therein, to the bad taste of the picture window. The logic here would be that one shows one’s belongings in order to belong: a large expensive lamp or a well-­lit tree might win over new friends and loved ones. It is this caricature of suburban life as a bearer of a grammar of bad taste that motivates Graham to once again turn to the politics of pop art and vernacular architecture. In an interview from 1994, Graham famously cites David Riesman’s 180 // Automotive Prosthetic

sociological exposé of suburbia, The Lonely Crowd (1950), as an inspiration for Homes for America. Yet Graham did not want to report Riesman’s position as though it were a disinterested truth, as though he agreed entirely with Riesman. Rather, Graham translated Riesman’s position, maintaining the symbolism of architecture and everyday life without the moral negativity. He wanted “to keep all of those meanings but empty [them] of the pejorative expressionist meanings.”62 Graham’s Video Projection outside Home (1978) is a similar project in which he installed a large monitor that directly fed into the interior of the home. Installed at a private home in Santa Barbara, California, in 1996, the monitor projected what the people inside were watching, disintegrating the boundaries between public and private space through virtual technology much in the way that has become normative in the twenty-­first century with social networking sites on the Internet. Similar to Picture Window Piece, Video Projection outside Home is a dynamic work in which the technological flows constitute the work of art (Figure 4.15). Data passes along electronic conduits into a live-­feed and projector that in turn shows legible information on a large monitor. Certainly from one perspective, individual identity and “being” are dissolved into flowing data; from another perspective, that is, in terms of urban space, the city center and periphery, public and private, merge, coalesce, and disintegrate in the perpetual flux of electronic flow. This dynamism is the essence of another video project, Video View of Suburbia in an Urban Atrium (1979–1980), a work in which suburbia is identified by difference, that is to say once again, in the exchange between itself and another wherein suburbia takes form by what it is not (Figure 4.16). Originally conceived as part of an exhibition of installations in the public atrium of the Citicorp building in New York, this piece materialized uniquely and only temporarily and was filmed in August 1980 by Ernst Mitzka for German television. For the piece, Graham installed several monitors in the public atrium of the Citicorp building that showed a video loop of suburban houses and green lawns. A photograph of the installation shows white-­collar workers on lunch break sitting in white Bertoia wire chairs surrounded by the foliage of small young trees. Graham describes the piece: “Real trees used with high-­tech and breezeway suburban design—green and white metal open chairs, green lettering on shop windows, and the trees and the earth—connote the ‘ecological’ aura of a ‘vest-­pocket’ urban park in a high-­rise office building.”63 Graham plays on various manifestations of fabricated nature, embedding views of one type of highly artificial landscape, video views of suburbia, inside of another, the Communication Space \\ 181

F i g u r e 4 .15 .

Dan Graham, Video Projection outside Home, 1978.

Courtesy of Dan Graham and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

F i g u r e 4 .16 .

Dan Graham, Video View of Suburbia in an Urban Atrium, 1979–1980. Courtesy

of Dan Graham and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

public atrium of the Citicorp tower, where there were several potted trees. The idea of “feedback city” mentioned above comes to include the play between the manmade and natural in addition to inside and outside, center and periphery. For Graham, such technological porosity manifests across media, making architecture more similar to television than hitherto realized. There is a literalism to this communicative permeability in that architectural codes become interchangeable with television codes. Screens replace walls as portals of interaction, connecting and mediating “between rooms, families, social classes, ‘public’/‘private’ domains, connecting architecturally (and socially) bounded regions, they take on an architectural (and social) function.”64 Foreshadowing the transformative potential of the Internet, which would unfold some twenty-­five years later, Graham predicted in 1979 that the prototypical mise-­en-­scène of public and private space created by the architecture of individual buildings and the city would be superseded, and potentially replaced, by cable TV. The new hot spots for interaction, community, and political discourse would occur through cable lines and the platform of TV, further reinstantiating if not mirroring the ongoing process of decentralization unfolding in the landscape of suburban sprawl: The centralized production facilities of film or broadcast TV exploit the saleable (product) aspects of culture at the expense of the existential. A cable system, by contrast, presents the possibility of becoming two-­way and decentralized. Individuals, families and the local, extant cultural systems could be given potential self-­determination and control.65

Graham’s thinking on the emancipatory power of technology, cable TV in particular, was in part cultivated by his engagement with a short-­lived but influential magazine called Radical Software and the influences of Marshall McLuhan. Graham describes the publication as a “utopian video magazine . . . in to television, communalism, topology, [and] topological furniture.”66 The readership and writers of the magazine Radical Software were interested in cable TV functioning as a means of social empowerment, as it could be used as an interactive device for political action and enlightenment. This idea was shared by another group that might seem counterintuitive, the defense intellectuals behind the development of the city as communication space discussed above. Jennifer Light describes how discussions among leaders in the defense industry interested in bettering the problems of the Communication Space \\ 183

inner city included connections between emergent communication technologies, among them cable TV, and community development and urban social welfare.67 Two seemingly polar sides of advocacy, the grassroots activism expressed in Radical Software, which includes Graham as a peripheral actor, and defense intellectuals came together in support of cable TV as a form of interactive communication. Once again we find Graham, by connection, cultivating, constituting, and shoring up communication space in his art. In discussing the communication space of Graham’s work, I have intended to reinforce, at base, the fundamentally social nature of Graham’s work. By connection, the communication space of Graham’s works bears political potentialities that unfold through communication technology as well as in the public and private spaces of a city, in the public atrium of the Citicorp building in downtown Manhattan as well as in the front yard of a suburban house in Santa Barbara, California. By starting with the suburban home as a primary motivator of communication space and then turning to Graham’s related museum pieces, the organizational logic of this argument would seem to be inverted, insomuch as conventional modes of art history and criticism might begin with the museum and then turn to the city in order to show connections between art and context to reveal the political underbelly of seemingly autonomous works of art. Here we start with the city, the art camouflaged in the banal everyday setting of American suburbia, and then move to museum pieces, works that have been performed and/or installed in museums or galleries, in order to show the inherent urbanism of a certain strain of Graham’s oeuvre. In so doing, we find that the logic of communication space, and the attendant reinscription of the subject-­object relationship within art as mutable and melding, is evident in a vast array of artworks intended for gallery spaces. Three works from this selection, Roll (1970), Two Consciousness Projection(s) (1972), and Present Continuous Past(s) (1974), show Graham working out the logic of the protean subject-­object relationship within the shifting parameters of communication space. Moving steadily forward in time, from ’70 to ’72 to ’74, we see Graham working out the idea first alone, between himself and a video camera in Central Park, then as a live performance of two people in front of a seated audience, and then as an installation that, in its prototypical form, metes out the paradigm as it might be tweaked and retrofitted off museum/gallery site in the quiet hurly-­burly of suburban life. Roll involves two opposing video cameras, one held in the hands of Graham 184 // Automotive Prosthetic

while he rolls around on the autumnal leafy grounds of the park, and later on the linoleum of a gallery floor, and another that is situated statically on the ground recording him as he rolls. The two cameras produce two opposing perceptual views, which create a feedback-­inspired mise-­en-­abyme in which subject is embedded in object which is embedded in subject which is embedded in object, ad infinitum. In the end, the two loops would be projected for “simultaneous viewing at eye-­level on opposite, parallel walls.”68 Two Consciousness Projection(s), which was done with the performers clothed and naked, involves two people, a woman and a man, verbalizing their consciousness as it engages with and is mediated by cameras and television monitors before an audience. The woman “focuses consciousness only on a television-­monitor-­image of herself and must immediately verbalize . . . the content of her consciousness.”69 The man focuses his consciousness on the woman as she is seen through a live-­feed projecting her onto the monitor. The man and woman verbalize conscious but otherwise silent gender positions, and thus their constructions, while the audience functions as a “superego, inhibiting or subtly influencing the course of his behavior or consciousness of the situation.”70 The woman focalizes her vision on the surface of mediated information—of herself. She sees herself filtered, potentially reified, by technology. He focuses on her, also potentially reifying her, as she looks at herself on the screen. Man, woman, and technology constitute a feedback loop in a real-­time performance. Here, subject-­object formation, from work of art to identity, becomes a loop of exchanging forces and elements, including technology, object, human-­to-­human interaction, and questions of gender. In Present Continuous Past(s) similar issues are catalyzed by way of a temporary installation of architecture and technology. A room is built, two walls of which are covered in glass and another of which bears embedded in it a video camera and large monitor. While the mirror reflects present time, the video camera tapes what is opposite and adjacent. This information is then relayed onto the screen in an eight-­second delay. The mirror reflections further double the time of the delay, making in certain instances a temporal echo of a sixteen-­second delay. The mirrors, along with the live video-­feed, which is on an eight-­second delay, create another situation in which there is a feedback-­inspired mise-­en-­abyme: “An infinite regress of time continuums within time continuums (always separated by 8 seconds intervals [sic]) within time continuums is created.”71 We find here that context fully understood, at least in the prescriptions of the museum gallery space, comes to Communication Space \\ 185

include the surfaces of architecture, its walls, floors, and ceilings, as well as technological filtration. Graham’s message is that subjectivity is formed by relationships, the interaction between and intermingling of other subjects and objects in space. Mediation makes subjectivity and vice versa. This reflects, as suggested in the movement between signage and the feedback loop discussed above, a connection between structuralist linguistics and McLuhan’s writing on technological extensions. As Graham explains, “My position is always in-­between. It’s structuralist anthropology and McLuhan at the same time.”72 The urbanism of communication space at work in Graham’s art implies, constructs, and reinforces what we might describe in terms of the “relational subject” that art historian, curator, and sculptor Jack Burnham outlined in 1968. Burnham, who organized the 1970 exhibition Software, Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art at the Jewish Museum in New York, reinforced that conceptualism, or the “new art,” was not so much concerned with a sense of classical object delectation, “but in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment.”73 Burnham published the history of this relationality the same year “System Esthetics” appeared in Artforum, outlining it in the book titled Beyond Modern Sculpture by way of the passage from kinetic art to conceptual art. Paralleling the logic of communication space in Graham’s work, Burnham believed this unfolding was fundamentally a matter of the shift from object to matrix. Kinetic art, a precedent of conceptualism for Burnham, “is not an objet d’art in the conventional sense, but a système d’art.”74 By turns, the “world of relations” cultivates a relational subject as well as a relational object.75 The actions of this relational subject, similar to the cyborg discussed above, are a matter of an “aesthetics of thought” rooted in the collapse of the res extensa and res cogitans—the body extending outward and connecting to the world and the mind reconceived as both internal and external to those extensions.76 Giving form to the concupiscent play of res extensa and res cogitans, subject and object connect, unite, disconnect, and disperse, only to repeat the same process again but as slightly tweaked subjects and objects in the communication space of Graham’s work. The relational subject roves between mobile nodes, mediating herself by car, screen, and home while promiscuously working between forms of mediation, always becoming other.

186 // Automotive Prosthetic

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Repression, Sublimation, the Real: A Triangle of Oblivion

Jonathon Rosen’s epitaphic illustration of a red Hummer appeared in the New York Times on Sunday, February 28, 2010 (Figure 5.1). Part prehistoric creature and part machine, it wallows in a tar pit, with its four antediluvian skeletal appendages grasping for the embankment. Its windshield broken, this once-­beacon of cultural militarism flounders in a muddy crater, bringing home a rising consensus that the vehicle is obsolete. With a pterodactyl flying overhead and oil wells in the background, it is a setting at once of the deep primordial and the near modern past. Earlier that week, talks between General Motors and Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machines had come to an end. A year into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, General Motors ended negotiations to sell to the Chinese equipment manufac-

\\ 187

F i g u r e 5 .1.

Jonathon Rosen, untitled illustration, New York Times, February 28, 2010. Courtesy

of Jonathan Rosen.

turer the Hummer brand of SUVs based on the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, an all-­terrain truck known in the American military as the HMMWV, or Humvee.1 Initiated nine months prior, the discussion between the two corporations terminated because manufacturing and sales of the gas-­hungry 5,900-­pound vehicle went against the Chinese government’s recent ecological directive, which had advised a newly expanding demography of citizen-­consumers to purchase environmentally friendly, smaller, more fuel-­efficient cars.2 The failed talks marked an end to the eighteen-­ year run of the Hummer’s civilian manufacturing, which began in 1992 by AM General and continued from 1999 to the near present under the aegis of GM. High gas prices followed by an abrupt crash in the global economy 188 // Automotive Prosthetic

were cause for a precipitous fall in sales in the following years. Sales of the Hummer family of vehicles in North America topped out in 2006 at 75,939 vehicles, and then slumped to 66,261 in 2007, 37,573 in 2008 and 9,046 in 2009.3 Reaching its zenith as an icon of cultural militarism in the mid-­noughts, the Hummer and its five-­year prominence on American roads from the start of the Iraq War in 2003 might seem to some like evidence of crass public support for an American-­led international conflict fought for oil.4 From this perspective, the Hummer signifies war support at a distance: the conscious and willful condoning of wanton urban destruction and death far away, or American cultural militarism writ large. I would argue, though, that rather than being an overt and intentional mode of war support, the Hummer is a passive sign within a complex fabric of the normative cultural practice of cultural militarism. Its passivity, however, mitigates none of its powerful mode of expression. Writing in the heat of the Cold War, the sociologist C. Wright Mills described this condition of normalcy in terms of an inexorable yet somewhat ineffable “military metaphysics”: “What is being promulgated and reinforced is the military metaphysics—the cast of mind that defines international reality as basically military. The publicists of the military ascendancy need not really work to indoctrinate with this metaphysics those who count: they have already accepted it.”5 Operating under the same “metaphysics,” cultural militarism functions something like an underlying mise-­en-­scène: a normative state of being in which citizen-­actors perform under a general state of torpor and oblivion. Within this wide-­ranging state of cultural militarism, I would like to argue for a triangulated understanding of the perceptual field forming around the Hummer, with semiotic interconnection and movement occurring between three points: repression, sublimation, and the real. The Hummer, its artistic likeness, and YouTube.com views to the road of the American war in Iraq constitute a triad of interconnected visual significance within the greater matrix of cultural militarism. It is a rubric the three legs of which can be replicated in a parallel triangle of psychoanalytical positioning (Figure 5.2). The Hummer operates as a commodity within an economy of desire rooted in the false promise of wish fulfillment. It is a wish in part fueled by dominance: the idea that in owning a Hummer one participates in a vast matrix of martial security. The silent logic of this promise is the inevitable obstruction of that desire, for capitalism’s expansion depends on the dialectical creation and thwarting of desires. In frustrating them, the system produces Hummer \\ 189

F i g u r e 5 .2 .

Hummer: Parallel triangle of psychoanalytical positioning.

more. Desire is the carrot before the proverbial donkey with blinders, leading it further down the road of craving but never fully sating. Philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno describe the ongoing dynamic of consumption based on upset desires in terms of the culture industry’s pattern of broken promises: The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. . . . However, by repressing deprivation as negative, they retracted, as it were, the prostitution of the impulse and rescued by mediation what was denied. The secret of aesthetic sublimation is its representation of fulfillment as a broken promise. The culture industry does not sublimate, it represses.6

The civilian desire for the Hummer in the domestic realm perpetuates repression of preemptive and unnecessary American wars, while art based on this transaction of desire and denial functions to reflect that process of repression through its own means of sublimation. Hummer art and attendant works of art about war vehicles discussed here sublimate or redirect wartime atrocities through the prism of art—as both form and discourse—making the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan anodyne topics for discussion in the public realm. This art also tells of capitalism’s broken promise in the form of the Hummer, the failed guarantee that channeling ever more public funds into wars of choice will bring collective sovereignty. While each are distinct types of artifacts, Hummer and Hummer art alike nonetheless fall within the realm of cultural militarism. Giving ballast to the third point of the triangle, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s concept of the real emerges through direct and raw perceptual engagement with war. In short, the real brings conscious awareness and an ethics of political agency instead of sublimation or repression. It is a force 190 // Automotive Prosthetic

that, like the Hummer-­repression and art-­sublimation dyads, is equally harbored within the holds of cultural militarism. The real comes to us, in particular, by way of graphic wartime views to the road from Iraq and Afghanistan available to the public on YouTube.com from 2005 to 2010. By 2010, four of the six videos discussed below had been officially removed from You Tube.com. Three of these were clips of soldiers in Humvees and a contractor in an SUV performing violent acts in Iraq. One was a Hummer commercial that had been edited to include jingoistic material. In looking for war footage, one enters by chance various couplings of words in a search box—such as, “view to the road Iraq” or “violence Iraq road”—and what follows is a chain of visual experiences that brings home the violence of the war unlike other portals of information. The war-­based visual culture of YouTube.com is raw and often unedited, offering forthright views into the realities of the war that body forth in certain instances as the Lacanian real. For Lacan, the real is an accidental encounter [tyché] with something—an image or event—that is incommensurable: “The function of the tyché, of the real as encounter—the encounter in so far as it may be missed, in so far as it is essentially the missed encounter—first presented itself in the history of psycho-­ analysis in a form that was in itself already enough to arouse our attention, that of the trauma.”7 Though for Lacan the shocking confrontation with the real occurs outside and beyond the signifying power of the symbolic in what is a chance head-­to-­head, in this instance its irreducible otherness emerges directly out of the symbolic fabric of the Internet and surfing YouTube.com. As a confrontation with violence amid and from within everyday life, moving images from afar seen in the comfort of the home or office, the confrontation with the real on YouTube.com tears forth an ethical opening. Through this opening emerges a response of political agency in the form of rumination, judgment, and potential rejection of American involvement in war. In this chapter, I correlate the Hummer with what Horkheimer and Adorno describe as “repression” and its complementary in the form of Hummer art with “sublimation,” while the “real” emerges through the screen of the computer at YouTube.com by way of slightly edited or uncut and ad hoc video clips showing the view to the road on the American warfront of Iraq. The goal is to provide a matrix through which one might locate political agency from within the everyday practices of cultural militarism. Though configured around three exclusive forces—the banalities of material culture as they are connected to repression, sublimation, and the Lacanian real—they emerge from a general state of political eclipse and isolation descriptive of Hummer \\ 191

cultural militarism. What I am getting at here is the way that our collective participation in the culture of militarism makes war easy for us: cultural militarism makes us callous, even oblivious, to the effects of war. Within this general condition, the Hummer offers a track of political engagement parallel to the war, allowing its owner and driver to feel as though she is engaging in the Iraqi war, supporting it, while repressing the violent realities of that war. Its trauma is at once an empirical ongoing event and interpolated by stock images of Hollywood. Obfuscating the brutality of the real that is war, the Hummer embodies a fantasy world of denial defined according to a myth not only of endless oil reserves, but of manifest destiny, homeland security, and American exceptionalism. Akin to Marie Antoinette playing peasant in her Hameau, drivers play war at home wheeling heavy gas-­guzzling Hummers down neighborhood roads. Theirs is a form of denial rooted not so much in the simple refutation of the trauma of the real, but in their comfort with the real as a constructed fantasy. Though a matter of lighthearted recreation, their vehicle signifies support of a state that, on the surface, has promoted its own deliquescence through “less government” and greater self-­sufficiency on the part of its citizens, while at the same time overseeing the greatest government expansion in history by way of military development. The Hummer, like other SUVs, promises to buffer its driver from the unknown, and thus fosters radical atomization and an “SUV model of citizenship” based on autarchy.8 A symbol of xenophobia, the Hummer is a thing for cathexis, a wish object for investment in national machismo and government-­less self-­rule. At the same time, it is giant, boxy, often brightly colored and toy-­like. It is a material artifact of the Wunsch, the Freudian wish, or as Lacan explains, building upon Freud’s thinking, an object of the “regressive, infantile, unrealistic phase.”9 The Hummer is a would-­be tool within a childlike fantasy of state-­disintegration. It promotes an ideology of radical self-­governance which, similar to its drivers’ oblivion of the war, can only be fathomed without true recognition of the anarchy such stateless-­ ness brings. In the same years of the Hummer’s high popularity in the 2000s, artists produced works of art that reflected the combined irony and violence of the Hummer’s presence in the domestic sphere. Telling of the imperial boundlessness of American cultural militarism, they are works of art—sculpture, painting, video, and an activist project coalescing around discourse—based on the war vehicle broadly conceived. Using diverse means, from the age-­ old tropes of verisimilitude and mimesis to video and relational aesthetics, a 192 // Automotive Prosthetic

variety of artists, including Margarita Cabrera, Andrew Junge, Peter Ligon, Angie Waller, Alex Villar, and Jeremy Deller, have placed the war vehicle— the Hummer, armored cars, and a bombed out car from Iraq—at the center of projects that interrogate the interwoven economics of power substantiated by the car and war. Several of these artists work through this nexus of power in the straightforward mimesis of the Hummer: for Cabrera in soft-­ form Hummers stitched and sewn to actual scale (2005–2006); Junge in a life-­size Styrofoam Hummer (2007); and Ligon in a small impressionistic painting of a Hummer parked in front of a suburban house (2005). There is a similar matrix of power relations meted out in the other works of art, but through several more permutations of mediation. With Waller’s Armored Cars: Protect Yourself from Ballistic Attacks (2007), these layers of mediation occur through a sociology-­inflected quasi-­documentary of armored cars. Villar’s Crash Course (2008) is a stylized video of pedestrians dodging Hummers in a computer-­designed fantasy urban landscape. Deller’s It Is What It Is: Conversations about Iraq (2009) is an interactive work of traveling art. Trailed by a bombed-­out car from Iraq, it consisted of a motor home carrying Deller, the artist; Jonathan Harvey, a reservist in the military who served in Iraq; Esam Pasha, an Iraqi artist; and Nato Thompson, a curator from the Creative Time offices in New York. The caravan roved around the United States in early 2009, stopping intermittently with the peaceful intention of catalyzing discussion about the war. While poignant critical engagements with the war, these works of art offer up a form of sublimation with a weak form of agency coalescing around art and political expression. It is an agency the parameters of which are largely defined by the art world. Diagramtically adjacent rather than opposite to Hummer owners, the artists, Hummer art, and works of art that confront the relationship between the automobile and militaristic hegemony displace the repression of domestic cultural militarism, at once sublimating it while also bringing the war-­S UV-­citizen trifecta of cultural militarism to bear in the world of high-­art practices. There is a strain of transference at work here in which the artist defers her own practice of cultural militarism into artwork, which in turn points to the repressive acts of cultural militarism embodied in the straightforward or playful consumption of the Hummer. The works of art mirror, digitally mediate, and instigate discourse about the war, American intervention in the Middle East based on oil, and the frankness of the civilian usage of the Hummer. The art points to what the Hummer says of its driver: “I am a cultural militarist in oblivion and I play at war.” Hummer \\ 193

Looking to the nexus of Hummer culture, one need not move beyond war, cultural militarism, or even the culture industry to find a space of action, where there might be a greater sense of political agency than the coin of Hummer culture. While there is space of action, there is no Archimedean point beyond the culture industry or war in our moment. There is no outside; the agency takes place inside. War, its attendant military elite, and today’s cultural militarism, propagated by the culture industry, are all-­ encompassing, at once physical and metaphysical. As Mills warned, with us in the tactile forms of objects and without us spread to the geographic outposts of the world through war and propaganda. Here we might extend Slavoj Žižek’s critique of the academic Left to the actors implicit in the psychoanalytic triangle of Hummer culture discussed above: “Contrary to the notion that curiosity is innate to humans—that there is deep within each of us a Wissenstrieb, a drive to know—Jacques Lacan claims that the spontaneous attitude of a human being is that of ‘I don’t want to know about it’—a fundamental resistance against knowing too much.”10 Here Žižek underscores Lacan’s articulation of willed oblivion, which I would like to connect to Hummer culture. What might be considered a flaccid bidding to know the actualities of the war and the real in all of its trauma, this laziness is a correlative of the very status and nature of the trauma of the real, namely that it is itself bound up with its own making as a fantastic construction. Its midwife and partial maker is the “fantasmatic screen” of the collective mass media. Hummer drivers, like the rest of us, artists and YouTube.com surfers included, are bound by a “reality . . . structured and supported by the fantasy.”11 Looking to the thinking of Richard Boothby, Žižek explains, “To traverse the phantasy in the Lacanian sense is to be more profoundly claimed by the phantasy than ever, in the sense of being brought into an ever more intimate relation with that real core of the phantasy that transcends imaging.”12 Agency, I would like to argue, is nonetheless linked to encountering the real, in this instance, as a probable confrontation in plain sight in one of the most pervasive forms of communication in the twenty-­first century. Here I refer to the Internet, in particular the edited and unedited views to the road on American warfronts posted in moving-­image form at YouTube.com. There one engages the real as a traumatic accidental encounter. From this perspective, the agency of individual action and choice is located within the virtual heart, specifically, the populist digital core, of cultural militarism and, thus, occurs in a state of oblivion. It plays within a sense of being-­in-­the-­ 194 // Automotive Prosthetic

world that, similar in part to the sense of chance at the base of the Lacanian real, is arbitrary in nature. The three points on the triangle—Hummer drivers who repress the war in a strain of playful denial, artists who sublimate the war in the form of art that inspires political discussion, and web surfers confronting the real in the gruesomeness of wartime views to the road— share a general foundation in a state of oblivion. And this is because cultural militarism is, by quality and nature, a form of oblivion that marks an ethical eclipse and denial. Deflating any probable moral sensibility, that is, the idea that owning a Hummer is morally above or below art about the Hummer, the political agency bound up with the real occurs within a general state of suspension, not unlike like repression and sublimation. This space of noncommittal abeyance is host to the “ugly feelings” of accidental political agency, or what the scholar Sianne Ngai has described in terms of a project of “negative affects.”13 Oblivion is the seat of the potential personal power of resistance set in motion by the “ignoble feelings” of animatedness, envy, irritation, anxiety, paranoia, disgust, and “stuplimity,” a term referring to the combination of the sublime and stupid, or an awesomeness that is constituted by and filtered through the mundane.14 These feelings well up as part of the existential side of technology, within and outside of art. The accidental state of political agency grows from the general condition of oblivion, where also sit both the playful Hummer driver in denial of the war and the artist-­ activist who sublimates the war to art form.

Repression: The Hummer and Recent Evolution of Cultural Militarism

John Carlos Rowe recognizes the lengthy history behind the vast reaches of cultural militarism in our own moment, explaining that it is “our cultural legacy from the Vietnam War and integral parts of our emergence as a neo-­imperial nation since 1945.”15 The history of armaments manufacturing coincides and corroborates in parallel fashion the evolution of the culture industry: “US cultural production, the work of what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno termed ‘the culture industry,’ conditioned American citizens to accept the undisguised militarism and jingoistic nationalism now driving US foreign policy.”16 Rowe looks to American film and TV for proof not only of the infiltration and saturation of martial customs into societal mores, but also of its Hummer \\ 195

mechanism: how we have become not just a warring nation but a warring culture through Hollywood’s fictional images of violence. To say that militarism in the United States has grown in reach from “nation” to “culture” is to underscore the reaches of militarism beyond wartime into peacetime and to reinforce the role the culture industry plays in this scalar shift, as it operates beyond the seventeenth-­century configuration of the nation-­state. From nation to culture, American cultural militarism is no longer bound to its physical geography. It spreads globally by way of war and the mass media. Writing more broadly about the SUV, David Campbell claims: The SUV is the icon through which the relationship of security to automobility can be best understood, precisely because the SUV constitutes a cultural site that transgresses the inside and outside of the nation and— through the conceptualizations of security it both embodies and invokes—because the SUV folds the foreign back into the domestic, thereby rendering each problematic.17

Because American soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan drive Humvees on the warfront while civilians drive Hummers at home, the Hummer is a poignant example of New York Times reporter Todd Gitlin’s claim that “the SUV is the place where foreign policy meets the road.”18 While the Hummer embodies the most striking and obvious connection between war and the American homeland, it is but one in a vast array of militaristic consumables propagated through a nexus of “free trade imperialism”—the dissemination of a free-­market consumer democracy through global capitalism.19 In addition to the spectacle of mass culture, that is, film, TV, radio, and print culture, militarism becomes a cultural characteristic by way of the manufacturing and consumption of everyday commodities. We practice our militarism through our mythos, which in turn, as Roland Barthes teaches, emanates from the objects we buy and consume. The American mythology of the Hummer is not passed down through words but rather objects. As toy soldiers and warring video games have indoctrinated children into the mores of war, today the Hummer comes in miniature form for children, appearing in August 2006 as the prize toy in McDonald’s Happy Meals.20 Further broadening the reach of Hummer marketing to children, Target sells “Ride-­ on” Hummers for children to play adult driving on the American road and Hummer H2 bedding for children. We find here that the artifacts of mass culture—from contemporary art and toys, films and TV, the marketing of 196 // Automotive Prosthetic

beer and leisure time, everyday camouflaged clothing, to the cars we drive— extend the reaches of militarism from war to peacetime. With the emergence of the Hummer into the civilian car market, we are witnesses to the full-­fledged “militarization of consumer culture.”21 The expansion of cultural militarism seems almost inevitable as we look to manufacturing patterns in the shift from wartime to peacetime economies. Recast from war to civilian vehicle, the Hummer followed the production cycle of the Jeep, the first SUV. Dating back to 1941, the Jeep was the forebear of the Humvee. As a 1/4-­ton vehicle for basic utility roles, it played a light tactical role in the military. For heavier duties, the military developed a 3/4-­ton truck. The Humvee ended the two-­prong approach with its ability to do a wide range of missions, both light and heavy in terms of load.22 Production of the first HMMWV, also known as the Humvee, took place in April 1984 at the AM General plant in Mishawaka, Indiana.23 Partially a result of the prodding of actor-­turned-­governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, in 1992 AM General introduced a line of civilian Humvees under the name “Hummer,” encouraging the public to “Meet an American Legend.”24 When introduced in 1992, the base price of civilian models ranged from $40,500 to $51,100.25 The militarism of the Humvee seems particularly egregious because the military’s use of it has been concurrent with its popularity in a modified version, the Hummer, on the home front. At the same time, the Hummer is but one of many such warlike vehicles. Automobile manufacturers have copied the Humvee, taking advantage of a readymade demographic of militaristic consumers and marketing their own version. Foreign and American car manufacturers have introduced similar SUVs specifically to an American market. Toyota introduced the FJ Cruiser as a concept car in 2003 at the Chicago Auto Show. Originally not intended for mass production, the vehicle was mass-­produced in early 2006 after an enormously positive response from American consumers. It is the sixth SUV in Toyota’s American lineup. Unlike other SUVs, the Hummer is an object at the center of a web of interconnected symbols. Functioning like Barthes’s notion of the “myth,” the phrase “Hummer culture” encompasses this network of iconography: the Hummer art, toys, and other material culture; the instantly recognizable militancy of its shape and form; and the world of commercial advertising that helped to propagate and maintain Hummer culture until late 2008.26 The iconography of Hummer culture forges a direct link between the domestic mores of a people at home and the international nexus of foreign policy. The heaviness of the Hummer and its height from the ground bring home a Hummer \\ 197

message of American dominance in the world. The H3, the third-­generation civilian version of the Hummer, is almost double the weight of the average sedan. It weighs just over 6,000 pounds and has a height of 72 inches.27 By comparison, the Honda Accord four-­door sedan weighs approximately 3,350 pounds, with a height of just over 58 inches.28 Bigger than most cars on the road, the Hummer signifies dominance and security: it is a form of mobile armor for a world of seemingly unforeseen dangers.29 Like other SUVs, it is an “‘urban assault vehicle’ for the homeland city at war . . . with the driver as a military figure, confronting, but safe from an insecure world.”30 Hummer advertisements reinforce the physical iconography through an array of references—to natural disasters, free reign and dominance in open virgin territories, World War II, and Godzilla. Available at the official Hummer website under a link titled “Headline Heroes,” a commercial shows flashes of newspaper headlines and reports on natural disasters. The commercial opens with a white Hummer quickly barreling through a blizzard. The remainder of the commercial is devoted to hurricane footage, with the white Hummer forcing its way through storm-­ roiling waters and flooded streets. A date on one newspaper clip, December 2006, reveals that designers put the advertisement together with Hurricane Katrina in mind. Viewers see glimpses of bent palm trees and ersatz journalism about “Hummer drivers rescuing stranded flood victims.” The commercial ends with a view of the globe, which is typical to most Hummer commercials, across which appears the web address, www.hummerhelps.com. The message from Hummer manufacturers reinforces the combination of autarchy and laissez-­faire economic policy. It oddly takes advantage of the second Bush administration’s socioeconomic philosophies, the very ideologies that would further harm an already hurricane-­ravaged New Orleans. Hummer informs us that it is every man for himself when it comes to natural disasters. Advertisers churned up fear in order to sell cars, using panic as a marketing strategy to manipulate citizen-­consumers, similar to the invocation of global terrorism and the mythos of Big Brother in the form of world government. The message is that we do not need government to botch things up, because private industry will always save the day. Hummer commercials available at YouTube.com reiterate the fantasy of Hummer ownership in a world driven by fear and the unknown. An ardent fan of the Hummer has re-­edited an original commercial for the Hummer H2, reinforcing the symbolic jingoism of the vehicle. The original commer-

198 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e 5.3 .

“It’s Germany’s Worst Nightmare,” from ersatz Hummer commercial, 2008

(subsequently removed from YouTube.com).

cial shows the Hummer bounding through a landscape that is primal, lunar, and rugged. With no people in sight, this driver is on a mission of discovery in a new world. On a beachfront rather than the plains of the American frontier, car and driver reenact the foundational myth of manifest destiny. The ad concludes with the phrase “Like Nothing Else,” followed by the standard cutaway to a view of the globe from afar. Accompanied by the sentence “This is the Hummer commercial that Hummer should have made” from a YouTube player operating under the user name “skins70,” the tweaked version replaces the low hum of trendy ambient music with the theme to the 1978 film Superman. Footage of the Hummer effortlessly leaping through the air is interspersed with the following words: “IT’S BIG IT’S BAD IT’S A BEAST IT’S A MONSTER IT’S A TANK IT’S AMERICAN IT’S SUPERMAN IT’S THE U.S. ARMY.” Resonating with President George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld’s frequent comparison of the war in Iraq with World War II, the final phrase reads, “It’s Germany’s Worst Nightmare” (Figure 5.3). A handful of comments amassed in response to skins70’s video. One response reads, “Is a fucking amazing video. . . god bless USA and bless Hummer.” Another person responded in a foreign language, to which skins70 riposted, “What the hell is that supose to mean, speak english, this is america and that is an american made commercial for ya.”31 Hummer expanded its advertising creativity in 2006 for the fortieth Super Bowl, introducing a red “baby” Hummer to the mass audience of American football fans. In this commercial, viewers witness a giant robot crashing through a dense Asian city, destroying it with each step. The robot locks eyes with Godzilla, who is, as we learn shortly from her obvious pregnancy, a female. The giant robot plucks trees from tower rooftops, creates arboreal bouquets, and gives them to his paramour in this clipped romance. She ap-

Hummer \\ 199

pears pregnant; their “child” is born in the form of a small red Hummer; and the two wistfully watch the “baby” Hummer drive away. The sentence “It’s a little monster” appears and the commercial closes. Perhaps unwittingly, Hummer advertisers have linked one wartime chimera to another, Godzilla to the “little monster” Hummer. Japanese filmmakers introduced Godzilla, a mutation of an unidentified reptile species, in the 1954 film Godzilla. The giant deformed creature was the result of hydrogen bomb testing.32 Hummer advertisers appropriated Japanese cultural militarism of another era for contemporary American cultural militarism, which in this instance makes light of mass urban destruction by invoking the filmic mythology of Godzilla. Would-­be Hummer consumers are told a cheerful revisionist history in which the Hummer is not the direct product of wartime munitions, like Godzilla, but rather the fantasy product of an out-­of-­this-­world union of two monsters. Cultural militarism is fodder for fanciful distraction and play. Today we live the apotheosis of cultural militarism as a normative practice, as it has seeped into the deep crevices of our culture. A product of individual choice, a weak media, and government collusion and enablement, our militarism and its sources, though outrageously obvious, lies within a blind spot. Our ability to practice and live a culture of militarism on a daily basis is directly bound to our willed blindness. Our play at war can only coexist with our denial of the real thing. We play at a self-­configured game of militarism, flirting with a concept of “war” framed and bound by our own jaunty rules, while true acts of war and real images of war are forbidden. This dialectic of playful militarism connected to the denial of war is at the very heart of contemporary cultural militarism as practiced in the United States. A sense of righteous empire at home coupled with the rhetoric of fear that has been ubiquitous in American media constitutes the engine behind mass cultural militarization. For Julia Himberg, this coupled force creates an “essentialized space of entitlement and threat.”33 Seeded in wars of the last century, cultural militarism today is well nigh omnipresent: “The public is surrounded by the visual normalization and hegemonic support of military necessity and unity since September 11, 2001.”34 American Homeland Security has taken on an imperial air. Disseminated through international mass media outlets, fear, the War on Terror, and American Homeland Security have become a worldly endeavor with cultural responses from all corners of the globe. While 9-­11-­01 is a pivotal date, global culture of militarism has its roots

200 // Automotive Prosthetic

in the political habits of the early twentieth century. The mid-­twentieth-­ century sociologist Mills describes the pervasive inculcation of such militarism not in terms of cultural indoctrination, but rather as it a practice of “warlords,” or in other words, the elite of the U.S. government and military. Mills describes “war [as] total and seemingly permanent.”35 Similar to the play of cultural militarism on the home front, war far away connects to everyday business state side. It is a case in which “the free sport of kings has become the forced and internecine business of people.”36 Though writing mid–last century, Mills captures the structure of power behind and general sense of oblivion to ongoing American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in our current day. No area of decision has been more influenced by the warlords and by their military metaphysics than that of foreign policy and Once war was considered the business of soldiers, international relations the concern of diplomats. . . . Every man and every nation is either friend or foe, and the idea of enmity becomes mechanical, massive, and without genuine passion. When virtually all negotiation aimed at peaceful agreement is likely to be seen as “appeasement,” if not treason, the active role of the diplomat becomes meaningless; for diplomacy becomes merely a prelude to war or an interlude between wars, and in such a context the diplomat is replaced by the warlord.37

Mills writes persuasively of militarism’s precepts, practices, and imminent normalization. Yet he did not foresee the role that culture would play in the spread and empowering of such militarism. Andrew J. Basevich, professor of International Relations and a Vietnam War veteran, understands the current strain of American militarism in terms of Mills’s “military metaphysics,” seeing in this pithy phrase an all-­too-­apt designation of militarism with global imperial reach. The very existence and ever-­more-­expansive reach of this global imperialism has become dependent on cultural production. From the early 1980s, with movies such as An Officer and a Gentleman, the Rambo series, and Top Gun, Hollywood has given form and content, though vapid and often inane, to cultural militarism. On the political front, before Hollywood’s endeavor to profit from the further dissemination of cultural militarism, Bacevich locates the origins of militarism in the years prior to World War II and the Cold War in the subtle rhetoric of American exceptionalism

Hummer \\ 201

that courses through the demands for peace made by Woodrow Wilson at the end of World War I. Wilson’s tenure as the twenty-­eighth president of the United States is rightfully associated with peace waging. Wilson delivered the famous “The Fourteen Points” in January 1918 as an attempt to instill American participation in WWI with moral ballast. One year earlier, Wilson had set forth those ideas, ending his speech to Congress with the fateful enlistment of city-­on-­the-­hill exceptionalism: “These are American principles, American policies. We can stand for no others. And they are also the principles and policies of forward-­looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community. They are the principles of mankind, and must prevail.”38 Bacevich is careful to point out that “for Wilson . . . the resort to arms could for the United States never be more than an expedient, a temporary measure reluctantly employed, not a permanent expression of the nation’s character.”39 In more recent times, we have been witness to the coupling of “Wilsonian ambition. . . . Wilsonian certainty,” and “the affinity for the sword.”40 With such militancy, Wilsonian ambition easily tips toward global policing and neo-­imperialism. The legacy of Wilsonian ambitions in the second half of the twentieth century has had no partisan limitations. Recast in light of this legacy, doves quickly show another side as hawks. In a State of the Union Address on January 23, 1980, President Jimmy Carter introduced the Carter Doctrine: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”41 There have been calibrated versions of this position through the subsequent presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Political militarism works in tandem with cultural militarism in the expansion of American empire. As Marxist philosophers and critics once wrote about the endless reaches of capitalism, today we must be aware of the endless and absurd encroachment of militarism. Neither political partisanship nor cultural production hinders its spread. Once again the words of Horkheimer and Adorno resonate: “Even the aesthetic activity of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the system.”42 Their words link international politics to cultural militarism by way of bilateral political support—encouragement from all corners of political bias and thought—in the United States. 202 // Automotive Prosthetic

Sublimation: The Mimetic, Mediated, and Discursive Automobile of War in Art

Prodding at and creating new spaces within the matrix of cultural militarism, six artists—Margarita Cabrera, Andrew Junge, Peter Ligon, Angie Waller, Alex Villar, and Jeremy Deller—have made works of art surrounding the Hummer and other war-­related vehicles since the start of the Iraq War. These artists hail from a variety of places around the world, have varying degrees of stature in the global art discourse, and work in a variety of media. At the same time, all sublimate the forces of cultural militarism into art. They channel American cultural militarism, transforming it into a means of social empowerment in its catalysis of political discussion. On the face of their work, the first three artists, Cabrera, Junge, and Ligon, are tightly bound to the age-­ old convention of mimetic form described by ancient Greek philosophers in terms of the straightforward imitation of nature. Mimesis from this perspective is a matter of representation and mirror-­like reflection. If for Plato one was to be circumspect of imitation’s secondary and tertiary removal from the Truth, for Aristotle, imitation was a matter of man’s ability to improve upon nature through representation.43 Somewhere between Truth and Nature, Cabrera, Junge, and Ligon make work that literally looks like the Hummer. Cabrera and Junge mimic the Hummer through sculptural semblances of the real thing, and Ligon paints its representation through slight impasto on the surface of a canvas. There is a tangentially related sense of mimesis at work in two videos by Waller and Villar, in the shared referential system that does not directly mirror the Hummer but rather takes on the look of documentary and instructional video. Waller’s ersatz documentary focuses on armored vehicles, while Villar creates an ironic heuristics in video form for pedestrians dodging Hummers in a digital landscape. Deller’s traveling relational piece It Is What It Is, which involves a blown-­out car from Iraq, is different in that there is no sense of mimesis. He collapses the space of reference opened up by the mimetic relationship, that is, the chasm between one thing referencing its mirrored other, opting instead for the immediacy of public discussion around the blunt thingness of an actual destroyed vehicle from the Iraqi war front. While I argue below that Deller’s interactive mobile caravan functions nonmimetically as a heuristic form of performance, the former works of art by the other five artists operate according to two different valences of mimesis: the conventional sense in which an artist creates an object that imitates another obHummer \\ 203

ject and the nonliteral sense of mimesis in which looking like something is being its other. Mimesis in these instances results in difference, something that is unique from the original in kind and substance. I would like to describe this relationship in terms of a politics of identification motivated by a distinct take on mimesis in which looking like the banal means being other than the banal, or, that is, profoundly important. This chameleon-­like process of mimesis warrants comparison with several ideas. For anthropologist Michael Taussig, sameness and difference are interconnected, or, to use his words, mimesis is dialectically bound to alterity.44 Mimesis within Hummer art functions similarly: there one finds “the copy that is not the copy.”45 Taussig developed a concept of the coy, dissimulating “copy” by studying closely the uses of mimesis in the dolls and images of the Cuna people of Panama and Colombia. The dolls strongly resembled Westerners who had passed through the region over the years, and the images were recognizable from Western advertisements. Yet, when asked about these similarities, the Cuna denied any such copying, mirroring, or mimesis at work. Taussig explains: With this we are plunged, so I believe, into a paradox—namely that the copy, magically effective as it is, with the point-­for-­point correspondences of body part to part, for instance, with all this implies for the transformation of the imagized, is not a copy . . . Yet for it to be (magically) effective on the real world of things, persons, and events, it would very much seem that it has to be just that—a “faithful” copy [according to] that law by which “the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires by merely imitating it.”46

The Hummer likenesses are also what photographer Jeff Wall has called “anti-­autonomous yet autonomous work[s] of art.”47 Providing another instance of the Derridean pharmakon, theirs is a tactic of immersion: passage through the culture industry, taking on its appearance in order to critique it.48 Theodor Adorno further describes, “Mimetic behavior does not imitate something but assimilates itself to that something.”49 Adorno’s thinking on mimesis unhinges art from the hardbound determinism of autobiographical intention: “Art is imitation only to the extent to which it is objective expression, far removed from psychology.”50 Rather than viewing mimesis in terms of an object representing the emotions of its author, the work of art is expression unto itself: “There may have been a time long ago when this ex204 // Automotive Prosthetic

pressive quality of the objective world generally was perceived by the human sensory apparatus. It no longer is. Expression nowadays lives on only in art.”51 For Adorno, mimesis as expression marks an autonomous art. “It is able to speak in itself.”52 Far from establishing a conventional sense of autonomy, mimicking the Hummer in sculpture or painting and documentary in war-­ related instructional videos makes these works of art interested rather than disinterested: they are embedded in everyday culture, not entirely above it yet bearing an ability to critically reflect it. The relationship between object and thing mimicked is not a matter of one-­to-­one representation, but rather, looking and becoming like it in order not to only to mean something else, but to open up an entirely different way of thinking about the object. It is art that “is able to speak in itself ” by representing the perverse cultural significance of a given thing. In this case it is not simply the Hummer looking like a Hummer, but the Hummer looking like a Hummer in order to show in rarefied form eldritch, violent, and quotidian practices of cultural militarism. The art at hand is thus quintessentially other than the actual Hummer, operating by way of sublimation, with artists congealing a twisted sense of cultural militarism into art form. The vinyl, Styrofoam, and painted Hummers point to the ecological burdens connecting a war-­cum-­civilian vehicle and broken promises of weapons of mass destruction, legal and symmetrical war, and above all else “freedom.” The two together—artworks mimicking war vehicles and the actual vehicles—constitute a coin with dubious purchase when it comes to political agency. With the pretension of confronting war, Hummer drivers play at violence and combat in real time as gamers do in virtual. Driving a Hummer functions in three dimensions, something like painterly verisimilitude does in two: it looks like war but is not. Citizen-­ consumers play at and act out war at home in their support of the troops abroad. Though profound, even poignant, in its formal beauty, the above-­ mentioned artwork can do little more than reveal the broken promises of consumer capitalism and its violent cognate war. It does little in the way of individual political agency, insomuch as we define these words according to action and truth about the war—images of violence, death, and destruction. Prima facie, this art engagé lacks the power to move beyond or cut through the muck of obfuscation, that is, the news media’s pallid coverage of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. At the same time, it is enticing precisely because of its attractiveness. The power of political analysis at work in this art is located in its blithe form and comforting beauty. The Mexican-­born El Paso–based artist Margarita Cabrera identifies Hummer \\ 205

F i g u r e 5.4 .

Margarita Cabrera, Hummer, 2006. Courtesy of Margarita Cabrera and Walter

Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles.

the locus of political violence, surveillance, and American opulence in the Hummer, an American-­made war vehicle that bears a unique sense of militarism in its dominance on both war and civilian fronts. Cabrera has made a body of work focusing on the harrowing nature of illegal border crossing along the Mexican-­American border. She wraps and sews soft vinyl around actual Hummer components, creating a pliable skin-­like sheath that droops from the skeletal parts in steel (Figure 5.4). Reminiscent of Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculpture, Cabrera’s pieces are ironic as their physical droopiness contradicts the rigidity of their violent raison d’être. In addition to life-­size Hummers, Cabrera has fashioned bicycles, desert plants, and backpacks after those used by immigrants in the torturous and desperate illegal passage across the borderland of the desert (Figures 5.5 and 5.6). The juxtaposition of Hummers, desert plants, old bikes, and backpacks sets off a whirlwind of colliding symbols, forms of the enfranchised clashing with the disenfranchised. Cabrera’s Hummer project bears a message on the extremes of border crossing that is at once accessible, populist, and profound. Her show at the Walter Maciel Gallery in Los Angeles in January 2007 offered a display 206 // Automotive Prosthetic

of the overwhelming disparity of power between border patrol police officers and immigrants in pursuit of a better life across the border. Cabrera’s ersatz Hummers constitute a poetry of violence, so many discerning and poignant statements in three dimensions on the brutality of war and border crossing. It is a violence that becomes palatable through the denaturing of actual objects: bicycles, backpacks, desert plants, and Hummers. Its material and context—vinyl, stitching, and placement within the white walls of the gallery—functions to domesticate the feral reality of the Mexican-­American border, deflating the work both literally and figuratively. Its blitheness, what might be irony under the right circumstances, underscores our way of living with the Mexican-­American border and the brutal farce of the ongoing construction of the United States–Mexico barrier. Exhibited at the Tampa Museum of Art, Andrew Junge’s Styrofoam Hummer (2007) makes a political statement that goes directly to the root of the Iraq War: the ruthless pursuit of and endless extraction of finite natural resources (Figures 5.7– 5.8). The Dow Chemical trade name for expanded polystyrene, Styrofoam is configured from 95 percent air and 5 percent poly-

F i g u r e 5.5 .

Margarita Cabrera, Bicicleta Marrón y Azul (Maroon and Blue), 2006. Courtesy of

Margarita Cabrera and Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles.

Hummer \\ 207

F i g u r e 5 .6 .

Margarita Cabrera, Nopal con Tunas #3, 2006. Courtesy of Margarita

Cabrera and Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles.

styrene solids. As Junge explains in his artist’s statement, “Polystyrene is a commercially manufactured polymer made from monomer styrene, a colorless liquid hydrocarbon derived from crude oil and natural gas.”53 It is a ubiquitous packing material, which, due to the costly nature of recycling, amasses in city dumps in perpetuity. Junge scavenged the materials for Styrofoam Hummer from the trash in San Francisco. The artist has made a statement directly linking ecology, the politics of war, and mass consumption by 208 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e s 5 .7 a n d 5 .8 .

Andrew Junge, Styrofoam Hummer, 2007. Courtesy of Andrew Junge.

F i g u r e 5 .9 .

Peter Ligon, Hummer in the Summer, 2005. Courtesy of Peter Ligon and owner of

work, Gary Cunningham.

making the likeness of a Hummer, a gas-­guzzling SUV the prototype of which emerged from the American military, out of Styrofoam, material that partially comes from finite resources that are difficult to recycle and that take years to break down. Indeed a commentary on the hallowed white walls of the stereotypical gallery space, the stark whiteness of Styrofoam Hummer bestows the object with a sense of Platonic form. It is the “ür” Hummer, irreal in its semblance of transcendent original form and representation of an American ideal of perpetual war. With the work of Peter Ligon, we shift from three to two dimensions, from sculpture to painting, and to the genteel space of Highland Park, in North Dallas. The painterly gestures of Ligon’s Hummer in the Summer (2005) transform our shared reality of mindless consumption and oblivious cultural militarism into a plane of abstract and beautiful realism (Figure 5.9). The Dallas-­based painter paints the both grubby and tony neighborhoods of the city en plein air in what amounts to a newfound embodiment of fin de siècle aestheticism. Here Ligon has painted a Hummer in front of a 210 // Automotive Prosthetic

mansion (reminiscent of the White House) in Highland Park, a gated community without a gate. Highland Park is one of two balkanized fiefdoms (the other being University Park) with public schools, a police force, fire department, and public maintenance (trash, water, sewage) separate from the larger metroplex of Dallas–Fort Worth. Though separate, Highland Park is nestled within Dallas, surrounded by a city that is more ethnically diverse and economically complex. Highland Park is home to Southern Methodist University, the locale of the Bush fils library and think tank, located just south of the postpresidential home of the forty-­third president of the United States, George W. Bush. In painting a Hummer parked in front of a mansion in Highland Park, Ligon distills the vast expanse of cultural militarism, reinforcing the fact that contemporary art that represents the symbols of war reflects, enacts, and enables, even if only circuitously, the very reaches of that cultural militarism. In other words, the painting or sculpture that deploys a funky sense of verisimilitude in the representation of wartime vehicles is not so different from the thing itself, the Hummer. While in different degrees and to different effects, Hummer-­painter and Hummer-­owner alike are enacting and working through the rituals of a militaristic society. As the artist strives for a form of critical commentary and distance from militarism by reflecting it, the Hummer consumer embraces it by purchasing the tools of the war domesticated for homeland play. Though distinct in their relationship to and participation within our current state of militarism, both are ultimately part of the greater militaristic culture industry. No one can escape its well-­nigh sublime, metaphysical grasp. Parsing the words of Horkheimer and Adorno above, these examples of art engagé involving mass culture through processes of mimesis operate by the aesthetic sublimation of desire while the culture industry embodied in the Hummer forcefully represses the extant connection between the Hummer and war, both in terms of origin and petrol. Distinct in function, with artifacts of aesthetic sublimation representing “fulfillment as a broken promise” and those of the culture industry functioning to “repress,” there is nonetheless little distinction in the origins of the psychologies at work. Both emerge from and negotiate an all-­embracing cultural militarism. Perhaps cynical in the longue durée, the words of Horkheimer and Adorno are apropos in describing the dialectical connection between Hummer art and the actual Hummer in the current moment: “Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system.”54 If the one artistic Hummer \\ 211

force of cultural production describes with great economy the intricacies of war and the other consumerist represses them, both navigate and represent the waters of cultural militarism. This work, in all of its attractiveness and pop consumability, could easily be mistaken as a midwife, a Hermes of war in clever costume. We must be careful not to damn the conventional sense of beauty and craft and playful form in this art to ultimate failure in terms of its political effectiveness, for this body of artwork functions politically precisely in terms of such beauty and the manner in which it solicits desire. The invitation of desire here is rooted in what Lacan describes as the transgression of the Law, the Oedipal Law of the father, insomuch as these works of art play on a strain of libido that is similarly elicited by the automobile. They are works of art that point to the transgression of the law, as opposed to the Law, and the role that desire plays within such an enticement. In shifting from upper- to lowercase, I would like to take a moment to discuss an overlapping sense of the “law”: the law understood according to a certain slippage from the Lacanian Oedipal to the actual, everyday practices of law as administered by the American Congress in the form of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE). Here we go from Lacan to American legislation, the linchpin being the automobile— the SUV in particular. Enacted in 1975 in the years after the oil embargo led by the Arab states, CAFE was intended to curb oil consumption by requiring “the sales-­weighted fuel economy of the passenger car and light-­duty truck fleets sold in the United States.”55 While the law was meant to encourage the use of more fuel-­efficient cars, its results have been meager, hampered from its inception by a distinction made within the law between “passenger cars” and “light utility trucks.” The light truck is a designation that includes vans, minivans, pickup trucks, and SUVs, and is also the basis for what has become known as the “light truck loophole,” a distinction that ultimately “distorts the mix of large and small vehicles.”56 Separate standards for cars and lightweight trucks evolved in accordance with this division, with the standard fuel efficiency for cars first established at 18.0 mpg in 1978 and increasing gradually to 27.5 mpg, and for trucks established in 1982 at 17.5 mpg and increasing gradually to 20.7 mpg.57 Instead of doing away altogether with large heavy cars, the broad light-­truck category within CAFE functioned to replace the large passenger car. “Given that under CAFE large cars are penalized, small cars are subsidized, and light trucks are largely unregulated,” a two-­tiered market of small cars and light trucks among American car manufacturers has become the norm.58 212 // Automotive Prosthetic

An “inefficient law,” CAFE folds in on itself by its very structuring: because of congressional fecklessness and collusion with the automobile industry, the transgression of fuel-­efficiency standards is at the core of CAFE. Returning to the question of desire and the delectability of the art that is mimetic of the Hummer, we find a dialectic of jouissance and transgression at work here that relates to Lacan’s thinking. For Lacan, transgression of the father toward pleasure is the necessary counterpoint to the Oedipal Law: “Transgression in the direction of jouissance only takes place if it is supported by the oppositional principal of the Law.”59 As the path to pleasure is an ever-­bumpier road, the proscriptions of the Law intended to temper the will in its search for gratification become, in turn, something like an all-­terrain SUV. Or, to put it more directly, prohibiting petroleum consumption is actually an invitation to consume more. Lacan writes, aptly explaining that “prohibition” is metaphorically an “all-­terrain vehicle” and “half-­track truck”: “If the paths to jouissance have something in them that dies out, that tends to make them impassable, prohibition, if I may say so, becomes its all-­terrain vehicle, its half-­track truck, that gets it out of the circuitous routes that lead man back in a roundabout way toward the rut of a short well-­trodden satisfaction.”60 The works of art are egregiously large and forceful as they ironically mimic the overbearing presence of the Hummer. In this mimesis, they set in motion a force of desire that is not actual desire of the Hummer but rather a force of desire that mimics and mirrors it. In reflecting rather than being such a desire, they frame the role of the Hummer in the transgression of the law. Instead of being a necessary counterpart to the Law, as Lacan explains, transgression in this instance is the very stuff of the law in the form of CAFE. CAFE is something like a mirage, a dummy law intended to assuage congressional complaints of national fuel inefficiency that in fact barely functions. Transgression in the form of the light-­truck loophole is the essence of CAFE and, by connection, federally mandated fuel efficiency is part of the game of Hummer ownership and concomitant cultural militarism. In buying a Hummer one instrumentalizes the transgression of the CAFE law. With the videos of Angie Waller and Alex Villar, we move away form transgression and pleasure in the form of the Hummer, returning to the question of mimesis. Their documentarian and animated moving-­image war vehicles appeared in the exhibition Custom Car Commandos at the project space Art In General in New York in March 2009. With the hoary concept of mimesis brought into the realm of contemporary conceptual, faux documentary, and new media art, the sense of mimesis at work here moves beHummer \\ 213

F i g u r e 5 .10 .

Angie Waller, installation of Armored Cars: Protect Yourself from Ballistic Attacks,

2007. Courtesy of Angie Waller.

yond the linear sense of one thing imitating another. In more complex fashion, that logic is shot through the prism of informational reflection, with mimesis made manifold through refractive mimicry. Each moving-­image piece imitates not a three-­dimensional thing, but information about interaction with a thing, an armored car or Hummer. The videos ape “valid and useful information” rather than actually being it: more directly, they mimic how-­to and documentary videos. Waller’s Armored Cars: Protect Yourself from Ballistic Attacks (2007) is a single-­channel, 8.5-­minute video loop accompanied by color advertisements and statistical data mounted frameless directly on to the adjacent wall (Figure 5.10).61 Waller montaged together promotional videos available online from armored car manufacturers, ballistics tests, interviews with experts from the industry, and auto show and general marketing propaganda. Elided into one seamless video, the stream of images bears a sense of feigned documentary truth. As the artist’s own process of video fabrication parallels the corporate process, the work points 214 // Automotive Prosthetic

to the fabrication of corporate truth as a ploy in the marketing of armored cars. Reminiscent of Warhol’s adage that “business art is the step that comes after Art,” the artist factures a video project for the art world at large just as—even mimicking—a mid-­level manager within a corporation who puts together a marketing video.62 By comparison to Waller’s ad hoc documentary sensibility, Villar’s Crash Course (2008) is a minimalist video with subtle and ironic high-­tech pretentions (Figures 5.11 and 5.12). It is an installation with a four-­minute video projected on two freestanding, partition-­like screens configured in an upright and extruded L-­shape. Once again, the Hummer embodies a unique form of secular monadism. It is where foreign policy hits the road and the everyday life of an angry pedestrian intrudes into “the thematic horizon . . . given by the contemporary occurrence of war.”63 The video loop shows a Hummer in various shots, tumbling over stairs or parked under a townhouse or along a street. It is always at a standstill, whether mid-­action or parked, and located in a desolate, architecturally dense though anonymous urban setting. A single bald man dressed in black interacts often angrily with the Hummer. Apocalyptic time unfolds in a millennial space filled by a pastiche of buildings. Action takes place amid a montage of architecture: the old European city center gives way to the new monumental periphery. The viewer watches scenes of the bald man performing as an angry retaliating pedestrian, banging on the hood of the Hummer, then rolling beneath the wheels, crawling out from underneath, and climbing on top of the Hummer. Visual references collide. Suggestive of a De Chirico painting made into a noir film, the video is shot through a black-­and-­white filter. As an alternative type of how-­ to video, directed toward the pedestrian rather than the automobile driver, Villar’s video offers an ironic appropriation of power. The video mirrors war-­ front and domesticated militarism both obliquely and in straightforward fashion. There are two agents of power in this video: first, the single-­minded solitary pedestrian who goes against, second, the seemingly driverless Hummer. Their interaction is a dance of resistance and compliance that mirrors the actual play of Hummer and pedestrian on North American streets while metaphorically redirecting our attention to the “horizon of war.” This art functions by way of reflecting and working through desire and aesthetic sublimation. Each artist distills in playful form the sublimated desires inscribed by cultural militarism and, in turn, reflects the fulfillment of such cultural militarism—perpetual war—as the “broken promise” of capitalism, in particular its promise of “freedom.” While revealing the limitHummer \\ 215

F i g u r e s 5 . 11 a n d 5.12.

Alex Villar, still from Crash Course, 2008. Courtesy of Alex Villar.

less nature of the culture industry, indeed as it comes to fruition in an all-­ encompassing militarism—militarism that is at once political, social, and cultural—this art points to the limits of such freedom, especially as it has been at the center of the chauvinistic rhetoric leading to and perpetuating the Iraq War. The calculus of freedom prescribed by the American state, military industrial complex, and culture industry becomes part of a one-­way 216 // Automotive Prosthetic

deliverance rather than dialogical exchange of, as promised, democracy and free speech. It is an imposition of “freedom” on the world. In its keyed-­up sense of playful beauty and resolved form, the art at hand tells of its opposite, namely the end of acquisitive freedom and, more profoundly, that it is impossible for freedom to create a deliberative political culture and individual political agency. At the same time, theirs is an instance of verisimilitude that can do no more than show, reflecting in like form, the limits of a broken promise. Since it is art, and beautiful, almost gleeful art at that, to bear or inspire agency may in fact be beyond its capabilities. Before we turn our attention to the third leg of the original triadic diagram to a different mode of visual culture, the Internet, and what I argue to be its apposition to the trauma of the real, we look first to Jeremy Deller’s discourse-­based project from early 2009, It Is What It Is (Figures 5.13 and 5.14). An example of what curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud describes as relational aesthetics, it is motivated by the goal of social interaction rather than the politics of desire and mimesis. The 2004 recipient of the Tate Museum’s Turner Prize, Deller is known for unorthodox activities, taking on out-­of-­the-­box curatorial projects such as Folk Archive at the Barbican Gal-

F i g u r e 5.13 .

Jeremy Deller, It Is What It Is, 2009. New Museum, New York. Courtesy of The

Modern Institute, Glasgow.

Hummer \\ 217

F i g u r e 5 .14 .

Jeremy Deller, It Is What It Is, 2009. Image of bombed-­out car towed across

country. Courtesy of Jeremy Deller and Creative Time, New York.

lery in London in 2005, in addition to being a practicing artist.64 Artistic practice for Deller is more of a matter of praxis, that is, a concern of would-­be revolutionary engagement through social interaction fueled by urgent questions. The interrogations can function self-­reflexively within the realm of fine arts or bear more broadly upon global politics. In this case, the overarching question emerges out of the latter: “Why exactly are we at war in Iraq?” A caravan made up of a motor home trailing behind it a blown-­out car from Iraq, It Is What It Is created an open forum of discussion at each crossroads. Deller, along with the military reservist Jonathan Harvey, Iraqi artist Esam Pasha, and Creative Time curator Nato Thompson, traveled across the country, making prearranged stops at university campuses, arts institutions, and small towns. An extensive website (www.conversationsaboutiraq .org) documents the project, providing links to a map, road diary, the story of the blown-­out car, and interviews and essays. Deller recycled the rusted remains of the car from another, earlier exhibition titled War on Error, organized by the Dutch curator Robert Klüijver in May 2007. Klüijver had shipped the car originally from Al-­Mutanabbi, a street in Iraq, to the cen218 // Automotive Prosthetic

ter of Amsterdam after four months of negotiation.65 Similar to its role in Deller’s project, the car within Klüijver’s project was one among several interactive components by which discussion was catalyzed. As Deller sees it, the vestige of an automobile from the streets of Iraq might serve in the future as the basis for a museum on the Iraq War: “One day there will be a museum dedicated to the conflict in Iraq. Until then we have to imagine what it might contain.”66 The car was destroyed in an attack on a book market on Al-­Mutanabbi in the center of Baghdad on March 5, 2007. Deller sees the car as a stand-­in for the loss of human life, as thirty-­eight people lost their lives and hundreds were injured.67 Since the blown-­out physical remains of an urban setting are often used as the spectacular evidence of terrorism within the mass media, the urban remains of a bombing constitute a certain mesmerizing phantasmagoria of war. It tells of radical violence without the goriness of dismembered bodies. Setting off a bomb in the center of a city is liable to cause not only massive loss of life, but also invariably the destruction of infrastructure and technology. Ripped-­up macadam and cobblestones, torn-­out phone wiring and sundry electric lines, and destroyed cars are left in the wake of a suicide bomber or the guerilla-­styled booby trap of an improvised explosive device (IED). From the perspective of guerilla attackers, the destruction of infrastructure and technology, in particular the automobile, offers a symbolic form of self-­cannibalizing political agency. Similar to the burning of cars by young French men of African descent in French suburban housing projects (banlieusards), the destruction of an automobile is a radical form of subversion and defiance against an imperious state. While violent and socially eviscerating, it is a form of resistance. Traveling across the United States, the bombed car was the locus of heuristic exchange, presenting in its rough-­hewn tactility the war in three dimensions to audiences habituated to seeing it in the two dimensions of the screen.

The Real: The Internet, Views to the Road in War, and Political Agency by Chance

The ubiquity of the screen—film, television, and computer—does not make it any less powerful a channel for delivery of the truths of war. The inuring that comes with such habituation to the screen functions doubly, at once inculcating cultural militarism as a normative mode of experience in everyday life and purveying the perversities of cultural militarism in plain sight. Hummer \\ 219

The screen is a readymade vista of shock, a zone by which one experiences the Lacanian real by chance and, in turn, is faced with forming opinions about the ruthless and bloody violence of the war. Experiencing the real, as Slavoj Žižek points out, is not a matter of disinterring it from deep within cultural practices, or pulling back dissimulating veils hiding the real. Žižek looks outside of such hermeneutics of depth, describing the real as a “fantasmatic specter” that is with us on the surface of things, reflecting onto us from the screen: Here, we should abandon the standard metaphorics of the Real as the terrifying Thing that is impossible to confront face to face, as the ultimate Real concealed beneath the layers of imaginary and/or symbolic Veils: the very idea that, beneath the deceptive appearances, there lies hidden some ultimate Real Thing too horrible for us to look at directly is the ultimate appearance—this Real Thing is a fantasmatic spectre whose presence guarantees the consistency of our symbolic edifice, thus enabling us to avoid confronting its constitutive inconsistency (“antagonism”).68

The idea that the real is hidden and difficult to find only leads to a comfort with not knowing or being oblivious to it. The real can be located anywhere, emerging from one’s daily activities of sleeping or napping, dining, driving, watching TV or a film, surfing the Internet, interacting with people at a social networking site or by way of watching videos at YouTube.com. Regardless of its prosthetic means, it always arrives unexpectedly. Looking to the Internet, two fortuitous variables combine in leading to confrontation with the real: the will to find graphic war footage on the Internet at YouTube and the coupling of an array of terms mentioned above, such as “view to the road,” “Humvee,” “SUV,” “Iraq,” “war,” and “violence.” The video-­sharing website YouTube.com has been at times an unregulated frontier for the dissemination of an infinite array of moving-­image footage. Amid the barrage of banal information that is uploaded freely by anyone with access to the Internet and an account at YouTube, there was in the mid-­noughts a strain of war mediation that is far more brutal and honest than much official coverage by standard news portals. While there was an abundance of edited and unedited footage of American soldiers and British and American soldiers for hire at warring work in Iraq available at YouTube .com, I have limited the examples to three views to the road in Iraq. It is

220 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e 5.15 .

View to the Road in Iraq 1, by YouTube.com user “robairlb,” 2008. Video removed

from YouTube.com.

moving-­image footage shot by soldiers in Iraq through the double aperture of the camera and the vehicle window downloaded in 2008 and subsequently removed because of its graphic nature from the Internet by YouTube.com in 2010.69 My goal with this footage is to reinforce the ontology and epistemology of what I call the “automotive prosthetic”: our being in the world and means of knowing through the car. In comparing art that mimetically comments on the Hummer, those who purchase and drive Hummers, and actual wartime footage captured through the window of Humvees or other large SUVs in Iraq, my goal is to deflate the protective bubble and play of cultural militarism, to break down and move outside of the spaces of sublimation and repression in order to confront the real as seen online and described first by Lacan and later calibrated by Žižek. Originally posted in June 2007 at YouTube by an anonymous person operating under the username “robairlb,” the first example of moving-­image footage shows an American military vehicle, a Humvee, driving through the busy streets of a city in Iraq, likely Baghdad (Figure 5.15).70 The title of the clip reads, “Hummer driving in Iraq, crazy driver on Iraqi road” and bears the description, “No rules, no traffic, no stop signs, just need to reach his barracks i guess before getting blown up.” The soldier drives the Humvee down a busy street packed with cars. Pedestrians, children and adults, haphazardly run in front of the truck. Viewers hear the Humvee’s horn blaring as the soldier driving the Humvee bumps the backs of civilians’ cars and public buses slowly moving through traffic ahead. Bullying his way through the city, the driver goes over a low-­rise concrete median and drives into oncoming traffic. Oncoming cars veer to avoid the Humvee. Toward the end of the clip, viewers hear a soldier’s voice disparaging a male Iraqi civilian as he says, “This guy’s just pickin’ his nose, not a fuckin’ care in the world.” Interlopers and

Hummer \\ 221

occupiers, the soldiers at the helm of the Humvee ignore the extant traffic laws of this Iraqi city, creating the autarchic conditions that Hummer drivers mimic and play at back stateside thousands of miles away. The barrier separating “the digitalized First World from the Third World ‘desert of the Real’” is not toppled but pierced as watchers of YouTube are witnesses to the violence, illegal acts, and xenophobic disdain for local custom on the part of American soldiers abroad.71 Piercing this space of separation potentially sets in play a series of actions and reactions, from political consciousness to agency: watching life destroyed in a city far away brings a certain strain of refracted enlightenment. The video tells more about the barbarisms of American war for petrol in two minutes than does any thirty-­ minute news coverage on TV, left- or right-­leaning newspaper, or presidential press meeting. In anonymously posting video of the war on YouTube, Internet navigator “robairlb” has brought home the goods of war with knife-­ like penetration. The guerilla tactic of online reportage triggers the power of change because it invites and shows the real daily events of American war in Iraq in a broad, accessible forum. It is alternative information, the uncut, graphic truth of war—something akin to pornography—which goes ignored by all media outlets, everything from the news on network and cable TV to newspapers, conservative and liberal alike. Citizen-­viewers confront the real of the war, its trauma, in the form of banal daily war crimes. The violent reality of driving a Humvee through the streets of Baghdad replaces the play of driving a Hummer at home, thus inviting an intrusion of the real and its ensuing trauma. We must be careful to recognize, however, that this trauma from the real is not “concealed beneath the layers of imaginary and/or symbolic Veils,” as Žižek reminds us.72 The images are, unfortunately, part of our visual lingua franca. That they are ubiquitous, on the Internet in reportage and symbolically embodied in the objects we consume, shows that cultural militarism has become normative and seems ordinary. YouTube videos of war in Iraq collapse the distinction between sublimation and repression, looking like war and being war, into series of short clips. The combination of easy access, violence, and reportage brings home a unique sense of shock, the trauma of the real that is everywhere, with us all of the time, well nigh normal, ready at hand in that it is right at your fingertips day and night. Here I argue the power of YouTube to incite viewer empathy: either self-­identification with the lawless machismo at work behind the wheel or horror at the selfish survival tac-

222 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e 5.16 .

View to the Road in Iraq 2, by YouTube.com user “reece2076,” 2008. Video

removed from YouTube.com.

tics of an American confrere and concitoyen in a place where he should not be, participating in an haphazard war that should have never been. The title of another video of the view to the road in Iraq is “Soldiers make Iraqi kids run for clean drinking water (sad).”73 Posted by “reece2076” in March 2008, its longer description reads, “A group of soldiers make kids run after their Humvee to get a bottle of clean drinking water.” This clip offers a view to the road from the backside of the truck, where a gunner is taunting Iraqi children with bottled water (Figure 5.16). The children run in excitement after the truck, as the video shows the waving gloved hand of the soldier holding the bottle. Viewers hear the soldier taunt the children, “You want the water? Here, come and get it.” The soldier holding the bottled water says to the soldier filming, “Are you gettin’ it?” To which he replies, “Yeah.” The Humvee speeds up and the soldier says while laughing, “Do you want it?” The two soldiers discuss the exceptional distance one boy has run, “This kid’s running forever.” The discourse continues, “Come on . . .” he says, and his friend laughs. Finally, the gloved hand of the soldier throws the bottled water out of the back of the truck and the one-­minute footage ends. First posted in August 2006 by “kaiserguy” and later, in September 2007, by “jamocamac,” the final clip of the view to the road in Iraq shows a soldier arbitrarily shooting at approaching and passing cars from the back of a truck (Figure 5.17). It has been slightly edited, with the elision of clips from different roads and an overlay of Elvis Presley’s “Mystery Train” creating a seamless, almost polished sense of continuity. Viewers watch, once again, the view to the road out the back of a truck. Shot on the edge of Baghdad, the video shows desolate strips of highway rhythmically dotted by tumbledown low-­rise buildings and palm trees. The soldier shoots out the back of the truck, causing passersby and approaching vehicles to swerve or come

Hummer \\ 223

F i g u r e 5 .17 .

View to the Road in Iraq 3, by YouTube.com user “kaiserguy,” 2006. Video

removed from YouTube.com.

to a halt, as he presumably hits his target, killing innocent Iraqi civilians inside the vehicle. Kaiserguy further edited the original version, framing it ideologically with anti-­war sentiment.74 The video opens with a blue screen and the words, “Videofact: Western Democracy in Action.” A viewer comments in 2007, “these arent British troops. they are in a suburban or civilian car. they are either terrorists (which I doubt) or it is shithead blackwater.” Jamocamac posted the same video without further editing under the title, “AEGIS contracted commandos shooting cars in Iraq,” linking the video to the British security contracting company AEGIS.75 Further research online at Sourcewatch.org reveals a discussion of the clip under the subheading, “trophy video.” According to Sourcewatch, the video showing a soldier for hire, “firing rounds into cars along what might have been ‘Route Irish,’ the dangerous stretch of highway between the Green Zone and Baghdad airport,” had originally been posted at an unofficial AEGIS site by a disgruntled former AEGIS contractor.76 An investigative article, “From Mercenaries to Peacemakers: Scandals Confront Military Security Industry,” posted November 29, 2005, at Corpwatch.com explained that Tim Spicer, founder of AEGIS, launched an internal investigation on the matter, with a judge and a former senior police officer among the members of the panel.77 In response to the footage, the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division launched its own, official, investigation. Though watching the footage is proof of illegal acts—a case of murder and mayhem at the hands of a mobile highway sniper—both “investigations confirmed that all the circumstances, when seen in context, were within the approved and accepted Rules for the Use of Force, that no crime had been committed, and that there was no case to answer.”78 Operating in an autarchic, state-­less rubric, the accused here does not pass through the legal system of an evenhanded, disinterested judicial system prescribed and enacted by the constitutional separation of powers, 224 // Automotive Prosthetic

but rather through the lawless underbelly of a private corporation. By not taking full legal action against the shooter, the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division has condoned his acts. It is blatant evidence that the military industrial complex, lead by the U.S. Army, is complicit in, if not constitutive, of the lawless world in which soldiers for hire exist. YouTube footage of the view to the road in Iraq brings home the Lacanian real to viewers not merely in its easy midwifery of psychological trauma, the graphic portrayal of brute force, violence, and murder that is ready at hand, but in its incitation of individual agency. Lacan states directly the connection between moral action and the real: “Moral action is, in effect, grafted to the real.”79 Moral action, with respect to the YouTube.com footage, begins with critical thinking, evolves from oblivion and mindless support of the war, and culminates in choice: the decision to support or reject perpetual war wrought by American forces around the world. This strain of political agency, that of the wandering reader and watcher surfing the Internet, is indirect and almost arbitrary in nature, oriented by will working through—thwarted and subverted by—chance. We are productively challenged by such chance political agency. It is a type of political agency that is inspired and caused by the trauma of the Lacanian real, which has its roots in ancient ideas of causality and the unforeseen. Agency is thus not a matter of “free will,” agency ex nihilo, but rather the “chance” opportunity that skirts along the surfaces of everyday life.80 In this instance, that agency takes body according to the chance coalescence of several vectors: momentary concentration in front of a computer screen, the uncensored posting of information about war on YouTube.com, and the choice of right algorithmic coupling of words in the search for imagery. The sublime nature of the anonymous video reportage posted at YouTube, so many violent views to the road in Iraq, comes into play because of its traumatic nature: it is unassimilable, like the Lacanian real and its motivating force in chance. The images are well nigh incommensurable in their turpitude and gross violence. They constitute a digital sublime, especially when compared to the soft, clean coverage of the war promulgated by American news media outlets. In this graphic imagery, one experiences the trauma that comes with encountering the Lacanian real, its pain bearing the power to tear asunder the symbolic fabric of American cultural militarism.81 At the same time, we must bear in mind the nature of that “symbolic fabric,” that it is an a priori fabrication of playtime violence (like Hummers on the road at home) given to us by Hollywood productions of wartime action and Hummer \\ 225

drama that have come to grammatically forewarn, foreshadow, and create the very possibility of the Lacanian real in the form of violent events (9-­11-­ 01) and actual war to come. Though horrifying in its trauma, we invent the real in order to respond to it in ecstasy or righteous indignation. The angry response to watching violent views to the road as found at YouTube, the ensuing illumination about the barbarisms of American war, and the would-­ be emergence of anti-­war sentiment is an accidental process very much in keeping with the Lacanian sense of the real. It is a fortuitous volition rooted in the imbrications of the psyche, which emerges from chance—the real as trauma experienced during wanderings of the virtual passages of YouTube .com. The real as trauma poses the question: “Will you continue to support American cultural militarism after watching these video clips?” While there is little room outside of the culture industry and the attendant norms of cultural militarism, there is a space of rumination, a zone of choice that opens to the individual watching YouTube. There we locate the proposition of a weak but nonetheless purposive political agency in the way of an informed and sincere opinion followed by anger and a refusal to consent.

226 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e s 0. 2–0. 4.

Jonathan Schipper, Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle: Slow Motion

Car Crash, 2008. Courtesy of Jonathan Schipper and Pierogi Gallery, New York.

F i g u r e 1.1.

Julian Opie Imagine You Are Driving installation, Hayward Gallery, London, 1994. Includes (on the floor)

sculptures (1993); (on the side walls) paintings (1994); and (on the far wall) computer film (1993). Courtesy of Julian Opie Studio, Artists Rights Society, and Lisson Gallery, London.

F i g u r e 1. 2.

Julian Opie, Imagine You Are Driving, 1993. Courtesy of Julian Opie Studio, Artists Rights Soci-

ety, and Lisson Gallery, London.

F i g u r e 2.9.

N. E. Thing Co., Strip Mall, Toronto Ontario, 1974. Courtesy of Corkin Gallery, Toronto.

F i g u r e 2.20.

John Baldessari, The Back of All the Trucks While Driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, 1963.

Courtesy of John Baldessari and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

F i g u r e 2. 35.

Cory Arcangel, F1 Racer Mod (Japanese Driving Game), 2004. Courtesy of

Cory Arcangel Studio, New York.

F i g u r e 3. 1–3. 3.

Gregory Crewdson, images from the series titled Beneath the Roses,

2003–2005. Courtesy of Gregory Crewdson and Gagosian Gallery, New York.

F i g u r e 3. 19.

Film still from Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler, Single Wide, 2002.

Courtesy of Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler.

F i g u r e 4. 1.

Dan Graham, Car Hop, Jersey

City, NJ, from Homes for America, layout for Arts Magazine, 1967. Courtesy of Dan Graham and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

F i g u r e 4. 7.

Venturi, Rauch, and Scott Brown, photomontage proposal for City Edges. Courtesy

of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

F i g u r e 4. 8.

Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates, General Plan, California City, California, 1970–

1971. Courtesy of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

F i g u r e 5. 1.

Jonathon Rosen, untitled illustration, New York Times, February 28, 2010.

F i g u r e 5. 4.

Margarita Cabrera, Hummer, 2006. Courtesy of Margarita Cabrera and Walter

Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles.

F i g u r e 5. 9.

Peter Ligon, Hummer in the Summer, 2005. Courtesy of Peter Ligon and owner of

work, Gary Cunningham.

F i g u r e 6.10.

Richard Prince, The Sweetheart of the Rodeo, 2008. Courtesy of Richard Prince Studio and Gagosian

Gallery, New York and Rensselaerville, New York.

F i g u r e 7.2.

Sylvie Fleury, Skin Crime (no. 5–6), 1999. Courtesy of Sylvie Fleury.

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Richard Prince’s Car Fetishes

The role of the automobile in the art of Richard Prince appears, upon first glimpse, simple and basic, its semiotic function merely a matter of caricaturing the putative “American love affair with the car.”1 Because much of his investment in the car, artistic and otherwise, has coalesced around the banalities of car culture, including speed and the freedom of the open road, 1970s muscle cars, hot rod magazines, and pictures of the babes of hot-­rodding men, we understand the automobile to plainly signify desire in his work. From this perspective, the car symbolizes an insatiable craving for, bluntly said, more, more speed, more women, more money, more power, the force of which is proof of testosterone writ large and manhood unlimited. It is also, simply put, a fetish. We look first to what might be considered the most obvi-

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F i g u r e 6 .1.

Richard Prince, Untitled, 2008. Courtesy of Richard Prince Studios and Gagosian

Gallery, New York and Rensselaerville, New York.

ous, the Freudian definition of the fetish, in order to get some sense of the psychological roots of Prince’s fetishism. In Freudian terms, Prince’s interest in the car, his automobile fetish, could be interpreted as a matter of phallic substitution: the automobile reinforces his manhood by mechanically extending the artist’s phallic body.2 In so many words, he wears his penis in the form of a roving mechanical prosthetic. He pronounces—enlarges—his penis by way of a fast, powerful car. When Prince had an auto body shop in upstate New York refabricate a 1970 Dodge Challenger for the European art fair Frieze in 2008, he extended his phallus through the automobile in order to heighten not only his manhood but also the anti-­art stakes of his automobile-­based work (Figure 6.1). Describing this untitled work of art, Prince says, “It’s like art but isn’t. The fact that it runs changes it. You can sit it in an art gallery, but then you can get in it and drive away. What happens to it when you do—does it lose the art? I think it does, and I like that.”3 At work here is Prince’s particular strategy à rebours the art establishment, as it unfolds within its very precincts and entails a collapsing of high culture into a specific grain of low, namely the base culture of muscle cars, white trashdom, and high-­throttle, Hollywood-­manufactured machismo. The 1970 Dodge Challenger is an icon of muscle cars made famous by the 228 // Automotive Prosthetic

road-­chase movie Vanishing Point (1971), starring Barry Newman as “Kowalski,” a macho man and the quintessential adrenaline junky. The seeming simplicity of Prince’s automobile fetish gives way to a hydra-­headed process of psychological investment, both as Prince intends his fetish of the car to function outwardly as a thumb-­in-­the-­eye attack on the political correctness of the art world and as it is an inward practice, a sincere fetish of an adored object, namely the muscle car. Richard Prince’s relationship to the car is affective, even existential: evidence of a strain of sentimental conceptual art. Prince had his completely rebuilt 1970 Dodge Challenger painted in a shade of bright orange-­yellow called “Vitamin C,” echoing the inventive though kitschy names of muscle-­car enamels.4 Reinforcing the sense that the car is an extension of his mind-­body continuum, the bright colors are reminiscent of the dazzling plumage of a peacock. At Frieze, tricked out with the latest twenty-­first-­century technology, including, as Prince explained with great attention to detail, a “high-­tech transmission, chassis, suspension, all new interior, bucket seats, dash, 440 horsepower, 5.7-­liter engine,” the car sat still on a circular, mirrored, and rotating platform.5 Viewers posed for pictures with it as though it were the latest concept car being displayed in a car show.6 In transforming the high-­art precinct of the Frieze fair into an automobile bazaar, Prince not only brought to bear his personal penchant for the vulgar and what to some might be the brute, utilitarian form of everyday life, but also set in relief with great poignancy the frenzied yet base sense of monetary exchange and profit at work in the typical international art fair. It was one commodity like another commodity in the fair, handmade by a mechanic car-­junky instead of a painter. While a carefully crafted, customized, and rare muscle car, the Vitamin C 1970 Dodge Challenger signals banality. Painted in bright colors and tailored for extreme speed, it is basically a car and thus common, simply one form of many similar forms. Prince likens art to the mass-­produced car, rolling off an assembly line as one thing after another, to invoke Donald Judd. Prince, however, might be considered more Duchamp than Judd. Prince originally intended the car to be one of a series of three, the first of which was fabricated by XV Motorsports for him in Irvington, New York. Living up to the moniker of the “Duchamp of the muscle car” engaged in “conceptual car fetishizing,” Prince considered it something of a prototype—a readymade—to be produced in limited number.7 But it is in his role as appropriator rather than Duchampian art-­annihilator that we find the true crux of his deployment of the fetish as a multifaceted object of desire. Working as an appropriator as early as the Richard Prince \\ 229

1970s, an artist-­plagiarizer who literally copied images by way of rephotographing already made photographs, Prince played out and further set in relief the investment of desire and longing elicited by catalog display and advertising. Rather than the symbolic indifference to the object intended by Duchamp’s readymade, Prince’s act of appropriation reinforces appetite, ardor, and infatuation.8 Beyond Freud, the automobile elicits other theoretical connections prominent across Prince’s broader body of artwork. His automobile fetish also functions in Marxist terms. As perhaps the most recurrent and omnipresent icon in Prince’s oeuvre since the mid-­1970s, the automobile is, at base, a symbol of social value. It is a commodity fetish, a substitute for actual social relationships between people, and a thing [ding] that emanates if not manufactures envy and desire. Similar to the series of advertising fragments that were the basis for Prince’s rephotography of the late 1970s and early 1980s—the photographs of photographs of female models looking in the same direction, couples standing in the same stance, high-­end products (a watch, a purse, and jewels) placed within autumnal settings and, perhaps most famously, grizzle-­chinned, horseback-­riding, lariat-­carrying cowboys—the automobile is an object that serves as a stand-­in for face-­to-­face connection between people. It is in the United States arguably the most powerful national mass commodity, and as such, it is, like advertising, where social relations—identity formation, urban life, and basic utility—are congealed. The car is a readymade sign of American political economy. Prince underscores what Marx described as “nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” The car is for Prince what the commodity-­ thing was in general for Marx, namely a form of “fetishism.”9 Freud and Marx aside, at base Prince does in fact engage in a form of simple, everyday fetishism with his ferocious love of the muscle car. Shared by many, primarily men, it is a practice of fetishism virtually bastardized in its omnipresence and, by connection, commonplace recognizability in Prince’s work. It is readily evident and for some, because of the vulgarity of the car and its attendant car culture, not necessarily appropriate to the realm of high-­art practices. For these denizens of the art world, Prince’s work engaging the car is degraded art: it is kitsch. Yet, beyond the realm of everyday life, Prince deploys the automobile in a form of high-­art fetishism, reinstating if not reworking the auratic halo of beauty that was seemingly disinte-

230 // Automotive Prosthetic

grated in his earliest work as a rephotographing postmodernist. In a review of Prince’s 2007–2008 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Eleanor Heartney writes of the vast range of influences on Prince’s practice, both modern and postmodern, “from Pop and Abstract Expressionism to Conceptualism and formalism.”10 Scrutinizing the artist’s oeuvre thus far in his career, from the rephotography of the Pictures Generation to the nurse and de Kooning paintings of the new millennium, Prince proves himself to be “an equal opportunity appropriator,” quoting advertising images as well as the abstract expressionist brushstroke with a consistent will to fetishize the false, heroic, and beautiful.11 Prince is simultaneously a postmodernist and modernist extraordinaire, an artist who makes the act of quoting itself an auratic and singular experience. Playing on what Walter Benjamin called the “phony spell of [the] commodity,” Prince reintroduces the classical imprimatur of authenticity, the aura of modern art, by way of the automobile.12 If for Benjamin mass production in the form of the photograph, and then later the cinema, destroyed the site-­specific originality of a work of art that had come to be articulated most powerfully in the invisible form of the golden halo of an aura, Prince ushers the return of the aura precisely by way of mass production in the form of the car. Site-­less, unbound, and roving like the aura-­less photograph, the car in Prince’s oeuvre is an auratic vessel containing people. His fetishizing of the automobile restores the aura to the work of art. The car in the trajectory of Prince’s career has thus materialized in several different forms of the fetish. In his earliest years as a practicing artist, the car is the basis by which he dismantles the conventions of high-­art beauty, diminishing the heroic authorial presence of the artist and the valued, singular object in the staged amateurism of several photo-­collages. From this series, there are at least three that engage the automobile, two in terms of a fetish that is directly engaging perception through the car window and one as a fetishized object. In two untitled works from 1975 to 1976, we find intentionally amateurish photographs, some blurred and all taken through the front window of a car showing the back of cars in front of the driver, in which the car functions as a device structuring the norms of mobile perception (Figure 2.21). The car does not so much bear an imagistic but imagined presence in Variations on Christina’s World, also from 1976.13 On one side of the collage there is a reproduction of Andrew Wyeth’s famous painting Christina’s World (1948) and a photograph of a house that looks like the one in Wyeth’s

Richard Prince \\ 231

painting, and on the other an imagined narrative by Prince in which the narrator drives “a ’53 two tone green 50th anniversary year roadmaster buick [sic]” with his “girlfriend in the middle of the seat” down an old dusty road in Eastern Northern Maine.14 Although Prince’s careful identification of the type of car in the verbiage of Variations on Christina’s World intimates his love of cars, the car in these works functions, perhaps even beyond a fetish, as an archetype, one syntagm within a foundational grammar of form that allows him to engage in the most basic tropes of conceptual art. Later Prince initiates a return to modern ideas of beauty by way of the automobile, first in tongue-­in-­cheek fashion under the pseudonym of John Dogg and with the help of art dealer Colin de Land by way of his monochromatic car hoods of the late 1980s and then a decade later in what would appear to be full-­fledged honesty and artistic fashion, with the gestural presence and worked surfaces of sculptures and paintings the basis of which are car chassis, bodies, and hoods. Prince’s hood paintings, such as Slingerlands (2004) and Cereal 3 (2002), and car sculptures, such as Continuation (2004–2005) and Elvis (2008), constitute the reconsideration and embodiment yet again of painting as painting: the hoary medium reinvented and tweaked into three-­dimensional objects sutured together out of car parts covered carefully in a mixture of bondo and paint that Prince has applied in smudgy, hands-­on brushstrokes, so many neo-­painterly flourishes done as though in homage to abstract expressionism (Figures 6.2 and 6.3). The movement of paint and bondo on the surface of these objects shows the care of craftwork and concerns of a willful maker, which in turn bear the seal of high-­art beauty and the fetishism of auratic singularity. They create a bridge across automotive fetishes within his work: from Freudo-­Marxian fetish to the automobile as fossilized Jungian archetypal object, the raw material in the making of neo-­modernist beauty—and a form of high-­art fetishism. What we begin to understand is that Prince, rather than being an artist hard bent on destroying the auratic imprint of authenticity and originality, as he might have once been celebrated, is a manufacturer of the aura in the form of the automotive fetish in several valences and according to a variety of protocols.15 He is the mischievous maker of fetishized form, a creator of the maleficium of the automotive fetish. In medieval Latin the word “maleficium” means literally “evil or bad deed,” and refers to the mischievous workings of sorcery and magical play that coalesce around the fetish.16 I cleave to the latter part of the definition in order to instate Prince’s inter-

232 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e 6.2 .

Richard Prince, installation of Hood Paintings in Second House, 2003. Courtesy of

Richard Prince Studios and Gagosian Gallery, New York and Rensselaerville, New York.

rogatory gaming with the automobile as a form of impish and clever mischief, while also using the word in the same manner as the scholar Michael Taussig, who describes “maleficium” in relationship to the fetish as a praxis, a matter of “consciousness making itself through making objects . . . a compulsion to fuse and separate and fuse once again the maker with the making with the thing made.”17 Eliciting the magical pull of desire inherent in the fetish, as phallic, commodity and otherwise, “maleficium,” when joined with the qualifier “automotive,” homes in on the existential function of the automobile in everyday life—its role as a fetishized object bearing a host of emotions, ranging from elation to angst. Automotive maleficium also refers to the complexity of the car in Prince’s oeuvre, the way the car carries fetish value at several different levels in his work. It is at the interstices of the artist’s generalized investment in the fake, fiction and fiction writing, technophilia, and white trash culture. While without a doubt the car is a personal fetish object for the artist, his

Richard Prince \\ 233

F i g u r e 6 .3 .

Richard Prince, Elvis, 2008. Courtesy of Richard Prince Studio and Gagosian

Gallery, New York and Rensselaerville, New York.

engagement with the car also functions epideictically, showing the American cultural mores surrounding the automobile as it points outward to everyday life. The dialectical play of the automobile in Prince’s work—in which it is at once a veritable diaristic confession of his own love of the automobile and an outward framing of the extreme and, at times, perverse nature of that love as it is commonly held—brings us back into the realm of the fetish as praxis described by Taussig. “In short,” Taussig explains, “the fetish takes us into the realm of praxis . . . the subject making itself through making the object—and by the same token . . . take[s] us into the realm of ‘agency’— the vexing problem of individual versus social determination.”18 Because this play between the individual and collective is about him, the would-­be heroic and genius artist Richard Prince, it is at the core of his automobile-­ based work. The broad range of Prince’s work concerns the fetish and the making of the self through the object—but not always the making of the self through the making of the object. If we replace the “making of the object” with the “manufacturing of the object,” and “making” by “mediation and deferral” (i.e., customization), we arrive at a more insightful and accurate understanding of Prince’s fetish praxis, and one also better aligned with his

234 // Automotive Prosthetic

reinstatement of the auratic presence of the work of art. He puts the aura back in place, albeit atop and around the car, precisely by way of the mass-­ produced object. In looking to the work that made Prince famous, the rephotography of the late 1970s and early 1980s, we find the crux of Prince’s will to fetishize and what may very well be a priori his fetishizing of the car, namely the artist’s fetishizing of the fake rooted in the act of appropriation. It is well known that Prince arrived at the idea of rephotography while working in the tear-­sheet department of Time Life in the mid-­1970s, where working in a basement office he cut, ordered, and filed articles for editors in the tower up above.19 Prince’s art came from the detritus—the mass-­ produced pictures of advertising—that fell to the ground in the process. Prince admits to the fact that the authorless nature of the images is what attracted him. Yet authorlessness in this instance did not so much bear the emancipation of expression in the way of erasing rules but rather a form of solidity and resolution that is birthed from the machine as though fully formed—from a version of neo-­Platonic classical form. Referring to the advertisements that are the basis of his rephotographed works, Prince says, “Advertising images aren’t associated with an author. It’s as if their presence were complete—classical in fact. They are too good to be true. They look like what art always wants to look like.”20 The complete image, the artwork that has reached its manufactured completion, or telos, is by nature false— a photograph and advertisement only to be rephotographed by the artist then in the making, Richard Prince. In rephotographing the already photographed, Prince did not merely highlight and frame the false, but fetishized it in order to reveal that art as an “official fiction” always already plays in a field of manifold and competing official fictions, all of which function to manufacture desires as well as individual identities in what Taussig calls the play of “individual versus social determination.”21 Prince’s appropriated images show the various and mutating grammars of identity set in place by the techno-­genesis of advertising, with his goal being not so much to show the difference within repetition but rather the sameness of difference. Prince discusses his interests in the “recognition of cultural patterns, of the ‘same within the different’” in various interviews.22 Looking for the sameness of difference sets in motion an unfolding in which surprisingly “something meaningless turns into something meaningful,” the artist has explained.23 Contextual significance emerges from technologically generated sameness; the singularity of a given meaning is thus based on the

Richard Prince \\ 235

repetition of similarity. Individual identity comes to fruition as the readymade, one of many mass-­produced objects. Yet, Prince does not advocate a moralizing resistance to technology, but rather a cool-­headed, pragmatic, and often ironic view onto the all-­pervasive reality of technological production and the related mediation of identity. “My work is not judgmental; it’s like a window I see through,” he explains.24 He describes the flow of information in personal terms, connecting the individual to the socially determined: It’s almost as if in this culture information touches a chord in us the same way a hit song makes you impulsively keep a beat with everybody else— because you know you’re not the only one who thinks the song is great. The commonality of this information retrieval, the fact that we’ve shared it and think it’s somehow part of us, makes us think about the information as a genuine experience. What the experience means to me might mean the same to someone else, like the experience has a common definition.25

The marketplace binds people through a manufactured sameness that creates, in turn, a sense of real community experience. The image-­based sameness instrumental in the forging of identities is thus ontological in nature even though mass manufactured by technology and the media. And because it is the ballast of existence, this power of the marketplace to connect people through likeness is at the same time singular, sometimes even strange. As we will find in the section that follows, Prince’s stance on sameness offers a counterpoint to the classical humanism that lurks within theories of difference and ideologies of political correctness. In Prince’s automotive maleficium—his fetishizing of the car, the mass-­manufactured object, the fake, the fictional, and white trash culture—he throws putative “difference” into disarray by pointing out the folly of sameness. The banal materializes on occasion as unique, strange, even uncanny, but nonetheless goes overlooked in what amounts to a reifying glorification, even a fetishization, at work in theories of difference. This is precisely because the look-­alike image seems merely the same as everything else in dominant culture. At the root of Prince’s automotive maleficium—the layered aspects of his fetish praxis—is this folly of sameness, in particular as it manifests in the unpredictable appearance of the most lurid aspects of everyday life, such as car and white trash culture. These elements too can be protean, weird and, most certainly, provocatively unreasonable.26

236 // Automotive Prosthetic

Fetish, Fiction, Car: A Technophilic Triad

Fiction and fakeness go together in Prince’s work, constituting another locus of the artist’s generalized will to fetish. This fakeness, argues Michelle Grabner, “is characteristic not only of his art but of the artist himself.”27 In 1986, Prince and gallerist-­cum-­art dealer Colin de Land together invented the East Village artist John Dogg, a fictional artist and alternative identity for Prince and de Land as a team.28 One year into the fabricated life of John Dogg, Prince began making monochromatic paintings in the form of car hoods. Two forces of the inauthentic—the pseudonymic self and the readymade—course through this period of Prince’s productivity, bringing to mind the pivotal anti-­establishment strategies of Marcel Duchamp. Like Duchamp’s alter ego, the female persona Rrose Sélavy, whose name is a pun on the phrase “Eros, c’est la vie,” the name John Dogg is Prince’s alter ego, which, in an abstruse epitaphic commentary on the premature death of de Land in 2003, he introduces in punny fashion as “man’s best friend.” One of several artists asked by Gareth James to reminisce about de Land, Prince gave forth his memories of the dealer according to a hypothetical, or fictional and fake, discussion between himself and a man looking for American Fine Arts, de Land’s New York gallery. Prince interweaves the ersatz figure of Dogg into an ersatz discussion. “‘So who are you?’ ‘I’m John,’ I say. ‘John who?’ ‘Just John.’” Prince continues, elliptically referencing de Land, “‘the rest of me, the other half, the one who thought it all up, he’s in the back, ask him, he’ll tell you, the reality has no door, the camera is always on and man’s best friend is spelled dogg.’”29 Like Duchamp, who concocted Sélavy with the help of artist Man Ray, Prince invented John Dogg in collaboration with de Land. At the same time, in the early years of the life of John Dogg, a time when Prince frequented de Land’s gallery, Prince also began making paintings out of automotive readymades, the muscle-­car hoods available for purchase out of the back of hot rod magazines. Prince showed his hoods under the name John Dogg at Pat Hearn Gallery, the storefront space of de Land’s wife, located across the street from de Land’s American Fine Arts.30 Like Duchamp, with his Fountain—a urinal turned upside down—Prince deployed the muscle-­car hood as a readymade, with the intention of upsetting status quo ideas of beauty and truth and the usual flow of the art market. Yet, unlike Duchamp, whose now stock readymade functioned as a denegation of art, Prince brought the

Richard Prince \\ 237

F i g u r e 6.4.

Richard Prince, 1989 poster

for the Spanish exhibition Spiritual America. Courtesy of Richard Prince Studio and Gago‑ sian Gallery, New York and Rensselaerville, New York.

readymade in the form of the muscle-­car hood into his work out of sheer desire: a hedonism that is equal parts love of beautiful form, macho bravado, and nostalgia for his teen years. Just as Prince photographed the already photographed, so he painted already painted car hoods.31 Beyond the analytics of deconstruction that ensues from the act of quoting and pilfering already made form, this particular practice of appropriation sheds light on the visceral pleasure of stealing premade form. One plagiarizes out of admiration, absolute desire, and the will to fetish. Capturing this raw hedonism, Prince described his territorial-­cum-­artistic imprint on the already painted hoods as a matter of having “fucking Steve McQueened” them.32 By referencing the actor Steve McQueen, Prince pays homage to a particular moment in the greater unfolding of the history of American muscle-­car culture: the movie Bullitt, a 1968 film starring McQueen as the quick-­witted rebel cop with a gift for racing his green 1968 Ford Mustang GT390 through the hilly streets of San Francisco. The machismo of McQueen and the muscle car unite in a film still, a shot of McQueen’s Mustang defying the gravity of undulating San Francisco macadam, that Prince used for his 1989 exhibition Spiritual America in Spain (Figure 6.4).33 While the muscle car is a fetish of pure desire for Prince, it also serves as part of his general modus operandi of self-­making. He invents himself—he writes his own fiction—using the muscle car as a constituent element. As though a mechanical carapace-­body hybrid, he makes himself out of the 238 // Automotive Prosthetic

car. Prince references several muscle cars, among them the Mustang “Steve McQueen drove in Bullitt,” the 1970 Dodge Challenger “that was in the movie Vanishing Point,” and the “’69 Dodge Charger, a kind of sister car to the Challenger,” in an interview between John Dogg and “me,” or himself properly titled in legalese, “in propria persona.”34 “In propria persona” is a Latin phrase meaning literally “for one’s self,” which refers to acting on one’s own behalf without a lawyer in court of law.35 Discernible from within this facetious split-­mindedness, the ironic schizophrenia of the staged back and forth between John Dogg and Prince himself, there emerges an acute sense of Prince’s construction of self as heroic artist. The kernel of Prince’s admiration of the artist-­as-­hero is located in his teenage bedroom, where the desire for artistic recognition emerged not so much in the form of a burgeoning need to make objects or craftsmanship but in the photographic portraits of Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, and Steve McQueen that Prince tacked to his wall.36 As Dogg, Prince recounts the 1980s art scene, referencing Hans Namuth, the well-­known photographer who indelibly catapulted Pollock to fame and painterly heroics by documenting him at work in his Long Island studio during the summer months of 1950: “Heroes and heroines, artists with all kinds of private points of view, living in apartments, living in castles, living on beaches and in forests. They have their portraits taken. Hans Namuth ’50s style. Looking like Abstract Expressionists and Method actors.”37 Here we can relate Prince’s penchant for fiction and fakery to the fetish, and most poignantly, the manner in which he activates the fetish at several different valences, or what I describe above in terms of the automotive maleficium. The artist’s sense of self, his own identity, is wrapped up with the muscle car, Jackson Pollock, and Steve McQueen. It is a group of men so different in its makeup save for one binding element: the bravado of staged and performed machismo. Notably, etymologies of “fiction” and “fetish” are both related to “making” though not rooted in the same Latin words. The root words of “fiction” and “fetish” bring us back to modes of fabrication, the former coming from the Latin verb “fingere, which means “to fashion, form, or shape,” and gives rise to the word “feign”; the latter terms evolved from the term “facticius,” an adjective form of the Latin verb “facere,” meaning “to make.”38 In both fetish and fiction, Prince works through, channels, and recapitulates the outer reality of the world and his inner sense of identity by way of the hard-­ wrought materialism of everyday life—cars, pulp film and fiction, and white trash culture. In the Latin word “facticius,” which is the Latin root of “fetish,” Richard Prince \\ 239

we find a sense of manufacturing that binds together the mischievous nature, or maleficium, of Prince’s fictional self-­creations and the pivotal force that the mass-­manufactured plays in his reinstantiation of auratic singularity. In Natural History, Pliny (ca. CE 23–79) used the word “facticius” to mean “manufactured” and “man-­made” commodities, “in contrast to goods produced through purely natural processes”; later, the term would be used in Christian theology to designate the idolatry and superstition surrounding witchcraft and fetishism.39 Here, in the single Latin term “facticius,” we find a simultaneous sense of the unadorned, manufactured, and magical play, the forces that manifest in Prince’s fetish praxis—his appropriation of car parts in the creation of lavish works of art and his investment in muscle-­car culture, which seems at once ironic and serious. The pivot connecting the making of art and self in Prince’s work is located in the related Latin root of “fiction”—“fingere,” whereby Prince appropriates image and object, advertisement and car part in the molding of both art-­thing and self. Another naming of Prince’s perverse creation of self and art object comes together in the theoretical construct of “parafiction,” a neologism created by adding the Greek-­rooted prefix “para,” meaning “next to, beyond, or auxiliary,” to “fiction.” The scholar Carrie Lambert-­Beatty describes parafiction “like a paramedic as opposed to a medical doctor,” and as being “related to but not quite a member of the category of fiction as established in literature and drama.”40 Parafiction is a hybrid form of art bearing a stronghold in the hurly-­burly of reality as it operates outside of the stately, proper, and more purely fantastical discipline of literature.41 Lambert-­Beatty uses the word to describe the “socially-­engaged” art projects by Michael Blum, Fred Wilson, Walid Ra’ad, and The Atlas Group, in which the artists create quasi-­fictional histories, characters, or administrative rubrics to set in relief the politics of bigotry and unfair biases in the art world or a given geography. Scholar Michelle Grabner, by contrast, links the theoretical model to Prince’s oeuvre in terms of his interest in Truth. Calling Prince a “head game artist,” Grabner looks not to the politically correct social engagement of Prince’s work, but rather to the way that Prince “undercuts the truth in order to examine its principled authority.”42 No bullshitter, as Grabner explains, Prince uses the parafictional to get at and unravel the construction of the Truth. Yet, beyond the noblesse oblige strategies of certain kinds of critical thinking and deconstruction that are at the core of both Lambert-­Beatty and Grabner’s reading of the parafictional, Prince practices the fictional out of a pure, unreconstructed force of pleasure—because of the desire and im240 // Automotive Prosthetic

mediate gratification bound up with irony. At the same time, we might interpret his practice of fiction writing and performance (Prince as John Dogg) as “parafictional” insomuch as his work around the automobile is both inner and outer, both about himself and the realities of culture at large. But it is an activation of the parafictional in the name of pleasure and high jinks and not the hard-­line politics of criticism. In an interview with Barbara Kruger that Grabner recounts, Prince is straightforward, explaining the way fiction makes him feel in terms of tactility and emotional response. Prince says, “Fiction feels good and recanting causes stress. Like lying, in the physiological sense, the telling of a true story is an unnatural act.”43 The fictional creation of self through writing and appropriation, plainly put, makes Prince feel good, and thus is the driving force in the fetishization not only of the car but also of the fake itself. The fake and the mass manufactured—rephotography, the pictures in advertisements, parts of cars, and writings of authors like himself and J. G. Ballard—mold self and identity at the level of the individual, the artist Richard Prince, and also the collective, the world at large. We find another instance of the technophilic triad, the interweaving of fiction, the fetish, and the car, coalescing around the fantasy-­science fiction writer J. G. Ballard. The neologism “technophilic” brings together an abbreviated form of technology, “techno,” and “philic,” from the Greek philía, meaning “friendship,” which is used here to mean “unnatural attraction.”44 I use “technophilic” in order to underscore Prince and Ballard’s shared amorous fascination with technology in the form of the fetishized car. I also use the neologism to frame Prince’s gaming of fiction, that is, the way he tweaks the genre of fiction, Ballard’s expertise, in order to place himself alongside the famous author. An interview with Prince by Ballard offers a tour de force of fiction and author appreciation on the part of the person who is likely the sole author of the dialogue, none other than Prince himself.45 Published in Spiritual America, an artist’s book-­cum-­catalog that came out in conjunction with the 1989 exhibition of his work that originated at the Institut Valencia D’art Modern and then traveled to New York’s Guggenheim Museum, the interview was, according to Prince, a republication of an interview that had appeared when he was eighteen years old under the title “Extra-­ordinary” in the September 1967 issue of Punch. In it, Prince recounts his place of birth, the Panama Canal Zone, and the travails caused by his missing passport photograph. Because he showed up at the airport with a passport that was absent a photograph, he was kept at the airport for four days, where after undergoing “psychic Jujitsu” he became a “citizen of Richard Prince \\ 241

British Airways.”46 Prince “spent . . . three weeks on jumbo jets crisscrossing the Caribbean and Atlantic five times” because no country would accept him.47 Ultimately, Ballard asks if his father, whom Prince describes as “one of those imaginative criminals who wakes up in the morning and makes a resolution to perform some sort of deviant or antisocial act,” might have stolen the picture as some sort of “initiation rite.”48 Prince replies affirmatively, elaborating in so many words that the theft of the photo was probably a birthday present from his father. Historians and critics often look to this interview between Prince and Ballard, which is likely apocryphal, as ambiguous evidence of the artist’s birthplace, the Panama Canal Zone, a five-­mile area with a population of about three thousand people in Central America. While dubiously accepting Prince as a “Zonian” and looking to the dialogue as a would-­be confession of Prince’s Oedipal struggles, they consistently overlook the semiotics of Prince’s invocation of the author Ballard. Prince speaks through the voice of Ballard in what amounts to a paean to the author. The story of Prince’s multiple passages across the ocean, his temporary loss of statehood, and his sketchy father is written in the style of a Ballard short story. In sum, it reads as a Ballardian techno-­dystopia, as though written by Ballard himself. A flood swallows London, creating “the drowned world”; a plane crashes, making the surviving somnambulant pilot preternaturally capable of rejuvenating wildlife; a derelict skyscraper devolves into a Lord-­of-­the-­Flies incubator of the uncivilized. Resonating with Prince’s fictional interview, these are nutshell summaries of some of the fiction for which Ballard is famous.49 Ballard writes of the surrealist transformations that ensue from epic technological catastrophes. Ballard’s take on technology is existential, at once ejaculatory, eerie, and bizarre—not unlike Prince’s take on the car. It is to this talent that Prince pays homage in what is likely a feigned dialogue between himself and the author. Years later, forty-­three years after the supposed interview and twenty-­one years after its republication in the catalog, Prince offered another paean to the author in an exhibition, titled Crash, which took place in the late winter of 2010, almost a year after Ballard’s death, at the London location of the Gagosian Gallery. Prince’s American/English (2009) consists of two first-­run, hardback copies of Ballard’s 1970 novel Crash covered in their original dust jackets mounted on a stocky square podium in light gray bondo made out of sintra (Figure 6.5). In fabricating a work of art about Ballard’s book, Prince connects directly to Ballard’s own technophilic sensibility, in particular as 242 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e 6.5 .

Richard Prince, American/English, 2009. Courtesy of Richard Prince Studio and

Gagosian Gallery, New York and Rensselaerville, New York.

it manifests in this book involving the car, the freeway, and the smash-­up. Striking a sense of gender duality, the American book cover shows a hooded man in goggles in the driver’s seat of a large pudenda-­shaped car, while the English cover shows the title in large letters in cracked tan, as though made out of concrete, with a phallic gear shift protruding up through the center of the page. In mounting the two books on a bondo-­covered paper box, Prince has made a work that is personal and public: a work of art that is part of his larger car-­based oeuvre while also embedded square in the center of everyday car culture, as the material of bondo immediately signifies the workaday car world of body shops and car customizing. It is one of two works of art by Prince that were in the exhibition, the other being Elvis (2008), the skeletal husk in blue-­gray of a vintage Dodge Charger (see Figure 6.3, above). Two-­ thirds of the car chassis sits atop a large rectangular bondo-­covered socle, while the last third of the car, its back end, hangs cantilevered over the floor. The car strikes a ghostly pose, with no tires in the back and bondo filling the front wheel and headlight areas of the car. A signature component of the muscle car, the engine vent bulges up from the center of the hood, casting the mechanical body of the car into an aquatic form, making the car at once the sheath of machine and the shape of a deep-­breathing cephalopod having evolved into the angular. Richard Prince \\ 243

These two works by Prince at Gagosian’s Crash reinforce the artist’s multifarious sense of the fetish, his automotive maleficium, with “American English” bringing to bear even beyond the car and fiction his love of rare books. A two-­story red-­brick Georgian building in Rensselaerville, New York, the town where Prince lives and works, houses the artist’s vast collection of first-­ run and rare books.50 Prince’s library is indeed evidence that the author loves to read but also that he loves the fetish object of the original hardback, dust-­ jacket covered book. From this perspective, content is secondary and the clean, rectangular form of a pristine book covered in the stellar designs of an original book cover are primary. Prince practices commodity fetishism with his book collection: “I want the best copy. The only copy. The most expensive copy.”51 They are objects to be arranged on his shelf in the creation of an ever-­evolving self-­portrait: A lot of books I collect have a movie version. . . . Sometimes I have the book and the movie cassette on my shelf: Ninety-­Two in the Shade, Play It As It Lays, The Hustler, The Subterraneans, Panic in Needle Park, In Cold Blood. When I look at them both I don’t see comparison, I don’t see study, I don’t see fancied interest, I don’t see hobby or appreciation, I don’t see exhibition or connoisseurship. The thing is, I don’t see these things on my shelf. I just stare at them. They are the everyday. They change me.52

If Prince practices commodity fetishism with his book collection, he does so in the vein of at once finding and making himself. Related to the car-­ as-­object, the fictional self-­creation of John Dogg, and the interview with Ballard, Prince creates himself through collecting and fetishizing objects. Prince’s collection of books is a matter of “library-­as-­likeness.”53 Like American/English at the London show, Prince’s car sculpture Elvis pays homage to Ballard in object and imagination. If American/English brings together Prince’s love of the book-­as-­object and Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash, Elvis links his intimate love of the muscle car to the Ballard’s adoration of urban infrastructure and the culture of mobility located in highways, airports, the automobile, and its symbiotic urban template, the suburb. In fact, the suburb and exurbanism together are the red-­thread linking several of Ballard’s novels. Like most of his books and short stories, Ballard’s Crash is a tale of obsession not just over the exhilaration, speed, and futurism of technology, but also the role they play, in particular as they coalesce in the form of the car, as a substrate for a panoply of existential responses. 244 // Automotive Prosthetic

A novel about the pathology of symphorophilia, sexual arousal from disasters, Crash centers on the interaction of three main characters, the narrator James Ballard, the scarred and pocked television expert-­cum-­crash voyeur Dr. Robert Vaughan, and Ballard’s wife Catherine. Told retrospectively from the advent of the death of Vaughan, the story unfolds around Ballard and his wife’s attraction to the sex-­crazed car crash–chasing mad scientist who is Vaughan. Vaughan’s main goal in life is to have a head-­on collision with Elizabeth Taylor, who happens to be in the “Thames Valley town of Shepperton, a suburb not of London but of London Airport,” which is also the British filmmaking capital where Ballard lived for over forty years, and the setting of Crash and many other of his novels.54 Ballard’s fetishization of technology unfurls in the landscape surrounding the London airport, with its “continuous artificial horizon, formed by the raised parapets and embankments of the motorways and their access roads and interchanges,” which demarcates the action of the story.55 Careening through this landscape, caroming between car, person, and highway divider, main-­character Ballard falls whole-­body prey to the lure of the car crash and its stratified subculture. Describing the rising organic linkage between body and machine, he sees an imprint of the automobile on his body after the car wreck that catalyzes the plot of the story: “As I looked down at myself I realized the precise make and model-­year of my car could have been reconstructed by an automobile engineer from the pattern of my wounds.”56 For Ballard, narrator as well as writer, the car is an extension of the body that both creates and masks the bridge between biology and machine, bio-­skin organ and analogue-­machine appendage. The allure of the car emerges as much from the car-­as-­object as from the car-­as-­imagistic-­construction. Looking through Danish sex magazines, narrator Ballard elides automotive metal and organic body all by way of the advertising image: I looked through the colour photographs in the magazines; in all of them the motor-­car in one style or another figured as the centerpiece—pleasant images of young couples in group intercourse around an American convertible parked in a placid meadow; a middle-­aged businessman naked with his secretary in the rear seat of his Mercedes; homosexuals undressing each other at a roadside picnic; teenagers in an orgy of motorized sex on a two-­tier vehicle transporter, moving in and out of the lashed-­down cars; and throughout these pages the gleam of instrument panels and window louvers, the sheen on over-­polished vinyl reflecting the soft belly of a Richard Prince \\ 245

stomach or a thigh, the forests of pubic hair that grew from every corner of these motor-­car compartments.57

Like Prince, Ballard sees advertisements not only as the ideological glue binding fellow to fellow, citizen to citizen, but also as they constitute the visceral guts of a given culture’s collective body. For Prince and Ballard alike, advertising is where the insides play on the surface, the entrails of a people work out on the skin. The car in advertising not only elicits but also manufactures desire by way of tightly linking the automobile to the human body and sex. Written at the height of post-­WWII consumer abundance, Crash distills a high point in the modern history of consumerism, where object and desire are sexualized in the framing of advertising. It was not unusual for female models to be seen sexually caressing the automobile as if it were a living body, in magazine advertisements, television commercials, and game shows. Ballard’s inspiration for writing Crash came no doubt from seeing these sexualized images on television and in advertisements. For Ballard, the aesthetic experience of the automobile—the sensual nature of technology and driving through the landscape—were at the center of the conceptualization of the novel. Art and the automobile crash came together in an experimental month-­ long exhibition Ballard put together as a kind of test run of the central idea of Crash. He would, he said, prove true the open proposition that there exists “a strong connection between sexuality and the car crash, a fusion largely driven by the cult of celebrity,” in an exhibition of crashed cars at the Arts Lab gallery in London.58 Ballard brought together three crashed cars and hired a young attractive woman to interview gallery goers while she was naked. Cameras recorded and played back the interaction on closed-­circuit monitors, while alcohol was amply served. “Wine was splashed over the cars, windows were broken, and the topless girl was almost raped in the back seat of a Pontiac,” Ballard says.59 And, in 1970, he further recounts, “encouraged by my car crash exhibition, I began to write Crash.”60 Oddly, in some peculiar hashing out of life as Gesamtkunstwerk, art became life when Ballard crashed his 1970 Ford Zephyr two weeks after completing the novel. Ballard’s suspicions concerning symphorophilia, the sexualized fascination with the car crash, were well warranted in the realm of art, where already some seven years earlier Warhol had fetishistically focused on media images of car crashes in what came to be known as the Death and Disas-

246 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e 6.6 .

Andy Warhol, Orange Car Crash, 1963. Courtesy of MUMOK, Vienna.

ter Series (1962–1963). Warhol’s silkscreen paintings of car wrecks, such as Orange Car Crash (1963) and White Burning Car Twice (1962) did not so much sexualize the car wreck as lay bare the logic of highway-­inspired voyeurism, or what in more colloquial terms we call “rubbernecking,” while also setting in relief the manner in which the repetition of images in the mass media inures us to violence (Figure 6.6). In three dimensions, Charles Ray’s Unpainted Sculpture (1997) functions closer to Ballard’s sense of the fetish, but instead of sexualizing the wrecked car, Ray beautifies it in ghostly form (Figure 6.7). Ray salvaged a 1980s model Pontiac Grand Am, painstakingly taking it apart and casting a mold of each part in order to put the smashed car back together again in a hauntingly gray, mirror-­like form of the original made out of fiberglass and paint. The driver’s side of the car is completely crushed, implying the death of its driver. Reciprocally, it is a dead object shrouded in the crashed-­up remnants of human loss. Lisa Phillips connects Ray’s penchant for the figural to Ballard’s novel Crash, explaining that “throughout Ray’s work there is a sense of the body as a sculptural object and

Richard Prince \\ 247

F i g u r e 6 .7 .

Charles Ray, Unpainted Sculpture, 1997. Fiberglass, paint; overall installed: 60 ×

78 × 171˝. Courtesy of Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Gift of Bruce and Martha Atwater, Ann and Barrie Birks, Dolly Fiterman, Erwin and Miriam Kelen, Larry Perlman and Linda Peterson Perlman, and Harriet and Edson Spencer, with additional funds from the T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1998.

the sculptural object as a body—a sense of self as sculpture and sculpture as self.”61 Ray’s Unpainted Sculpture resonates perhaps even more closely with Prince’s automobile-­based sculpture. As in Ray’s work, with its exposed engine mirroring human guts, the automobile functions for Prince like a body, an extension of the corporeal self. Thus, the car-­based sculpture of both artists materializes a process of making-­of-­self, which in turn, to move to my second point, reveals the emotive and existential side of the automobile. The car, whether crashed or not, is a hinge for a host of emotional responses, be they sexualized or of fear, dread, and horror. The distinction between the two artists lies also in this point. Whereas Ray’s Unpainted Sculpture bears the haunting, Ballardian memories of technology that is faulty, failed, and torn asunder, Prince remains in the realm of technology as an instrument, even a prosthetic member, of unadulterated and unthwarted sexuality—the muscle car as an identifier of male sexual prowess. 248 // Automotive Prosthetic

Fetishizing as Othering: Richard Prince and White Trash Landscapes

The automobile does not exist ex nihilo: the car is part of an ecology of infrastructure. The car is culturally and functionally embedded, and thus implies a landscape and space, be it urban, suburban or rural, of roads, highways, architecture, zones, and coding. In scrutinizing Prince’s greater body of work, beyond the literal object of the car, we find a sense of “landscape” emerging, a continuum of roads, roadside scenery, foliage, and cultural practices that constitute the matrix in which the automobile is situated. Two of Prince’s art books, 4×4 (1997) and The Girl Next Door (2000), suggest imagistic landscapes while also offering a glimpse into the artist’s imagination at work.62 A much earlier work of art, Prince’s Creative Evolution (1985–1986) is the kernel of the artist’s book-­cum-­exhibition 4×4. It is a series of photographs of four-­wheel-­drive trucks with enormous, oversized tires, which are the basis for “Monster Truck” events, where small trucks on giant wheels race in covered arenas before audiences of car-­racing fandom. From his Gangs series of images, an early exercise in taxonomizing cultural practices delimited and fortified by mass-­media imagery, Creative Evolution shows an array of photographs of monster 4 × 4 trucks. It is literally representational and obtusely metaphorical at the same time. Beyond a surface reading of big-­tire automotive desire writ large, its photographs suggest that humankind “creates” its own destiny with the help of marketing and the mass media while, perhaps unintentionally, the title also alludes to Henri Bergson’s book of the same title from 1907, in which the French philosopher offers a counterargument to Darwinian evolution in the idea of élan vital, or vital impulse.63 Bearing many of the same images, the books strike a visual sensibility somewhere between channel surfing and an image-­based Tourette’s syndrome, with actual photographs following one another in no readily legible order: images of the environs of the artist’s studio in upstate New York, reproductions of early rephotographs, photographs of the interior of his studio, photographs of lists of ideas and things to do, old and new pictures of himself and family, and photographs of topless and fully clothed studio assistants. The arrangement of pictures suggests a certain creative randomness that might best be understood in terms of the artist’s thought processes. In 4×4, for example, image and list unite, creating a bizarre photo-­text document of the artist in media res. At the top of the page is a photograph of a building bearing the sign “Pharmacy,” in front of which sits a row of shopping carts Richard Prince \\ 249

F i g u r e 6.8.

Richard Prince, untitled page

from Richard Prince, 4×4, 1997. Courtesy of Richard Prince Studio and Gagosian Gallery, New York and Rensselaerville, New York.

on a sidewalk (Figure 6.8). Yellow no-­parking lines trail off at an angle into the foreground of what is a photograph of the façade of a big-­box discount retailer, a quintessential building type within the generalized automotive landscape of urban sprawl. Beneath the picture is an array of handwritten jottings that read as follows: Ravenna—winter at the golf course on the way to Toyota dealership to check out new Toyota 4×4 runner It just feels right—you want to light my cigarette. What the Fonz is really like: under the leather jacket. Kevin Costner: Revenge. Talk about the art of the deal. We think pictures speak louder than words—Did Morgan Fairchild get Breasts? Diapers Wipes Big Diapers Potato Chips Diet Coke Push Pins 250 // Automotive Prosthetic

Lettuce Vanity Fair N.Y. Times64

On the facing page is another photograph, presumably of the area around the artist’s studio in Rensselaerville, New York. It is a picture of a truck stop, Stewart’s Shops, in front of which is parked an eighteen-­wheeler truck (Figure 6.9). Creating a striking if not picturesque juxtaposition of the manmade and natural—the machine in the garden—behind both there is a lush green hill of trees and foliage. What makes these books constitute a sense of “landscape” in the most literal sense of the term is the predominance of photographs like this, of green hills and fields, in which sit old trailers, cars, above-­ground pools, and derelict and forgotten basketball hoops. As in Prince’s oeuvre more generally, juxtaposition is key here. The contrapuntal play of the manmade and artificial appears once again in order to relativize any sense of objective truth. Prince creates a landscape of images as a means of setting in relief the original fabrication of “landscape” as a linguistic, technological, and mediatized construction. Looking to Prince’s will to fabricate space as well as truth through pictures, Steve Lafreniere asked the artist about his “notion of counterfeit memory,” in particular Prince’s idea

F i g u r e 6.9.

Richard Prince, Untitled and

Stewart’s Shop at 443 and Rt 85, 12 Min East of R-­ville, Right at the End of the “S” Curves, Upstate NY, 1996. Courtesy of Richard Prince Studio and Gagosian Gallery, New York and Rensselaerville, New York.

Richard Prince \\ 251

that “the media landscape replac[es] personal history.”65 Lafreniere queries, “Has that idea panned out?” Prince says, with circuitous affirmation and a reference to science fiction writer P. K. Dick, “Do androids dream of electric sheep? Virtual reality. Cloning. Sampling. Substitutes. Surrogates. Stand-­ ins. It’s either here or right around the corner.”66 Prince first wrote about the idea of “counterfeit memory” in a work of veiled autobiographical fiction, Why I Go to the Movies Alone.67 This small work of fiction, one of several by Prince, reads like a verbal version of the later artist’s books of pictures. It is a radically differentiated mélange of verbal images from the artist’s personal image-­bank, but recounted in words instead of pictures. Recalling his work in the tear-­sheet department at Time Life in third-­person from an anonymous “he,” Prince tells of “his” interaction with pictures and magazine remnants, in particular automobile advertisements: Tonight there were some advertisements, ones he was just beginning to see, with pictures of cars, new cars, with their headlights on, in a scene that looked to be photographed right around dusk. The scenes had suns going down in the background. It looked like they used a photo-­projection of a sunset and the projection made the principle [sic] parts of the picture look flat and cut out.68

Bringing us back to Ballard’s lurid description of ads, the manufacturing of reality and desire coalesce for Prince in the form of an automobile advertisement. In the same moment, we see the articulation of Prince’s own aesthetic of the flattened, grainy rephotograph that is, at base, a fetish of manufactured reality. Prince further elaborates: “That time of day has always been nice for him. The artificial light from the car’s headlights and the natural light disappearing behind the horizon, and the way it gets mixed; he’s always thought the look set up a kind of pseudo-­reality that seemed to suggest something less than true.”69 Reality from this perspective is a creation of the mass image—the billboard, the television and magazine ad, and the Internet banner—and once again we find the manufacturing of desires at the base of everyday life. The norms of nature, the horizon line and sunlight, have become a matter of artifice, a creation of set designers and atmospheric manipulation. Yet, when we scrutinize the photographs that make up the “landscapes” that unfold in the pages of 4×4 and The Girl Next Door, we do not find solely rephotographs of advertisements, but rather rephotographs amid images of 252 // Automotive Prosthetic

a certain lived reality—muscle cars, piles of tires, and the merry gatherings of bikers and their women. The photographs of topless biker girls and drunk bikers are snapshots from biker magazines, documents of the lived-­time, subcultural bacchanalia of car and motorcycle aficionados. Beyond the creation of an imagistic or “counterfeit” landscape, these are the photographs of a very real automotive world in three dimensions—urban, suburban, and rural spaces with roads, highways, and small- and large-­scale infrastructure. In The Girl Next Door, for example, there is a photograph of a tattooed shirtless man wearing sunglasses at night. He sits slack-­jawed atop the shoulders of a bearded man also wearing sunglasses, holding a crunched plastic cup. The facing page shows two images, a photo on top of a bearded man squeezing the breasts of a topless woman, both of whom sway back on top of a motorcycle, beneath which sits a photo of a grimacing tattooed man squeezing the bare breasts of a laughing woman.70 Though taken from biker magazines, the photographs are not advertisements, but rather poorly shot random photos of biker culture that the artist has rephotographed and published in an art book. In describing the work of Upstate, the exhibition affiliated with The Girl Next Door, critic Ralph Rugoff assumes a tone of mild condescension, focusing on Prince’s actual photographs of the area surrounding his studio while avoiding the images of drunken biker culture. Rugoff says the photographs “chronicle a landscape of working-­class decline. Pictures of pathetic flora in planters made from inside-­out tires (a staple of upstate downscale yards), and melancholy images of abandoned basketball hoops suggest a region cut off from the surging economic mainstream.”71 At the same time, they are images of what might otherwise be known as white trash culture, participants in the bawdy, low-­class life of white trash landscapes. In using the phrase “white trash” rather than “working class,” my intention here is not so much to carelessly denigrate a certain group of people, but rather to highlight in forthright, even graphic fashion something essential about Prince’s work, namely the function of Prince’s photographs (and car-­based sculptures and paintings) within the world of art. By describing the context of the automobile in Prince’s work as so many “white trash landscapes,” I move beyond the tropological and rhetorical nature of his pictures in order to draw attention to representation, to their contents and what is inside the frame. There we find images of the politically incorrect, “the flashy, the inappropriate, [and] the garish” people of white trash culture.72 As Gael Sweeney explains, “White trash as an aesthetic is where the boundaries of taste and belief are not defined by New York, Washington, Los Angeles, or Richard Prince \\ 253

any other center of dominant American power.”73 Prince brings the outsider culture of upstate New York, his chosen residence, into the realm of high-­art lower Manhattan. As a blue-­chip artist, Prince is voyeur, tourist, and participant in this white trash culture. White trash in this instance sets off a play of culture and self as other: Prince playing the role of outsider and insider, as tourist and one with white trashdom. I bring the word “other” into a discussion where it is most unlikely— whiteness—in order to distinguish between two forces at dialectical play in Prince’s photographs of white trash culture and, by connection, his car-­ based work.74 In this work, Prince is, reminiscent of Gauguin in Tahiti, both voyeuristic tourist and radical provocateur, treating white trash culture as though an exotic species while at the same time othering it to critique the narrowness of certain precincts of the art world.75 As objective other, and here I use “white trash” as a noun-­object, white-­trash-­as-­other for Prince is a thing of the simple fetish, a culture that he reifies because it is, for a blue-­chip artist and former Manhattan-­ite, but a form of exotic otherness, a spectacle on display at the zoo from which he, as tourist, can depart if he chooses. At the same time, however, this other of white trash is also him. He is comfortable with white trash culture. Tweaking Julia Kristeva’s philosophical elaboration on immigration in France, the white trash specimen in Prince’s oeuvre offers an instance of “other as self.”76 His treatment of white trash culture is exoticizing and true, at once ironic and authentic as we find it in rarefied form in his love of muscle cars and fascination with the attendant muscle-­car culture. Prince also others white trash culture, verbalizing and activating the noun “other” as a knife that penetrates the insular bubble of political correctness that has come to formulate propriety for certain denizens of the art world. In the seminal essay “Other: From Noun to Verb,” Nathaniel Mackey writes about a “resistant othering found in black vernacular culture” and the poetry of cultural diversity in an elaboration of the distinction between the noun called the “other” and the verb of “othering.”77 Distinguishing the quality of otherness from the gerundive act of othering, Mackey writes of the need to privilege the movement from noun to verb as it “accentuates action among people whose ability to act is curtailed by racist constraints.”78 Mackey writes of the verbal “othering” that instigates “the dynamics of agency,” in particular as it comes to fruition in the form of “artistic othering,” which “has to do with innovation, invention, and change.”79 Prince artistically others white trash culture as a means of catalyzing innovation, invention, and change in 254 // Automotive Prosthetic

order not to emancipate in condescending fashion downtrodden white trash culture, but rather to other the official culture of art.80 His fetishizing of white trash culture does not solely objectify it but also activates it by bringing it whole-­body into high-­art confines—in the form of muscle cars and pictures of topless women having their breasts squeezed by bearded and tattooed men. Prince’s othering of white trash culture calls attention to its seeming opposite. On its face, this work depicts stereotypical imagery of white trash culture as “sexually promiscuous, violent, alcoholic, lazy, and stupid,” which is, simply put, the opposite of the upper-­middle and upper classes of the bourgeoisie that frequent galleries and museums in the city centers of the United States.81 However, Prince’s othering of white trash culture serves to set in relief a different yet related dyad, that between politically correct and politically incorrect art. If the work of artists such as Michael Blum, Fred Wilson, Walid Ra’ad, and The Atlas Group, to refer back to the politically engaged work at the center of Lambert-­Beatty’s reading of the parafictional, is intended to bring global politics and questions of bigotry and discrimination into the gallery world in the form of art-­as-­activism and art-­as-­discourse, then Prince’s art of white trash culture is intended not so much to deflate that idealism, but to mirror back a certain sense of its hypocrisy insomuch as it frames would-­be agitation, protest as an acceptable and safe performance in what amounts to a compensatory theatrics. To bring psychoanalysis to the table, Prince’s politically incorrect work sheds light on the logic of work that is its opposite, showing politically correct art to be but a leftist palliative assuaging so many agentless provocateurs who are agents not in the world, for this is much more difficult (if not impossible), but only in one segment of the world, namely the bourgeois realm of art. Returning to the question of “white trash landscapes,” I would like to focus the problematic of other and othering on First House (1993) and Second House (2001–2007), two of Prince’s projects that involve spatiality, both as it comes to fruition in the installation of art, on the one hand, and in urbanism and real estate on the other. In these two houses we return to Kristeva’s idea as the “other as oneself ” in order to further get at Prince’s own sense of self as white trash. In 1993, after years of living on the West Coast, Prince turned a condemned Hollywood tract home into “a high-­profile art project” for Artforum called First House.82 Prince transformed an ordinary small suburban home, which was in the process of being dismantled, into a temporary installation project. In this house en route to demolition, Prince’s joke paintings stood stacked on the floor against the wall. Doorframes were Richard Prince \\ 255

missing and carpet was rolled up to reveal wood floors beneath. The shelved books along one tight hallway complemented the stack mounted on the wall, like a self-­portrait of the artist at the end of the corridor.83 Prince lined the front of the kitchen cabinets with product packaging, transforming the kitchen into a surface grocery store. Emanating from this façade, a veritable Potemkin quicky mart, was verbiage in colorful graphics (Cheeze-­It, Triscuit, Ritz, and Premium), setting off a subtle competition between its visual white noise and a small white joke painting hung on the wall behind. House and art become one in a site-­specific temporary installation; the house “was blasted” shortly thereafter.84 By creating an installation in a suburban tract house, Prince draws upon the political economy of middle America, the mythology of the putative American Dream, and the pressure and illusory promise that comes with its formula of property ownership. As McKenna explains, “He adopts a real scorched-­earth policy in his interpretation of the American Dream—and, of course, nothing embodies the American Dream more succinctly than tract housing.”85 First House does not so much connect Prince to the mores of white trash landscapes as it does middle American landscapes, an adjacent cultural milieu that is similarly dependent on the automobile for its very existence. While in this distinction I draw attention to the slight but important class differences between the lowness of white trashdom and the more acceptable middle class, there is a constant shared in Prince’s interest in both. Like white trash culture, the culture of middle America elicited in First House seems prima facie very basic—a deployment of the trope of the ordinary and mundane. It offers up a simple sense of the “homely,” the readily recognizable, or heimlich, what Freud identifies as the necessary opposite of the unhomely, bizarre, extraordinary, or unheimlich.86 The dialectical play between the ordinary and extraordinary, the mundane and the frightening, and the heimlich and unheimlich, brings us back to upstate New York, to Prince’s Second House and the question of white trash culture. It is there in Second House that we find once again evidence of Prince’s preoccupation with white trash culture as a matter of self-­as-­other. In an interview with Glenn O’Brien from 1998, Prince discusses moving his studio out of Manhattan to “the sticks” as a matter of desired “withdrawal.”87 Describing the cultural milieu of Second House, which was subsequently acquired by the Guggenheim Museum in 2005 and burned down after a lightning strike in 2007, Prince tells of his own reclusion among a reclusive lot: “I think there is a kind of independent streak and a clannishness. People tend to stick with their relatives or their own kind. People tend to arm them256 // Automotive Prosthetic

selves for catastrophes, whether it’s something they’re fantasizing or make up or something that’s real like the weather. They tend to be self-­sufficient.”88 Prince moved to Rensselaerville, New York, and set up his home and studio there for economic reasons—to have more time for his work and bigger spaces at a better, more affordable cost than living in the heart of New York City. Somewhere between a studio, storage, and a rundown gallery space, Second House was to be open to the public for ten years, “after which the art works there would enter into the Guggenheim collection.”89 One of several buildings Prince owns in Rensselaerville, including a car body shop, a studio, a library, and a small house, Second House locates Prince in the middle of the culture that I have outlined here as his fetish—white trashdom.90 He is at home, one with himself, in the unhomely world of the outback, away from the city, amid white trash culture. To return to the amphibole of the heimlich about which Freud writes, there is an ambivalence in Prince’s fetishizing of white trash culture, just in the way that the concept of the “heimlich . . . finally coincides its opposite, unheimlich.”91 Before othering white trash culture to turn it against the center of the art world, he lives within white trash culture. It is the other in which he lives—the home that habituates the unhomely, an exotic other with which he identifies.

Skin Fetish: Richard Prince’s Photographic Integument and Ecologies of Desire

In early 2009, curator Kristine McKenna put together an exhibition of works by Richard Prince and the beat poet and LA artist Wallace Berman. Focusing on the naked women in their work, the exhibition was titled She: Works by Wallace Berman and Richard Prince and took place at Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles.92 In this exhibition Prince introduced several new automobile-­based projects in which photographic images from biker and hot rod magazines had been made into plastic advertising skins and pulled tightly over automobiles. At base, and in the most literal sense, the car in these projects functions for Prince as an inventive frame-­like armature for showing photographs of naked women. Prince’s The Sweetheart of the Rodeo is, for example, a 1987 Buick Grand National covered in a tight sheath of plastic bearing a collage of photographic images of biker chicks and hot-­ rodding women, the same genre of females that have been central to the artist’s work for over two decades (Figure 6.10). A photograph of a bare-­chested Richard Prince \\ 257

F i g u r e 6 .10 .

Richard Prince, The Sweetheart of the Rodeo, 2008. Courtesy of Richard Prince

Studio and Gagosian Gallery, New York and Rensselaerville, New York.

woman covers the top front of the car. Her naked breast covers the hood of the car and her head the windshield, while the sides of the car are covered with images of saucy, defiant, shirtless women on motorcycles. As in his early works of rephotography, Prince has appropriated the means of advertising, in this instance a system of photographic reproduction usually reserved for automobiles and city buses, transferring it to the exterior of vintage 1980s cars in order to play out his layered automotive fetish in yet another manner. Prince’s early practice of rephotography has been shot through the prism of a different mode of production and materiality, which results in thin, malleable, and stretchy photographic integuments intended to cover cars. In the shift from one to the other, photograph to the car, we move from a lesser sense of the auratic to one more pronounced. Prince’s choice of automobiles, a mid-­1980s Chevrolet El Camino and 1987 Buick Grand National, is by no means accidental or arbitrary. Working through a very specific form of semiotics, these cars point to the culture of everydayness and, more precisely, white trashdom. They are yesterday’s idealized automobiles within a certain stratum of society and culture of whiteness. They function in the most literal sense as fetish objects. Prince’s photographic-­skin-­covered cars are, prima facie, perverse phallic extensions 258 // Automotive Prosthetic

that, though priapic, nonetheless reify the female figure twice over, once in the large-­scale images of naked women and then again by having those images pulled tautly over the body of vintage 1980s automobiles. The simple interpretation here would be that “woman” is objectified as private property intended for ownership in the form of an automobile. Yet, at the same time, insomuch as the women in the photographs are “naked” rather than “nude,” to invoke the famous distinction made by the English critic John Berger, the cars are subversive forms of art. From naked to nude we move from resistance to sublimation, the brave and raunchy to the passive and supine. We find an instance of linguistic nuance that is parallel to the noun-­verb differentiation of “other” versus “othering.” “To be naked is to be oneself,” Berger explains. “To be nude is to be seen as naked by others and yet not be recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude.”93 Along a similar thread, the nakedness of Prince’s women does not function like that of the performance artists Carolee Schneeman or Valie Export, who give forth a strain of nakedness that signifies “emancipated woman.” The revealing-­of-­self activated in choosing the naked over the nude points back to the collective art world while also telling something intimate about Prince. It is another instance in which Prince others white trash culture, colliding lowbrow, white trash outsider culture into the predictable highbrow, elite of the gallery and museum world. Through a mixed signage of automobile and image, the cars make a folly out of art that boasts redemption through paternalistic promise, be it in the form of political engagement or high culture within the art world. The centrality of white trash culture in his blue-­chip art marks a certain breakdown of the culture of propriety rather than its salvation. At the same time Prince wields a sword of desire in these works that is deeply rooted in self-­identification and his personal love of the subject—cars and lewd naked women. Prince explains, “Well, as far as the biker chicks are concerned, I just wouldn’t mind being one. . . . I like what I think they look like, or perhaps what they are.”94 Carol Squiers describes Prince’s women as “smutty and disreputable,” but at the same time, “a patchwork of wishes and desires.”95 In subverting the conventional imagery of women in art, in choosing the “naked” woman rather than the “nude,” Prince discards classical concepts of beauty while at the same time maintaining the female body as a locus of desire. Fusing image to object, brazen shots of topless girls onto dragster cars, Prince once again gives form to a unique if not profound form of the fetish: the automotive skin fetish. It is the self transformed into an auto-­body that Richard Prince \\ 259

roves within ecologies of desire. The automobile incarnates as a mechanical-­ cum-­mammalian body, an extension of a fleshy ecological corpus and a means of spreading self into a matrix-­like world. Though Prince’s skin-­fetish cars are not intended to move, they do. The cars are drivable, and as such, we might imagine the ego-­image of the plastic skin sloughing off here and there, leaving pieces of the driver-­self as a memory in random places—on other drivers’ minds and the macadam out front—within a datum of interconnected nodes. The succinct and disparate object gives way to an interrelating thing. Instead of thinking Prince’s fetish practice here through Freud’s concept of the fetish-­object we might turn to another area of Freud’s thinking: his idea of the skin and its relationship to the ego. As part of a theory of the body as global mediator, Bernadette Wegenstein cites Freud’s sense of the ego being not merely a matter of the existential self, but the way in which that existential self is bound to the body and skin. “In The Ego and the Id (1923),” Wegenstein argues, “Freud talks about the body ego as a border surface, a skin sack or a skin fold. In other words, the skin for Freud is a psychic hull that constitutes the contact between the outer world and the psyche.”96 From fetish-­object to skin-­fetish, transferring this paradigm into the realm of art, the rarefied and separate art-­thing gives way to a moving, mutating and always recalibrating system of surface extensions. This surface emits interactive relational appendages in the form of the image-­as-­idea, in many ways reconfiguring Plato’s eidos for a modern world. French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu describes the related concept of the “skin ego” [moi-­peau]. In rethinking the ego as a skin, as an undulating, soft, and protective bio-­scape, Anzieu fathoms an ecological understanding of the self in which the body is a locus of interconnection. In structuralist as well as bio-­ecological fashion, the self is linked to a system of vectors and forces. Anzieu explains the repercussions of shifting the focus in psychoanalysis from the ego as contained object to surface-­like extension: By placing the emphasis on the skin as a basic datum that is both an organic and an imaginary order, both a system for protecting our individuality and a first instrument and site of interaction with others, I am seeking to bring into being another model—one resting on a solid biological foundation, out of which interaction with the environment [entourage] arises, and which respects the specificity of psychical phenomena in relation both to organic and to social reality.97

260 // Automotive Prosthetic

In Prince’s image-­skin-­covered cars, the artist’s self as female-­other is projected outward on the plastic surface, functioning not unlike an advertisement as a legible and memorable imprint of one’s ego. It is Prince’s ego as the white trash feminine other. In Anzieu’s rethinking of the ego as a skin, the self is a depth-­denying surface configured like a Moebius strip that further foregoes sharp distinctions between mind and body, brain and skin, and inside and outside.98 In mechanizing the skin-­ego, stretching image-­ imprinted plastic sheaths over cars, Prince reinforces the ontological status of technology. We exist through our technology and, by turns, we are when we drive. Insomuch as the combustion engine relies on oil, the car connects driver to the global economy of petrol products. We are political animals through the act of driving, our automotive skins so many egos-­in-­relation. This politics courses through Prince’s automotive skin fetish, working out according to the flat surface logic of the picture and the thick surface logic of urban space. In the most obvious sense, the photographic surfaces reinforce the common assumption that the car is a prosthetic extension of one’s identity and ego. To place a photographic skin with pictures of bawdy women on the surface of a car is also to play out once again all of the significance of white trashdom that is consistent within his work. It is to fetishize the car, the naked woman, and the cultures in which they are embedded. It is also to imply that the skin is an ecology and, by relationship, that the automobile, when treated like a skin, roves around in an urban context that like skin is itself an ecology of relationships.99 We thus begin to conceptualize the self, machine, and landscape as intermittently adjacent and interweaving integument-­like layers. The car skin fetish not only reflects self onto the world, but also reflects in mirror-­like fashion the spatial systems of infrastructure linking driver to car to urban context. As part of a course on ecology given in London in 1972 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Mary Marples presented a paper in which she likened the skin to an “ecosystem.” Marples’s intention was to highlight the ecological diversity of the invisible “microbial populations” living upon and within the cutaneous structures of the skin.100 What we might extract from Marples’s take on the skin is an understanding of the conceptual thickness of the surface of things. Like the microbial diversity skirting along the surfaces and through the layers of our skin, there is a diversity as well as diversion at work in the skin fetish of Prince’s most recent automobile projects. Prince’s automotive skin fetish bodies forth a sense of diversity through the folly of sameness, that is, inso-

Richard Prince \\ 261

much as it others the socioeconomic and cultural norms of the art world by injecting plain and simple white trashdom into its sanctum. As a catalyst of urban form and a roving machine within its networks of infrastructure and roadways, the automobile is also a bearer of diversion, the distracted aesthetic experience of driving within an ecology of nature, concrete, and buildings. It is an aesthetics of the view to the road wherein the skin ego sprawls lithely on the surface of an automobile, showing, connecting, and shedding bits and pieces of the self as roving metal edge and imagistic encrustation. What takes form here is, to repeat, a system of relations—the self-­as-­skin moving through urbanism-­as-­skin—with the dynamism of an open feedback loop. The car rolls; the skin ego pullulates the self as memory and entropic particulate into the air; and, from the concatenation of movement, person, and machine, the urban context shifts and changes. It is steadily worn away as a matter of entropy, while fellow drivers swarm along the roads, distracted by the divertissement of fellow drivers.

Coda: The Anatomy of Richard Prince on Facebook

On June 23, 2010, I posted an image on Facebook of Prince’s The Sweetheart of the Rodeo (2008) with the following question: “Do we refer to the naked chests in Richard Prince’s art as ‘titties,’ ‘boobs’ or ‘breasts’?” The eighteen responses that accrued over three days came from a broad array of friends, including artists, former students of architecture and art history, a family member, and a British friend from undergraduate days who has become a writer. At base, the enthusiastic response to Prince’s car-­based work of art is testament to the populism of his work. Beyond proving the patent accessibility of this work, the responses show that something deeper skirts along the surfaces of basic reality—that is, “reality” configured through language and technology old and new. In this instance, that sense of obviousness is yet again layered, with quick linguistic returns on a social networking site adding to the combination of playfulness and profundity at work in Prince’s work of art based on the automobile and crude biker culture. Coalescing here is evidence of a body in dialectical movement between the collective and individual, the interactive “we” and “I” of digital space coming together around the all-­of-­us of the car and highway. Between them emerges a corpus in addition to the biological, conceived according to an urbanism of the

262 // Automotive Prosthetic

trifold sense, that is, of the mass-­produced image, the machine, and matrix technology—through the photographic skin, the car, and Facebook. Here are the responses: Jeff Green: “automoboobs” Charissa Terranova: “Nice neologism. I believe, in light of his ‘othering’ of white trash culture, the most appropriate naming of them would be ‘titties.’” Sophia Terranova: “I agree that bc of the WT context ‘titties’ would be the default BUT I find the word breasts just as titillating!” Ryan Humphrey: “Breasts is too dignified for r.p. He is a titty man. He is naked not nude.” Chris Cebelenski: “Hood ornaments.” Tara Akins: “Is that a boobick? Or Buick? :0)” Jason Barnett: “Easy. Titties.” Grant Smith: “Jugs is the P.C. term.” Anna Ingwersen: “Sugartits?” Jesse Meraz: “TA-­TAs!” Charissa Terranova: “From the horse’s mouth, from Richard Prince himself: ‘Well, as far as the biker chicks are concerned, I just wouldn’t mind being one. . . . I like what I think they look like, or perhaps what they are.’” Jason Barnett: “That’s much more eloquent than my response. But my most primal reaction is that of a 14 year old boy. After a few seconds the titties become artistic, though. Sorta.” David Winslow Van Ness: “I just saw a comedian that complained that Americans are so negative and that boo-­bs should be instead called Yea-­ bs so Yeabswagon.” Benedict Smith: “Bosoms.” Benedict Smith: “Or, shaggin’-­wagon.” Amy Drezner: “big-­berthas.” Mike James Kury: “chi chi(s).” Benedict Smith: “Teeters.”

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It is a rule of thumb that the more new technological tools one has, the greater the enhancement of life. But, as this study of conceptual car has shown, that idea of enrichment is qualified by definition, that is, by human use. In its attachment to the fleshy, changeful biomorphic form of human life, the car, for example, humanizes while its user mechanizes. The goal here has been to scrutinize works of conceptual car art in order to better understand this crossing point, the merging where psychology and technology meet and humans and machines mingle and become one. In this concluding chapter, I look to the concept of “freedom,” another idea often stereotyped in its connection to technology, in order to recast it in terms of subjectivity and art. In looking to the pop ruminations of fashion designer and filmmaker Tom Ford and the existential views to the road of Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof (2007), we find a sense of freedom fraught by the

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limitations of interior and exterior existence, the slippery divagations of the mind and rule-­bound matrices of political economy. Binding humans to the greater biopolitical reticulation of law, money, and psychological perturbation, the “freedom” of automotive existence is anything but simple and straightforward.

Existential Freedom: Fashion, the Car, and Posthuman It’s so interesting how female form, less male form, mirrors where we are culturally, aesthetically as well as—for example, right now everything is pumped up. Cars look like someone took an air pump and pumped them up. They look engorged. Lips pumped up, breasts pumped up, everything is pumped up. I find it fascinating. I find it disturbing. I mean, you could consider it more fascinating because we are becoming posthuman. To m F o r d i n a n i n t e r v i e w w i t h T e r ry G r o s s, Fr e s h Air , D e c e mb e r 14, 2009

With these words, couturier and filmmaker Tom Ford could be describing a work from the Fat Car series (2001–present), made by the Austrian sculptor Erwin Wurm (Figure 7.1). Ford’s interest in fashion, the female form, and the car brings to mind the work of Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury as well. Though younger than Richard Prince, Fleury plays within the same gamut, appropriating everyday objects but from the world of the feminine mystique. She is interested in consumables, high-­dollar haute couture, fashion trademarks, and wearables as well as old cars made distinctly chic by a “skin” of glossy, rose-­colored paint. Skin Crime #5 (1999) is a semi-­crushed Camaro that has been splayed down the center and painted several coats of shimmering pink (Figure 7.2).1 Fleury riffs on the constructions of fashion, desire, and femininity. The title is a play on American beauty products—such as “skin crème”—which use French inflection as a marketing ploy. At the same time, going against the work of art as a gender-­based political critique, this is a car fully and forthrightly engaged with female sexuality.2 We find woman-­as-­car making a come-­hither assignation with open legs and splintered body parts. Commodities, in this case the mechanized commodity of the car, elicit desires that become biologically real.

266 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e 7.1.

Erwin Wurm, Convertible Fat Car, 2004. Courtesy of Erwin Wurm and Lehmann

Maupin Gallery, New York.

Like Wurm, who is concerned with bloat, gluttony, and overconsumption, and like Fleury, who is preoccupied with feminine branding, Ford is, simply put, interested in objects and objectification. Echoing Richard Prince’s photo-­skin-­covered automobiles, Ford’s comparison of the car and women is such an extreme form of objectification that it verges on caricature. Yet, since the thing-­ification of the female body is structural to the world of high fashion, Ford’s comparison makes sense. He brings together women’s fashion and the automobile out of the pragmatism of his industry, reifying them as a matter of workaday practice. There is at the same time a mutation at work within his standard sense of objectification. It is the posthuman: the self-­becoming-­machine, woman as car. It is to this bio-­ technological hybrid that the designer responds with existential uncertainty. In an interview in late 2009 with Terry Gross on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, Ford talked primarily about his recently released first film, A Single Man. He closed his discussion on film and fashion by expanding on the contemporary moment ten years into the new millennium, and more precisely,

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F i g u r e 7 .2 .

Sylvie Fleury, Skin Crime (no. 5–6), 1999. Courtesy of Sylvie Fleury.

the relationship between technology, fashion, and contemporaneity itself. If the simple, unadorned woman-­becoming-­car is alarming to him, when considered in terms of the “posthuman,” the monstrous crossbreed is scintillating. The former is polluted by the inauthentic while the latter is validated by its sense of mystery. The posthuman opens up to an unbound futurism and diversified ontological status. Similar to Jack Burnham’s enthusiasm over technology in 1968, which fizzled out in disappointment some twelve years later, Ford’s opposing takes on human enhancement constitute an existential wavering seated in sympathy for prosthetic transformation. The extremes make up an affective response to the trifecta of women’s fashion, the car, and the cyborg. Disgust and fervor unite, casting a sublime sensibility onto the automotive prosthetic. Ford builds on the emancipating powers of the artificial—the human becoming other and nature giving way to the robotic—outlined by theorists of modernity and contemporaneity from Charles Baudelaire to Donna 268 // Automotive Prosthetic

Haraway. The body modification involved in the making of the posthuman includes both plastic surgery and science fiction imaginings. For Ford, the posthuman—its fantasy and philosophical moorings—gives insight into human enhancement that is at once unique from and part of the exaggerations of plastic surgery. Body enhancement that seems inflected by automobile design offers a little bit of both, marking the rise of monstrous mechanical women in stilettos that look as though “someone’s taken a grapefruit half and inserted it under [their] skin.”3 Famous images of the violent human as robot in history come to mind, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Fritz Lang’s debased and mechanized Maria in Metropolis. As a sophisticated type of condemnation, though, it is his invocation of the posthuman condition in extended relationship to the automobile that is poignant here. In this concatenation of ideas—fashion, the human body, the car, and the posthuman—Ford points succinctly yet casually to the shared concern of this book: the transformation of self, art, perception, sensibility, representation, and politics by the technological extension of the automobile. Set apart from Ford’s more usual practices as a maker of provocative advertising imagery and designer for the houses of Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, his use of the phrase “posthuman” opens up a stance on the negative, decadent, and euphoric aspects of technology—plastic surgery and cars—in relation to the philosophically porous rubrics of ecology and cybernetic theory. The posthuman as it relates to the car is here cause for a dilation of mind. Ford’s discussion of fashion, the automobile, and the posthuman shows unlikely cracks in a conceptual and social edifice the foundation of which is a certain understanding of the relationship between technology and freedom. Ford’s discussion with Gross reveals the affective freedom, rather than liberal democratic freedom, that accompanies technology. Instead of the unchecked liberation that is connected to the car and open road, it is an existential freedom defined by doubts, limits, and the grotesque. With respect to the human-­technology interface, Ford’s position falls somewhere between the fatalist and the technicist: a negotiation between the negative and foreboding on the one hand and the euphoric and technophilic on the other.4 The fatalist understands technology as bringing an inevitable plunge into the darkness of earth and mankind: a radical depravation of flora and fauna and the devolution of humans into a state of mechanized subhuman existence. From the technicist perspective, the groundwork of the human-­ technology interface is devised on an idea of freedom that links humans to endlessly open opportunities, wherein various forms of technology plainly Conclusion \\ 269

make life easier and actions more successful and expedient. The technicist perspective fosters an understanding that technology seamlessly and without flaw creates one’s identity. Perhaps a more accurate place to locate Ford’s thinking is in terms of the imagination, or within what Mark B. N. Hansen describes as the “rubric of the ‘materialities of communication,’” which “expands the function of exteriority as it is developed in Derrida’s early work.”5 In looking to Derrida, Hansen refers to Derrida’s “anti-­hermeneutic,” anti-­depth, and surface-­ oriented readings of texts, which subsequently paved the way for practices of exteriority, that is, materialist readings of fashion, culture, and everyday objects in the form of cultural studies. “Exteriority” refers to outward and changeful connections to the world rather than the inward essence of being. Such outwardness, or what we might call “outering” in reference to Marshall McLuhan, can be stretched in this instance to include the exteriority of the body that takes form in prosthetics and machines. The “materialities of communication” thus offer a profundity of meaning on the hull of things, similar to the Teflon-­surface ethos of art that Andy Warhol introduced with his pop art in the early 1960s. We can connect Ford’s uniting of the automobile, fashion, and the car to Derrida’s anti-­hermeneutic practice by way of Warhol’s pop surfaces. Not so much a full-­blown deconstruction but a soft analytics of doubt, Ford’s discussion intimates a fault line at the base of the above-­ mentioned technicist structure, the plate shifts of which are motivated by a different kind of freedom, an existential freedom that looks out onto a plane of human expression.6 Being in the world is equal parts soft and murky, hard and bright, bulbous like the hairy root of an old tree, textured like a Gucci gown, and polished like the surface of a red Corvette. In discussing fashion with Gross, Ford delights over the speed and rapidity of change as though fashion were a form of technology. “It’s immediate,” he tells Gross. “It tells you exactly where you are in our culture, especially women’s fashion.”7 The French poet Baudelaire described this rapid-­paced now-­ness in the mid-­nineteenth century as the “the ephemeral, the fugitive, [and] the contingent.”8 If for Baudelaire prostitutes in maquillage strolling along next to carriages in the Bois de Boulogne defined the modernity of his moment, then it is the gym- and botox-­addicted women in five-­inch stilettos driving Porsches and Maseratis that make our own, according to Ford. While there is little new about Ford’s comment that fashion imprints and embodies the “now,” he strikes an offbeat tone in adding the automobile to the already-­existing coupling of fashion and the contemporary. The 270 // Automotive Prosthetic

car, though an object of sophistication and high design, is out of place, a presence of populism within the elite realm of haute couture design. At the same time, Ford’s simile about the female body and the car is striking for its topicality. It tells us much about our contemporary moment. Just as the art in this book reveals, Ford’s triadic connection between fashion, the car, and the posthuman reinforces that we see, act, and think through our automobiles. We are political agents in the world who make change for better and worse when driving, when filling up with yet another tank of gas and while registering to vote with our driver’s license. French philosopher Gilbert Simondon distills a related sense of temporality between the changeful and unchanging, the car and infrastructure, the individual and the network. Making a distinction between utility and style in the automotive realm, he claims, “Obsolescence hits the passenger car much faster than the utility vehicle or the agricultural tractor, which nevertheless are its close cousins.”9 In short, “The car ages faster than the plane.”10 The automobile is form of mechanical apparel: it is the skin by which one announces her presence. “The car is not only conceived as a network reality—like trucks—but as a social object, an item of clothing in which the user presents himself.”11 Like fashion in clothing, automotive fashion creates a semiosis by which society connects. It is a special hybrid language uniting fashion and the machine, wherein the shape of the automobile changes quickly through time according to the choices of manufacturers and owners. Shapes of automobiles mutate; they are protean and alive like words and human bodies, changing idiomatically in the form of official design prescripts, random modes of style, and individual customization. Designer Ford links this mutative capacity of the automobile to fashion and body enhancement in the articulation of a mechanized sense of the style-­bound self. For Ford this sartorial self is the posthuman subject; for others it is the cyborg. “We are actually starting to manipulate our bodies, because we can, into a shape. We are becoming our own art,” he says.12 While for certain denizens of the cyborg discourse technology gives rise to a qualified autonomy of self, for Ford it incites a combination of extreme emotional responses: excitement over the fashion trends from which it emerges; then dread at the mechanical deformation of the human body; followed by an open and curious view onto the mechanized human body. Ford’s combination of sentiments is reminiscent of Donna Haraway’s formulation of the technology-­human interface that comes to fruition in a cyborg world. Here, by bringing together Haraway’s cyborg and Ford’s posthuman, I come full Conclusion \\ 271

circle, returning to the subject position developed in Chapter 2 that is at the base of mobile perception, the cyborg who perceives in motion via technological attachments. Writing in 1985, Haraway described a new ontological position in the figure of the cyborg, a hybrid of the “natural and artificial, mind and body, self-­developing and externally designed.”13 The cyborg is virtually post-­gender. Haraway tells us, it “has no truck with bisexuality,” and by connection, it is far different from Ford’s bombastically female woman. In the same interview, though, Ford integrates a similar sense of degenderization, explaining that the blown-­out and pumped-­up form of the new millennium “desexualizes everything,” turning people into machines.14 “You know, you start to look more and more polished, more and more lacquered and you look like a beautiful car.”15 Ford’s posthuman subject pendulously swings between the monstrously female and provocative, the mechanical and posthuman: “Does anyone want to sleep with you? Does anyone want to touch you? Does anyone want to kiss you? Maybe not, because you are too scary.”16 Haraway’s cyborg glides along through the world in its mixed-­up grotesque form, all the while practicing a cautionary freedom. It is a freedom bound by the matrices of bio-­political sublimation, living within the global matrix of corporate and state discipline. The cyborg’s illegitimacy, its lack of precise gender, origin, and mythology, makes it an operator at once inside and outside the grid of technology and normative social relations. “A cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet,” while also being about the “joint kinship with animals and machines . . . partial identities and contradictory standpoints.”17 The cyborg bears an autonomy with constraints—the limit points of existential freedom and its dialectic of responsibility. Echoing here a connection between two unlikely streams of thought, Ford’s dread-­cum-­ecstasy of the posthuman fashion maven and Jean-­Paul Sartre’s dialectic of responsibility and existential freedom, cyborg ontology for Haraway “is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.”18 The existential freedom at the center of the posthuman experience must be “distinguished sharply from political and social liberty.”19 The liberal-­ democratic idea of “freedom” is the much-­vaunted version at the center of a simple construction of automobility and the open road. Unlike this construction, Sartre’s existential concept of freedom, for example, is freighted by the ambiguous circumstances of being-­in-­the-­world, both personal and collective, from one’s internal sentiments to our shared political economy.20 Freedom is not ex nihilo but rather bound to one’s material situation and 272 // Automotive Prosthetic

reciprocal actions and emotions: it is a series of hindrances and, ultimately, condemnation based on recognition of the angst, anguish, and absurdity of life. It is a sentencing to that life, an imprisonment to the reality of life’s emotional interactions and daily challenges. The automobile and road bring an ambiguous freedom, with limitations inscribed by political forces and the psyche combined. Sartre’s 1944 drama No Exit, a one-­act play about three dead characters, Inez, Garcin, and Estelle, gives a perspicuous distillation of freedom as entrapment. The three characters bicker and complain about the Second Empire–style furniture in the room as they find themselves trapped there together for eternity.21 Freedom brings emancipation in the form of confrontation with and resolution to life’s limits. Death is the ultimate existential freedom, yet even in death one suffers the unavoidable noise of existence. Sartre tells us “hell is other people,” reinforcing the idea that people are claustrophobic social entities further making palpable the limits of freedom.22 “Man being condemned to be free,” Sartre explains, “carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being.”23 Though frustrated, humankind finds reward in embracing the emotional aspects of life embodied in angst and dread. This study of conceptual car art tells not so much about the liberal freedom of democratic politics and the ideals of manifest destiny implicit within conventional references to the “freedom of the open road,” but rather about a freedom that better takes ballast in the ideas of existential phenomenology. From within this matrix of thinking we recast the relationship between the mind and body, logic and emotions, in terms of a porous and overlapping interface. Simply put, cogitation is a matter of the ecological body moving through space. Deep thinking happens on the skin. In a similar vein, Sartre insists that emotions are the phenomenological incarnation of consciousness. A psychology of emotions “takes man in the world as he presents himself through a multitude of situations, in the café, with his family, at war. Generally speaking, what interests is man in situations.”24 Sartre’s take on emotions offers a philosophical counterlogic to the mind-­body split of Cartesian thinking. Insomuch as existential emotions are consciousness expressing itself, then reciprocally, consciousness is not a pristine inborn purity but rather a dirty, hairy, well-­worn passage by which one comes to understand and express the experiences of one’s specific situation. Consciousness is like the raw nature Roquentin describes in Sartre’s Nausea. It is where the tree “root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass” melt into “soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder—naked, in a Conclusion \\ 273

frightful, obscene nakedness.”25 Consciousness is an eldritch zone with the odor of death and decay. Unlike Roquentin, who has an epiphany about the nature of consciousness while walking in a park, we arrive at it through the epidermal sack of technology, while driving the automobile. We wear our consciousness externally as a skin in clothing and technological appendages. The deepest part of our humanness—our supposed consciousness—extends us outward ecologically into the world.

The Existential View to the Road: Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof

I would like to connect this outline of emotionally mediated freedom to Quentin Tarantino’s 2007 film Death Proof. Relating back to Tom Ford’s fascination with fashion, women, and automotive mutation, Tarantino’s film is about female empowerment and survival through the automobile. As a filmic existential view to the road, Death Proof bears an aesthetic similar to the works of art considered in the preceding six chapters while also pointing to a distinct genre within film that is perhaps more closely related to video art. Like the works of video art discussed earlier, it is disjunctive, nonlinear, not a typical story or bildungsroman, as are most road movies, and is thus not a coming-­of-­age film whereby road and story unfold in tandem. Rather it is, in its reflective mimesis of low-­grade theater and rough-­and-­tumble culture, a moving-­image experiment that offers violent and eccentric glimpses of action on the road. An integration of several interconnected existential views to the road, Death Proof is a road-­chase film that pays homage to the classical road chase movie by undercutting the usual machismo with girl power (Figure 7.3). More provocative spectacle than heuristic story, the plot of Death Proof opens out around three louche young women driving to a bar in Austin, Texas, where they will eventually meet the figure of Stuntman Mike, a sociopathic misogynist who preys upon young women played by Kurt Russell. His lair is a matte-­black 1970 Chevy Nova with a white skull and crossbones painted on the hood. He tells his passenger that the car is “death proof ” even though it is his preferred death trap for hapless females along for the ride. The movie is geographically bifurcated, unfolding in the first half in the bars and on the roads of Austin, Texas, and the second half on the roads of Lebanon, Tennessee. The two parts, between which there is fourteen-­month time-­ lapse, are connected by bad-­guy Stuntman Mike. If the first half of the movie 274 // Automotive Prosthetic

F i g u r e 7.3.

Still showing the character Zoe playing Ship’s

Mast on the hood of the white Dodge Challenger from Quentin Tarantino, director, Death Proof, 2007. Courtesy of Weinstein Films, New York.

mimics in exaggerated fashion the macho violence of car-­chase movies from the 1960s and 1970s—Bullitt (1968) and Vanishing Point (1971) come to mind here—the second half marks the reinvention of the stereotypical car-­ chase movie, with the bloodthirsty male protagonist getting his just desserts at the hands of two strong, fast-­thinking, and risk-­hungry women. Ultimately Stuntman Mike’s car loses control and flips over. The girls drag him out of the car and kill him with their bare hands. There is admittedly a reversal in the role of genders here that might seem less existential and, more simply put, a crude shift in gender place holding. Whereas the man had been a violent sociopath who used his car to kill in the first half, the women become brutal killers using their car as a weapon in the second half. We must, however, bear in mind that the women are not sociopaths, like Stuntman Mike, but are rather bringing a balance to the scales of justice in killing a psychopathic serial murderer who hunts and kills women with his car. While the role reversal of genders could be seen as an inversion of the master-­slave narrative, I would argue rather that it substantiates a certain “intensity,” to refer to Brian Massumi’s take on “affect,” which he, in turn, distinguishes from “emotions.” Zoe and Kim are empowered by their outrage; they are exhilarated by the affectivity of the car race and, in Ballardian fashion, head-­to-­head smash-­ups. Affect and emotion, while seemingly synonymous, occupy different registers in Massumi’s outline of intensity. If “emotion is qualified intensity,” functioning according to its conventional insertion into the “narrativizable action-­reaction circuits,” then affect is “a suspension of action-­reaction circuits and linear temporality.”26 The nonlinear side of “affect” within intensity constitutes the aesthetics of the existential view to the road, which characterizes Death Proof. We can relate such “intensity,” which at once includes affect and emotion, to an existential authenticity that functions in place of the master-­slave narrative. Commanding single women do not hide their strength according to the obsolete conventions of the passive, quiet, and dutiful housewife, but exert it in order to protect themselves. And they do so by way of the appropriation of technology, using the muscle, historically a male-­oriented technological tool. Together the crafting of this film and its general premise—its manipuConclusion \\ 275

lated ugliness and general embracement of low culture—make it a moving-­ image existential view to the road bearing a specific strain of existential aesthetics. Such an aesthetics “embrace[s] the para-­human” and is measured by “confusion, pain, wonder, inevitable resistance, nostalgia, feelings of loss and dread, and moments of intense liberating pleasure, not to say joy and surprise.”27 The automobile is a moving pod hosting a panoply of intensities. A brief comparison of Death Proof to Thelma and Louise (1991), an earlier road movie, teases out some of the properties of the “existential view to the road.” Like Death Proof, Thelma and Louise centers on women, the roving automobile, constructs of the “open road,” and death. Playing the role of Louise, Susan Sarandon takes off with Thelma, her best friend, played by Geena Davis, on a cross-­country road trip, as the two together leave behind hopeless situations rooted in teetering and abusive relationships with men. The story is a something of a moving-­image Bildungsroman, a coming-­of-­age narrative that culminates in police chasing the two women driving a vintage convertible off a cliff, presumably to their death. It is a film in which the road mimics the linearity of the story: story line and highway work together, with the car’s further movement westward marking the unfolding of the script, line by line, scene by scene. Death Proof is, by contrast, not a typical road movie. It does not take the form of a moving-­image bildungsroman. It does not teach us the morals of growth and evolution of the self. It does not unfold slowly, scene by scene, steadily suggesting the ultimate fate of its motley assortment of protagonists. Rather, it functions by intentionally rough cinematographic tropes—the jump cut, splicing, montage, and the willful degradation of the celluloid. In its mimicking of the paracinematic techniques of grindhouse theater, it embraces the crude, sullied, and low-­class, if not white trash, side of reality. It functions according to the nonlinear “nows” of the automotive prosthetic. It is thus not a conventional road movie, but a series of linked existential views to the road, which, in keeping with paracinema, “questions the historical necessity of the film medium and insists instead on its contingency. Like the theories of Eisenstein and Bazin, it looks for the essence of cinema in the more ephemeral, conceptual realm rather than the material one.”28 Even though the conventions of the liberal-­democratic freedom of the “open road” are thwarted for Thelma and Louise by their suicides, the story is nonetheless told from the perspective of the conventional road movie. Road and story unfold together in traditional narratological fashion, with an exposition, followed by rising action, the climax, and the dénouement. By contrast, Death Proof tells a story according to intensities, 276 // Automotive Prosthetic

that is, in nonlinear hopscotch fashion. Because of its discursiveness, it is a matter of “affect” rather than “emotion,” to refer to Massumi’s thinking. Rather than literally portraying an existential end, as in Thelma and Louise, it is existential in its crafting and experience, in the bizarrerie of Tarantino’s choice to replicate lowbrow film from the 1970s. As a result, the beauty of the successful celluloid image in Tarantino’s film work can also be painful to watch. There is existential freedom in the actions of Death Proof ’s characters, the weak and strong women alike and their shared, ugly, misbegotten reality—their existential view to the road. They are women in their cars, so many cyborgs surviving the unforeseen events of automotive travel. Their curiosity forever squeezes out along the edges of the stopper that thwarts direct travel along the sometimes open, often encumbered road of existential freedom.

Conclusion \\ 277

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Notes Introduction

1. Andreas Jancke, “‘Auto-­nom’: The Car in Contemporary Art,” Mobile Tradition Live 2 (2004), 20–24, http://www.bmwccb.com.br/novo/noticias/mobile_tradition/Mo bile_02-­04.pdf. 2. Catalogues from the Museum of Modern Art library. In five of the six exhibits, the object of the car was presented as a grammar of design. Around the Automobile consisted of fine artwork that offered literal representations of the car as an object, not as a perceptual device. 3. Press release for Roads, August 15, 1961, from Museum of Modern Art archive, CUR 691. 4. Auto-­Nom: The Car in Contemporary Art might seem prima facie to be about the paradigm of looking-­through. However, its focus on cars painted by blue-­chip and canonical artists hired by the BMW corporation (Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jenny Holzer, Ernst Fuchs, Sandro Chia, etc.) makes this exhibition object oriented: a matter of looking-­at the painted surfaces of BMWs. 5. Rudi Volti, Cars and Culture: The Life Story of a Technology (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 89. 6. William J. Mitchell, Christopher E. Borroni-­Bird, and Lawrence D. Burns, Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility for the Twenty-­First Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 3. 7. Mitchell, Borroni-­Bird, and Burns, 3. 8. Volti, 67. 9. Volti, 99. 10. Gilbert Cruz, “GM, Ford, Chrysler’s Bailout Plan,” Time, December 3, 2008. http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1863637,00.html. 11. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Ninteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); and Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). See also Hal Foster’s Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), which references “prosthetics” and Freud. 12. An early installation—not a full-­fledged exhibit—is one exception. In 1987 the German video and installation artists Florian Kleinefenn and Fritz Rhamann installed Camarafahrten mit Automobil (Camera Rides with the Automobile) at Dokumenta 8 in Kassel, Germany. See http://www.medienkunstnet.de/works/watteau. 13. Sarah Greenough, “Disordering the Senses: Guggenheim Fellowship,” in Look‑ ing In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans,” ed. Sarah Greenough (New York: D.A.P., 2009), 124–125; Anthony Lane, “Road Show: The Journey of Robert Frank’s The Americans,” New Yorker (September 14, 2009). http://www.newyorker.com/reporting /2009/09/14/090914fa_fact_lane.

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14. For further information, see the ZKM Center for Art and Media (in Karlsruhe) website: http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/e/. 15. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1. 16. Bateson, xxiii. 17. Daniel Foxman, review of Steps to an Ecology of Mind, by Gregory Bateson, Western Political Quarterly 26, no. 2 (June 1973), 346. 18. Bateson, 339. 19. Bateson, 319. Bateson outlines a “total self-­corrective unit” replacing self and consciousness under the subheading “The Epistemology of Cybernetics,” 315–320. 20. See Bateson’s “Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art,” in A Study of Primitive Art, ed. Anthony Forge (London: Oxford University Press, 1968). 21. Jack Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” Artforum 7, no. 1 (September 1968), 31. 22. Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” 31. 23. Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” 32. 24. Jack Burnham, “Notes on Art and Information Processing,” in the catalog for Software (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1970), 10. 25. Burnham, “Notes on Art and Information Processing,” 11. 26. Jack Burnham, “Art and Technology: The Panacea That Failed,” in The Myths of Information, ed. Kathleen Woodward (New York: Coda Press, 1980), unpaginated version from www.etantdonnes.com/SystemsArt/Burnham_Panacea_1980.pdf. 27. Henning Schmidgen, “Thinking Technology and Biological Beings: Gilbert Simondon’s Philosophy of Machines,” paper presented at the Max Planck Institute of the History of Science, Berlin, August 7, 2004, www.csi.ensmp.fr/WebCSI/4S/download . . . /download_paper.php?. 28. John Hart, preface to Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, by Gilbert Simondon, 2nd ed. (Paris: Aubier, 1989), i–ii. See also Carl Mitcham, Thinking through Technology: The Path between Engineering and Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 33–34. 29. Hart, ii. 30. Mitcham, 34. 31. Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier, 1989), 154. 32. Brian Rotman, Becoming beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 133. 33. Rotman, 133. 34. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 2. By contrast, see Crary’s idea of “visionary abstraction” at the end of the book, 137–150. 35. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 6. 36. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, quoting Foucault, 6n2. 37. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978– 1979 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 21. 38. Foucault, 1–50.

280 // Notes to Pages 7–15

39. For the connection between biopolitics and habeas corpus, see Giorgio Agamben, States of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 40. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 2. 41. Mark B. N. Hansen, Embodying Technesis: Technology beyond Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press: 2000), 19, 4. 42. Hansen, 20. 43. Hansen, 19. 44. Simondon, 9. 45. Julia Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-­mêmes (Paris: Folio “essais,” 1991). 46. Simondon, 9. 47. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 249n7. 48. Haraway, 7–8. 49. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 219. 50. McLuhan, 23. 51. McLuhan, 26. 52. Jack Burnham, “Robot and Cyborg Art,” an excerpt from Beyond Modern Sculpture [1968], in Art and Electronic Media, ed. Edward A. Shanken (London: Phaidon, 2009), 247. 53. Burnham, “Robot and Cyborg Art,” 247. 54. Hart, iv. 55. Hart, iv. 56. Hart, iv. 57. Simondon, 48–49. 58. Schmidgen, 5. 59. Simondon, 15–16; Schmidgen, 9. 60. Schmidgen, 4. 61. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1961), 173, 181. 62. Jeff Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference’: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art” (1995), in The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960–1982, ed. Douglas Fogle (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003), 30.

Chapter 1

1. The phrase was first coined by Lucy Lippard and John Chandler in “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International 12, no. 2 (February 1968), 31–36. Lippard later elaborated on the idea in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York: Praeger, 1973). For the history of conceptualism see Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art, 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of

Notes to Pages 15–27 \\ 281

Institutions,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 514–537; Michael Corris, ed., Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art A&I (London: Phaidon Press, 1998). 2. Eric Dregni and Ruthann Godollei, Art Cars and the Museum of the Streets (Golden, CO: Speck Press, 2009), 7, 42. 3. Harrod Blank, Art Cars: The Cars, the Artists, the Obsession of Craft (New York: Blank Books, 2007). 4. Deborah Clarke, Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-­ Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 105–110; Mike Featherstone, N. J. Thrift, and John Urry, Automobilities (London: Sage, 2005), 62–63. 5. Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” Social Text 9/10 (Spring–Summer, 1984), 178. 6. Brian O’Doherty, “Highway to Las Vegas,” Art in America 60, no. 1 (January– February 1972), 80. I owe thanks to my European colleague Beatriz Toscano for this perspicacious reference. 7. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 80. 8. O’Doherty, “Highway to Las Vegas,” 89. 9. Mark B. N. Hansen, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (New York: Routledge Press, 2006); Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen, eds., Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-­Order Systems Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press); Anna Munster, Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006). 10. Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 11. Hansen, 28. 12. Hansen, 29. 13. Johanna Drucker, “Art Theory Now: From Aeshtics to Aesthesis,” unpublished talk, School of Visual Arts, New York, December 11, 2007, 26. 14. O’Doherty, “Highway to Las Vegas,” 80. 15. O’Doherty, “Highway to Las Vegas,” 80. 16. O’Doherty, “Highway to Las Vegas,” 83. 17. O’Doherty, “Highway to Las Vegas,” 82. 18. O’Doherty, “Highway to Las Vegas,” 82. 19. O’Doherty, “Highway to Las Vegas,” 84. 20. O’Doherty, “Highway to Las Vegas,” 84. 21. Samuel Wagstaff Jr., “Talking with Tony Smith,” Artforum 5, no. 4 (December 1966), unpaginated interview. 22. Mary Horlock, “Imagine You Are Driving,” in Julian Opie (London: Tate, 2004), 60. 23. Scholarly debate locates the “origin” of conceptual art in the bellwethers of Marcel Duchamp, Laszlo Moholy-­Nagy, and Ad Reinhardt. I limit my references here to Duchamp and Moholy-­Nagy because they are the earliest to have initiated a concep-

282 // Notes to Pages 28–35

tual practice. See John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade (New York: Verso, 2007); Frances Colpitt, “The Formalist Connection and Originary Myths of Conceptual Art,” in Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice, ed. Michael Corris (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 28–50; Michael Corris, Ad Reinhardt (London: Reaktion Books, 2008). 24. Lippard and Chandler. 25. Roberta Smith, “Hold That Obit: MoMA’s not Dead,” New York Times, December 30, 2010, www.nytimes.com. 26. Rosalind Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” in “‘Angelus Novus’: Perspectives on Walter Benjamin,” special issue (Winter 1999), Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2, 294. See also Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-­Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000). 27. Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” 290. 28. Brian Rotman, Becoming beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 7. 29. Raymond Williams, “From Medium to Social Practice,” in Marxism and Literature (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1978), 158–164. 30. Williams, “From Medium to Social Practice,” 159. Recalling Lucy Lippard’s famous description of conceptual art in terms of the “dematerialization of the object,” Williams explains that “every specific art has dissolved into it [the medium], at every level of its operations, not only specific social relationships, which in a given phase define it . . . but also specific material means of production, on the mastery of which its production depends” (163). See also Williams, “From Reflection to Mediation,” in Marxism and Literature (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1978), 95–101. 31. Wagstaff. 32. Horlock, 58. 33. Wagstaff. 34. John Roberts, “Photography, Iconophobia and the Ruins of Conceptual Art,” in The Impossible Document: Photography and Conceptual Art in Britain, 1966–76 (London: Camerawork, 1997), 25. 35. Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 51. 36. Horlock, 60. 37. Horlock, 61. 38. See Nader Vossughian, Otto Neurath: The Language of the Global Polis (Rotterdam: NAI, 2008). 39. Horlock, 60. 40. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 217. 41. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 57. 42. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 7–21. 43. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­ Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 156. 44. “Global Positioning Systems: History,” National Park Service, http://www.nps

Notes to Pages 35–45 \\ 283

.gov/gis/gps/history.html; and Ben Kage, “Roomba Maker iRobot also Developing Military Robots,” December 14, 2006, http://www.naturalnews.com/021301.html. 45. Lee, 51. 46. Lee, xii. 47. Lee, 33. 48. Lee, 105. 49. Lee, xvi. 50. Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (New York: Penguin), 164. 51. For a broad survey of the history of the automobile and its effects on the United States, see Stephen Sears, American Heritage History of the Automobile in America (New York: American Heritage, 1977); and Michael L. Berger, The Automobile in American History and Culture (New York: Greenwood Press, 2001). For more specific studies on the car and culture, see Catherine Gudis, Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape (London and New York: Routledge, 2004); and James J. Flink, The Automobile Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 52. Roland Barthes published individual vignettes in various journalism outlets— Esprit, France-­Observateur, and Les Lettres Nouvelles—between 1954 and 1956 before publishing the collection as Mythologies in 1957. 53. Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), v. 54. McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, v. 55. McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, vi. 56. McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, vi. 57. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill & Wang, 1997) 11. 58. Haraway, 153. 59. Barthes, 12. 60. Barthes, 142. 61. Philip B. Meggs, introduction to The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, by Marshall McLuhan (New York: Gingko Press, 2002), 12. 62. Barthes, 89. 63. There is a three-­minute video of Rauschenberg recounting the making of this piece on the SFMOMA website. See http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/videos/23; see also Robert Saltonstall Mattison and Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Rauschenberg: Breaking Boundaries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 56–57. 64. Mattison and Rauschenberg, 57. 65. Mattison and Rauschenberg, 58. 66. Howard Cunnell, On the Road: The Original Scroll (New York: Viking Press, 2007), 2–3. 67. Cunnell, 6. 68. Cunnell, 24. 69. Dick Higgins, “Statement on Intermedia,” August 3, 1966, http://www.artpool .hu/Fluxus/Higgins/intermedia2.html. 70. Vincent Katz, ed., Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 138–139.

284 // Notes to Pages 45–56

Chapter 2

1. Of the many histories of the automobile, none engages it philosophically except for the work of the late French philosopher of science and technology Gilbert Simondon. See his Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Méot, 1958). 2. David Wills, Prosthesis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 133. 3. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 23–24. 4. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 43–44. 5. McLuhan, 42. 6. McLuhan, 43. 7. Sarah Greenough, “Disordering the Senses: Guggenheim Fellowship,” in Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans” (New York: D.A.P., 2009), 124–125; Anthony Lane, “Road Show: The Journey of Robert Frank’s The Americans,” New Yorker (September 14, 2009), http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/14/090914fa_fact_lane. 8. Sarah Greenough, “Transforming Destiny into Awareness: The Americans,” in Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans” (New York: D.A.P., 2009), 176–198. 9. Coosje van Bruggen, John Baldessari (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), 30. 10. Rosalind Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” in “‘Angelus Novus’: Perspectives on Walter Benjamin,” special issue (Winter 1999), Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2, 290. 11. Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979), 75–88. 12. Douglas Fogle, “The Last Picture Show,” in The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960–1982, ed. Douglas Fogle (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003), 9. 13. Jeff Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference’: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art” (1995), in The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960–1982, ed. Douglas Fogle (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003), 32. 14. Fogle, 10. 15. Fogle, 9. 16. Margaret Lawther, http://www.margaretlawther.com/artiststmnt.html. 17. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 35. 18. Schivelbusch, 35. 19. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 502–513. 20. Bateson, 504. 21. Bateson, 504. 22. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (London: Chatto & Windus, 1954), quoted in Catharine Grenier, ed., Los Angeles, 1955–1985: Birth of an Art Capital (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2006), 58. 23. Lisa Phillips, ed., Paul McCarthy (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000), 22–23. 24. Chrissie Iles, Paul McCarthy: Central Symmetrical Rotation Movement: Three Installations, Two Films (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 2008), 23–24.

Notes to Pages 57–69 \\ 285

25. See Air France Magazine 108 (April 2006), 172; Grenier, 103; and Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein, and Ilene Susan Fort, Made in California: Art, Image and Identity, 1900–2000 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 206. Returning to the photograph later in his life, Hopper painted a large version (14 × 12.5 feet) on vinyl in 2000. See Rudi Fuchs and Jan Hein Sassen, Dennis Hopper (A Keen Eye): Artist, Photographer, Filmmaker (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 2001), 90–91. 26. Alexandra Schwartz, Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 79. See also Lee Friedlander, America by Car (San Francisco: Fraenkel Gallery/New York: D.A.P., 2010). An exhibition by the same name was held in September 2010 at the Whitney Museum in New York City. 27. Schwartz, 89. 28. Rudi Fuchs, “Back and Forth,” in Dennis Hopper (A Keen Eye): Artist, Photographer, Filmmaker (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 2001), 12. Fuchs’s emphasis. 29. Nancy Shaw, “Siting the Banal: The Expanded Landscapes of the N. E. Thing Co.,” http://www.vancouverartinthesixties.com/essays/siting-­the-­banal. Originally published in You Are Now in the Middle of a N. E. Thing Co. Landscape, February 19– March 27, 1993 (Vancouver: UBC Fine Arts Gallery, 1993). 30. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature,” trans. Marie Maclean, New Literary History 16, no. 3 (Spring 1985), 591–608. In keeping with this text, the minor beauty of this art is collective and political but anti-­heroic. 31. Branden W. Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (A “Minor” History) (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 47–52. 32. Joseph, 52. 33. Wall, “Marks of Indifference,” 265. 34. Wall, “Marks of Indifference,” 253. 35. Wall, “Marks of Indifference,” 253. 36. http://physics.about.com/od/glossary/g/entropy.htm. 37. Robert Smithson, “Entropy Made Visible,” interview with Alison Sky (1973), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 302. 38. Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments” (1966), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 12. 39. Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” 13. 40. Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” 13. 41. Smithson, “Entropy Made Visible,” 305. 42. Smithson, “Entropy Made Visible,” 307. 43. For discussions of “embodiment,” see Mark B. N. Hansen, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (London: Routledge, 2006); and Brian Massumi, Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 44. Johanne Sloan, “Bill Vazan’s Urban Coordinates,” in Bill Vazan: Walking into the Vanishing Point, ed. Marie-­Josée and Bill Vazan (Montreal: VOX, centre de l’image contemporaine, 2009), 86–88. 45. Yve-­Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, “A User’s Guide to Entropy,” October 78 (Autumn 1996), 38–88.

286 // Notes to Pages 70–80

46. Bois and Krauss, 83. 47. Robert Smithson, “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art” (1968), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 91. 48. Sylvia Wolf, Ed Ruscha and Photography (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2004), 139. 49. Wolf, 140. 50. LeWitt quoted in Wolf, 141. 51. Dennis Wheeler, “The Limits of the Defeated Landscape: A Review of Four Artists,” artscanada (June 1970), 51. 52. Wheeler, 51. 53. Jeff Wall, Landscape Manual, copy of original print from the Hirshhorn Museum Sculpture Garden Library, 1970. 54. Wall, Landscape Manual, 15. 55. McLuhan, 94. 56. McLuhan, 90. 57. Baldessari quoted in van Bruggen, 16. 58. van Bruggen, 12. 59. van Bruggen, 12. 60. Baldessari quoted in van Bruggen, 30. 61. Nancy Spector, “Nowhere Man,” in Richard Prince (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2007), 26. 62. Lisa Phillips, “People Keep Asking: An Introduction,” in Richard Prince (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 21. 63. Martha Rosler, “For an Art against the Mythology of Everyday Life,” in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975–2001 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 3, 6. 64. Eleanor Heartney, “Documents of Dissent,” Art in America (March 2001), http:// findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_3_89/ai_71558212/?tag=content;col1. 65. Martha Rosler, “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography),” in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975–2001 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 175. The essay was first published by NSCAD Press and NYU in 1981. 66. Rosler, “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography),” 177. 67. Rosler, “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography),” 188. 68. Note of the artist, Ms. Rosler, July 27, 2012. 69. Rosler quoted in Alexander Alberro, “The Mobile Passage,” in Rights of Passage, by Martha Rosler (New York: New York Foundation for the Arts, and Kortrijk, Belgium: Kanaal Art Foundation, 1997), 40. 70. Anthony Vidler, “Construction Ahead,” in Rights of Passage, by Martha Rosler (New York: New York Foundation for the Arts, and Kortrijk, Belgium: Kanaal Art Foundation, 1997), 22. 71. Martha Rosler, “Road Work,” in Rights of Passage (New York: New York Foundation for the Arts, and Kortrijk, Belgium: Kanaal Art Foundation, 1997), 15. 72. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phe-

Notes to Pages 80–97 \\ 287

nomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 162. 73. N. Katharine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 203. 74. Robert Pepperell, “Posthumans and Extended Experience,” Journal of Evolution and Technology 14 (April 2005), 2. 75. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­ Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 150–151. 76. Hayles, 285. 77. Hayles, 39. 78. Hayles, 39. 79. David Colosi, “2.1.0 Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz,” Center for Three-­ Dimensional Literature, http://www.3dlit.org/practice/Kienholz/section2_1_1kienholz _colosi_towards.html. 80. Frank Whitford, “Obituary: Edward Kienholz,” Independent, June 13, 1994, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary- ­edward-­kienholz-­1422312.html; Paul Richard, “Edward Kienholz’s Beautiful Losers: At the Whitney Museum, the Sculptor’s Retrospective,” Washington Post, April 14, 1996. 81. Jean-­François Lyotard, “Passage from Le Mur du Pacifique (1979),” trans. Pierret Brochet, Nick Royle, and Kathleen Woodward, SubStance 11, no. 4, 89. 82. Lyotard, 90. 83. Lyotard, 90. 84. Colosi. 85. Lyotard, 91. 86. Lyotard, 91. 87. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 168–173. See also Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 88. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 31. 89. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 3. 90. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 168. 91. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 169. 92. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 169. 93. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 38. 94. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 168. 95. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 170. Hansen draws from Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation psychique et collective (Paris: Aubier, 1989); and Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Méot, 1958). I focus attention here on Hansen’s reading of Simondon, and later Merleau-­Ponty, for it is Hansen’s ultimate theory of affective perception that is of interest to the study of the car and conceptual art. 96. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 171. 97. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 1. 98. Joseph Grigely, Exhibition Prosthetics (London: Bedford Press, 2010), 8.

288 // Notes to Pages 97–106

99. Rosalind Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” in “‘Angelus Novus’: Perspectives on Walter Benjamin,” special issue (Winter 1999), Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2, 290. 100. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 45. 101. Robbert Flick, Tim Wride, Michael Dear, David L. Ulin, and Andrea L. Rich, “Trajectories: The Photographic Work of Robbert Flick,” in Robbert Flick: Trajectories (Los Angeles: LACMA, Steidl Verlag, 2004), 18. 102. Bolter and Grusin, 34. 103. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 134. 104. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 28. 105. Brian Rotman, Becoming beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 6. 106. http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/Things_I_Made/F1RacerMod. 107. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 253–264. 108. Benjamin, 262. 109. Dara Birnbaum and Cory Arcangel, “Do It 2,” Artforum 47, no. 7 (March 2009), 197. 110. Rosalind Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-­Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 10–11. 111. Birnbaum and Arcangel, 192. 112. Bolter and Grusin, 3. 113. Bolter and Grusin, 66.

Chapter 3

1. Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997), 217. 2. Katy Siegel, “The Real World,” in Gregory Crewdson, 1985–2000, ed. Stephan Berg (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2005), 91. 3. Mark B. N. Hansen, “The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life,” Critical Inquiry 30 (Spring 2004), 584–626. See also Chapter 7, “Body Times,” in Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 234–267. 4. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 249. 5. DEAF00/V2_Organisation, “Machine Times,” in Machine Times, ed. Joke Brouwer and V2_Organisation (Rotterdam: NAI, 2000), 4. 6. Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 68. 7. DEAF00/V2_Organisation, 4. 8. DEAF00/V2_Organisation, 4. 9. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 412. 10. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 249.

Notes to Pages 107–122 \\ 289

11. Merleau-­Ponty, 416. 12. Merleau-­Ponty, 412. 13. Merleau-­Ponty, 422. 14. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 6. 15. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 252–253. 16. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 253–254. 17. W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 18. Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (New York: Simon and Schuster), 329. 19. Arda Denkel, “On the Compresence of Tropes,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57, no. 3 (September 1997), 599–606. 20. Russell, 329. Russell explains, “I suggest that the ordering relation is contiguity or compresence, in the sense in which we know these in sensible experience.” 21. Daniel Kurjakovic, in conversation with Franziska Baetcke, “Production, Criticism, Attitude, and Existence,” in Other Rooms, Other Voices (Zurich, Switzerland: Memory/Cage Editions, 1999), 19. 22. See Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time. Vol. 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time. Vol. 2: Disorientation (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); and Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 23. Stephen Mumford, introduction to Russell on Metaphysics: Selections from the Writings of Bertrand Russell (London: Routledge Press, 2003), 8–9, 221–222. 24. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 249; Francisco J. Varela, “The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness,” in Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, ed. Jean Petitot, Francisco J. Varela, Bernard Pachoud, and Jean-­Michel Roy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 269–271. 25. Varela, 271. 26. Varela, 269. 27. Varela, 269. 28. Varela, 269–270. 29. Varela in discussion with Mulder, 8. 30. Varela in discussion with Mulder, 12–13. 31. Constance Lewallen and Steve Seid, Ant Farm, 1968–1978 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 25. 32. Lewallen and Seid, 17, 100, 161, 163. 33. Charlotte Posenenske, quoted in In and Out of Amsterdam, ed. Christophe Cherix (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 108. 34. Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine Richards, “Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine Richards, Artlab,” in Documentary Creations, ed. Susanne Neubauer (Lucerne, Switzerland: Museum of Art Lucerne, 2005), 39. 35. Nic Nicosia, quoted in a press release from Dunn and Brown Contemporary, March 1, 2005.

290 // Notes to Pages 122–134

36. Nic Nicosia, quoted in a press release from Dunn and Brown Contemporary, March 1, 2005. 37. Bernard Stiegler quoted in Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 257. 38. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1890), 613. 39. James, 630. 40. Alexander Graf, The Cinema of Wim Wenders: The Celluloid Highway (London: Wallflower Press, 2002), 2. 41. Wim Wenders, The Logic of Images: Essays and Conversations, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 53. 42. Wenders, 51. 43. Robert Phillip Kolker and Peter Beicken, The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and Desire (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 8–9. 44. Wenders, 51. 45. Wenders, 2. 46. See Gottfried Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). 47. Wenders, 51. 48. Graf, 48–49. 49. Graf, 94–95. 50. Graf, 48. 51. Wenders, 54. 52. Wenders, 55–56. 53. Wenders, 15. 54. Donald J. Wilcox, The Measure of Times Past: Pre-­Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 53. 55. Andrea Karnes, “Of Two Minds,” in Hubbard/Birchler, No Room to Answer, ed. Andrea Karnes (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2008), 27. 56. Wenders, 13. 57. Alexander Birchler in conversation with Andrea Karnes, No Room to Answer, ed. Andrea Karnes (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2008), 159. 58. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 261. 59. Benjamin, 261. 60. Ronald Beiner, “Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy of History,” Political Theory 12, no. 3 (August 1984), 424. 61. Werner Hamacher, “‘Now’: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time,” in Walter Benjamin and History, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Continuum, 2005), 49. 62. Benjamin, 260; Beiner, 424. 63. Beiner, 424. 64. Benjamin, 254. 65. Hamacher, 53. 66. Hamacher, 48.

Notes to Pages 134–144 \\ 291

67. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1997). 68. Wilcox, 55. 69. Benjamin, 253. 70. Joshua Mack, “Yael Bartana: I Didn’t Want to Make a Documentary,” Art Review 20 (March 2008), http://www.artreview.com/profiles/blog/show?id=1474022%3ABlog Post%3A113394. 71. Joshua Mack. 72. Hansen, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (London: Routledge Press, 2006), 5. 73. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 5. 74. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 28.

Chapter 4

1. There are two versions of Graham’s Homes for America, one that was published in Arts Magazine 41, no. 3 (December 1966–January 1967), 21–22, with the elongated title Homes for America, Early Twentieth Century Possessable House to the Quasi-­Discrete Cell of ’66, and another, larger framed, version that was not mass produced, titled Homes for America. The latter is part of a private collection in Brussels, Belgium. 2. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in The Essential Foucault, ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas S. Rose (New York: New Press, 2003), 379. 3. Dan Graham in an interview with Nicolas Guagnini (2006), in Dan Graham: Beyond, ed. Bennett Simpson and Chrissie Iles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 280. 4. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 237. 5. Benjamin, 237. 6. Rosalind E. Krauss, Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 179. 7. The essay was originally published in Theatergarden Bestiarium: The Garden as Theater as Museum, exhibition catalog (Long Island City, New York: The Institute of Contemporary Art, P.S. 1 Museum, and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 8. Dan Graham, “Art in Relation to Architecture/Architecture in Relation to Art,” in Dan Graham: Works and Collected Writings, ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona, Spain: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2009), 234–235. First published in Artforum 17 (February 1979), 22–29. 9. Graham, “Art in Relation to Architecture/Architecture in Relation to Art,” 234. 10. Gloria Moure, “Dan Graham, in the Third Discontinuity,” in Dan Graham: Works and Collected Writings, ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona, Spain: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2009), 28. 11. Alain Charre, “Unplaceable Architecture,” in Dan Graham, ed. Jacinto Lageira (Paris: Editions Dis Voir, 1995), 7. 12. Dan Graham in an interview with Sarah Rosenbaum-­Kranson, http://www.mu

292 // Notes to Pages 144–158

seomagazine.com/10/dan-­graham. Graham here claims that Benjamin Buchloh’s interpretation of Homes for America as an “attack on Minimalism” is wrong. 13. Bennett Simpson, “A Minor Threat: Dan Graham and Music,” in Dan Graham: Beyond, ed. Bennett Simpson and Chrissie Iles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 34–36. 14. See the essays in Dan Graham: Beyond, in particular Beatriz Colomina, “Beyond Pavilions: Architecture as a Machine to See,” 190–202; Mark Francis, “A Public Space: Context and History,” 182–190; and Bennett Simpson, “A Minor Threat: Dan Graham and Music,” 34–36. See also Benjamin Buchloh, “Moments of History in the Work of Dan Graham,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 376–391; Thomas Crowe, “The Simple Life: Pastoralism and the Persistence of Genre in Recent Art,” in Art in the Common Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 173–211; Alain Charre, Marie-­ Paule MacDonald, and Marc Perelman, Dan Graham (Paris: Editions Dis Voir, 1995); Jeff Wall, Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel (Toronto: Art Metropole, 1991). 15. Graham, Works, 234. 16. Richard Cavell, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 81. 17. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 123. 18. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus, vol. 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 19. Cavell, 81. 20. McLuhan, 57. See also Cavell, 189. 21. Dan Graham, “The Artist as Bookmaker: The Book as Object,” Arts Magazine 41, no 8 (Summer 1967), 23, 29. See also Dan Graham in an interview with Mike Metz, Bomb 46 (Winter 1994), www.bombsite.com/issues/46/articles/1722. Graham explains, “Lichtenstein interested me because he was taking things out of magazines, blowing them up on canvases, and showing them in galleries. Thus making a connection to the information system.” My emphasis. 22. Louis Althusser, “The Ideological State Apparatus,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), 121–173. 23. Alexander Alberro, “Structure as Content: Dan Graham’s Schema (March 1966) and the Emergence of Conceptual Art,” in Dan Graham: Works and Collected Writings, ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona, Spain: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2009), 61. 24. Dan Graham, “My Works for Magazine Pages: A History of Conceptual Art, 1965–1969,” in Dan Graham: Works and Collected Writings, ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona, Spain: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2009), 218. 25. Alberro, 61. 26. Alberro, 61. 27. Dan Graham in an interview with Rodney Graham, in Dan Graham: Beyond, ed. Bennett Simpson and Chrissie Iles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 104. 28. Dan Graham in an interview with Rodney Graham, 104.

Notes to Pages 158–164 \\ 293

29. Dan Graham in an interview with Nicolas Guagnini, May 14, 2006, in Dan Graham: Beyond, ed. Bennett Simpson and Chrissie Iles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 280. 30. Graham in an interview with Mike Metz, www.bombsite.com/issues/46/arti cles/1722. 31. Rhea Anastas, “Minimal Difference: The John Daniels Gallery and the First Works of Dan Graham,” in Dan Graham: Beyond, ed. Bennett Simpson and Chrissie Iles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 121. Anastas quotes Birgit Pelzer, “Double Intersection: The Optics of Dan Graham,” in Dan Graham, ed. Birgit Pelzer, Mark Francis, and Beatriz Colomina (London: Phaidon, 2001), 40. 32. Jeff Wall, “Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel,” in Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 43. 33. Marie-­Paul MacDonald, “Materializations: Mass-­production, Public Space, and Architecture Convention in the Work of Dan Graham,” in Dan Graham, ed. Jacinto Lageira (Paris: Editions Dis Voir, 1995), 30. 34. Wall, “Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel.” This was originally published as part of an exhibition catalog for a show of Graham’s work in Perth, Australia. 35. Wall, “Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel,” 38. 36. Wall, “Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel,” 31. 37. Wall, “Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel,” 49. 38. Wall, “Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel,” 50. 39. Wall, “Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel,” 42. 40. Wall, “Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel,” 43. 41. Wall, “Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel,” 43. 42. Dan Graham, “Art in Relation to Architecture/Architecture in Relation to Art,” in Rock My Religion: Writings and Art Projects, 1965–1990 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 231. 43. Dan Graham, “Essay on Video, Architecture, and Television,” in Dan Graham: Works and Collected Writings, ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona, Spain: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2009), 225. 44. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), 6, 34–35. 45. David B. Brownlee, David G. De Long, and Kathryn B. Hiesinger, eds., Out of the Ordinary: Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Associates (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1999), 48–51, 66–71. 46. Dan Graham, “Signs” (1981), in Dan Graham: Beyond, ed. Bennett Simpson and Chrissie Iles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 259–260. 47. Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, “The Highway,” in The Highway, exhibition catalog (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1970), 9. 48. Scott Brown and Venturi, “The Highway,” 9. 49. Scott Brown and Venturi, “The Highway,” 12. 50. Jennifer Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

294 // Notes to Pages 164–173

51. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (New York: MIT Press and John Wiley, 1961), 11. See also Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (Autumn 1994), 228–266. 52. Norbert Wiener, “How U.S. Can Prepare for Atomic War: MIT Professors Suggest a Bold Plan to Prevent Panic and Limit Destruction,” Life, December 18, 1950, 77–86. See also Light, 35–54; Peter Galison, “War against the Center,” Grey Room, no. 4 (Summer 2001), 5–33; and Robert Kargon and Arthure Molella, “The City as Communications Net: Norbert Wiener, the Atomic Bomb, and Urban Dispersal,” Technology and Culture 45, no. 4 (October 2004), 764–777. 53. Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John R. Myer, The View from the Road (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 2. 54. Graham, “Essay on Video, Architecture, and Television,” 222n1. 55. David Joselit, Feedback: Television against Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 40. 56. Joselit, 106. 57. Antoine Picon, La ville territoire des cyborgs (Paris: Les Éditions de l’Imprimeur, 1998), 42. 58. Sandy Isenstadt, The Modern American House: Spaciousness and Middle-­Class Identity (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 268–269. 59. Graham, “Essay on Video, Architecture and Television,” 224. 60. Graham, “Essay on Video, Architecture and Television,” 224. 61. Isendstadt, 198–201. 62. Graham in an interview with Mike Metz, Bomb 46 (Winter 1994), www.bomb site.com/issues/46/articles/1722. 63. Dan Graham, “Video View of Suburbia in an Urban Atrium (1979–80),” in Rock My Religion: Writings and Art Projects, 1965–1990 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 242. 64. Graham, “Essay on Video, Architecture and Television,” 222. 65. Graham, “Essay on Video, Architecture, and Television,” 222. 66. Dan Graham in an interview with Eric de Bruyn, Dan Graham: Works and Collected Writings, ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona, Spain: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2009), 214. 67. Light, 202, 170–171. 68. Dan Graham, text describing Roll (1970), in Dan Graham: Works and Collected Writings, ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona, Spain: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2009) 86. Originally written in 1976 as part of “Film and Performance/Six Films, 1969–1974.” 69. Dan Graham, text describing Two Consciousness Projection(s), in Dan Graham: Works and Collected Writings, ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona, Spain: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2009), 96. Originally written in 1972 and first published in Benjamin Buchloh, Dan Graham: Video-­Architecture-­Television (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1979), 4. 70. Dan Graham, text describing Two Consciousness Projection(s), 96. 71. Dan Graham, text describing Present Continuous Past(s), in Dan Graham: Works and Collected Writings, ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona, Spain: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2009),

Notes to Pages 174–185 \\ 295

96. Originally written in 1972 and first published in Benjamin Buchloh, Dan Graham: Video-­Architecture-­Television (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1979), 7–8. 72. Dan Graham, interview with Eric de Bruyn, 213. 73. Jack Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” in Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970, ed. Donna De Salvo (London: Tate Museum, 2005), 165. Originally published in Artforum, September 1968. 74. Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture (New York: Braziller, 1968), 263. 75. Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture, 257. Burnham quotes the Venezuelan kinetic and op artist Jesus-­Raphael Soto. 76. Thomas McEvilley, The Triumph of Anti-­Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-­Modernism (Kingston, NY: McPherson, 2005), 78.

Chapter 5

1. Paul Gregan, John Reed, and Bernard Simon, “GM’s Hummer China Deal Collapses,” Financial Times, February 23, 2010. 2. Patti Waldmeir, “Hummer Deal Collapses under Own Flaws,” Financial Times, February 25, 2010. 3. Frank Ahrens, “The Hummer’s Dead End?” Washington Post, June 4, 2008; Joe Mathews, “The Hummer and Schwarzenegger: They Probably Won’t Be Back,” Washington Post, February 28, 2010; Jonathan Rosen, “Bye-­Bye Big,” New York Times, February 28, 2010; Nick Buckley, “GM to Close Hummer after Sale Fails,” New York Times, February 25, 2010. 4. The 2006 Hummer H3 gets 14 miles to the gallon in the city, 18 on the highway, and on average 16 miles to the gallon. The 2006 Honda Accord gets 23 miles per gallon in the city and 31 on the highway. This information is available at http://www.fueleconomy .gov, a site maintained jointly by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 5. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 198–241. 6. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1996), 140. 7. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 55. 8. Don Mitchell, “The S.U.V. Model of Citizenship: Floating, Bubbles, Buffer Zones, and the Rise of the ‘Purely Atomic’ Citizenship,” Political Geography 24 (2005), 96–98. 9. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–60: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 24. 10. Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! (London: Verso, 2002), 61. 11. Žižek, 16.

296 // Notes to Pages 186–194

12. Richard Boothby, Freud as Philosopher (New York: Routledge, 2001), quoted by Žižek, 18. 13. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 271. 14. Ngai, 271. 15. John Carlos Rowe, “Culture, US Imperialism, and Globalization,” American Literary History 16, no. 4 (2004), 576. 16. Rowe, 575. 17. David Campbell, “The Biopolitics of Security: Oil, Empire, and the Sports Utility Vehicle,” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (September 2005), 946. 18. Gitlin quoted in Campbell, 949. See Todd Gitlin, “In California, S.U.V. Owners Have Guilt, but Will Travel,” New York Times, February 8, 2003. 19. John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review 6, no. 1 (1953), 1–15. 20. http://www.toymania.com/news/messages/8453.shtml. 21. Julia Himberg, “The H3: Television Adveristing and the Reconfigured ‘Homeland’,” in The Hummer: Myths and Consumer Culture, ed. Elaine Cardenas and Ellen Gorman (New York: Lexington Books, 2007), 16. 22. Steven J. Zaloga, HMMWV Humvee 1980–2005: US Army Tactical Vehicle (Cambridge, England: Osprey, 2006), 3–4. 23. Zaloga, 8. 24. Mathews. 25. Patrick R. Foster, AM General: Hummers, Mutts, Buses and Postal Jeeps (Hudson, WI: Iconografix, 2005), 64–65. 26. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Hill & Wang, 1972). 27. www.hummer.com. 28. www.honda.com. 29. See Randel D. Hanson, “A Gated Community on Wheels,” 3–14, and Joanne Clarke Dillman, “Armored Bodies: The Hummer, The Schwarzenegger Persona, and Consumer Appeal,” 65–80, in The Hummer: Myths and Consumer Culture, ed. Elaine Cardenas and Ellen Gorman (New York: Lexington Books, 2007). 30. Campbell, 959. 31. http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=bQvXNrit9ns. 32. See David Kalat, A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla® Series (New York: McFarland, 2007); and William M. Tsutsui, Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 33. Himberg, 16. 34. Himberg, 16. 35. Mills, 205–206. 36. Mills, 205–206. 37. Mills, 205–206. 38. Woodrow Wilson, “Peace without Victory, January 22, 1917, http://www

Notes to Pages 194–202 \\ 297

.firstworldwar.com/source/peacewithoutvictory.htm. See also Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2005), 11. 39. Bacevich, 11. 40. Bacevich, 11. 41. Bacevich, 181. 42. Horkheimer and Adorno, 120. 43. Plato, The Republic, trans. John Llewelyn Davies and David James Vaughan (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 88; Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher, www.forgottenbooks .com, 2–3. 44. Micheal Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), 52. 45. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 52. 46. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 52. 47. Jeff Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference’: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art,” in The Last Picture Show, ed. Douglas Fogle (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003), 38. 48. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (London: Continuum, 2004), 98–118. 49. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 163. 50. Adorno, 164. 51. Adorno, 164. 52. Adorno, 164. 53. http://www.jungeart.com/. 54. Horkheimer and Adorno, 120. 55. Committee on the Effectiveness and Impact of Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standards, Effectiveness and Impact of Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standards (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2002), 1. 56. Paul E. Godek, “The Regulation of Fuel Economy and the Demand for ‘Light Trucks’,” The Journal of Law and Economics 40, no. 2 (October 1997), 495; Committee on the Effectiveness and Impact of Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standards, 1, 10. 57. Godek, 497. 58. Godek, 503. 59. Lacan, Book VII, 177. 60. Lacan, Book VII, 177. 61. http://angiewaller.com/installation/protect-­yourself/. 62. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (New York: Mariner Books, 1977), 87; Sandra Skurvida, “Image Drives,” Custom Car Commandos, catalog for a video exhibition at Art in General, January 16–March 7, 2009, New York. 63. Alex Villar, http://www.de-­tour.org/projects/2008/01/crash-­course.html. 64. Eliza Williams, “The Artist Jeremy Deller,” Creative Review (December 3, 2007).

298 // Notes to Pages 202–218

65. Billet for It Is What It Is: Conversations about Iraq, disseminated at Southern Methodist University, April 11, 2009. 66. Jeremy Deller, “Story of the Car,” http://www.conversationsaboutiraq.org/story .php. 67. Deller. 68. Žižek, 31–32. 69. I downloaded these videos from YouTube.com in 2008; by August 2010 they had been removed likely because they functioned to bring on the digital real, that is, to function as anti-­war tactics on the Internet. 70. http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=GRC9SDaQj7o. 71. Žižek, 33. 72. Žižek, 31–32. 73. http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=i4zU4yIRIdk. 74. http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=eoRpfRhXDFc. 75. http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=xMdHKOUm7NM. 76. Anonymous entry, “Aegis Defence Services,” at http://www.sourcewatch.org /index.php?title=Aegis_Defence_Services. 77. David Phinney, “From Mercenaries to Peacemakers: Scandals Confront Military Security Industry” (November 29, 2005), http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php ?id=12829. 78. Anonymous entry, “Aegis Defence Services,” at http://www.sourcewatch.org /index.php?title=Aegis_Defence_Services. 79. Lacan, Book VII, 21. 80. Philippe Julien, Jacques Lacan’s Return to Freud: The Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary, trans. Devra Beck Simiu (New York: New York University Press, 1994). A longer, more elaborate discussion of Lacan’s ideas of chance and the real would involve the Greek terms tyché, automaton, and clinamen. See Lacan’s 1964 seminar “Tyché and Automaton,” Book VII, 43–62. 81. Lacan, Book XI, 55.

Chapter 6

1. See Cotten Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), especially the introduction, “Automobility and American Subjectivity,” 1–16, and Chapter 3, “Crafting Autonomous Subjects: Automobility and the Cold War,” 69–104; Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 204–205, 168–169. 2. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” (1927), in Sigmund Freud: Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 215. 3. Ed Pilkington, “My Way or the Highway,” Guardian, October 11, 2007, www.Guard ian.co.uk.

Notes to Pages 219–228 \\ 299

4. Richard Prince in an interview with Larry Clark, in 4×4, by Richard Prince (New York: Powerhouse Books, 1998). 5. Pilkington. 6. Pilkington. 7. Randy Kennedy, “The Duchamp of the Muscle Car,” New York Times, September 23, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/arts/design/23kenn.html. 8. I owe this brilliant insight to Michael Corris. 9. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 165. 10. Eleanor Heartney, “The Strategist,” Art in America 3 (March 2008), 145. 11. Roberta Smith, “Tracing a Radical’s Progress without Any Help from Him,” New York Times, February 9, 2007. 12. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 231. 13. For a discussion on the early work of Richard Prince, see Michael Lobel, The Fugitive Artist: The Early Work of Richard Prince, 1974–77 (Purchase, NY: Neuberger Museum of Art Purchase College, 2007), 45–46. 14. Lobel, 45. 15. For a more recent account of Richard Prince as a postmodernist, see Michael Newman, Richard Prince “Untitled” (couple) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Afterall Books, 2006). 16. Michael Taussig, “Maleficium: State Fetishism,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 217–247; William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (Spring 1985), 5–17. 17. Taussig, 225. 18. Taussig, 225. 19. Nancy Spector, “Nowhere Man,” in Richard Prince (New York: Guggenheim Museum Press, 2007), 26–27; Lisa Phillips, “People Keep Asking: An Introduction,” in Richard Prince, ed. Lisa Phillips (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 21–23. 20. Jeffrey Rian, “Social Science Fiction: An Interview with Richard Prince,” Art in America 75 (March 1987), 90. 21. In discussion with Rian, Prince describes artists who think art is an “official fiction” (Rian, 90). 22. Rian, 91; see also Richard Prince, “Walter Dahn Interview,” Journal of Contemporary Art 7 (Summer 1994), 112–127. Prince says, “I hear the same and the difference, that’s always been very structural to my own work. You organized it in a way in which you find there is similarity and in that similarity there is a fascination. It becomes a surprise. It’s very unreal at first but once you make the connection then it turns into something meaningful” (117). 23. Prince, “Walter Dahn Interview,” 117. 24. Prince, interviewed by Rian, 94. 25. Prince, interviewed by Rian, 94. 26. Prince, interviewed by Rian, 94. Prince says, “You have to adapt to a protean world.

300 // Notes to Pages 229–236

I can wear a golf hat and motorcycle boots at the same time. I can have style and be unreasonable simultaneously” (94). 27. Michelle Grabner, “On Bullshit, Lies, Truthiness, and Parafiction,” X-­tra 11, no. 3 (Spring 2009), 48. 28. Richard Prince, “In Propria Persona,” in Richard Prince, by Nancy Spector (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2007), 333. 29. Richard Prince, “Shaggy Dogg: Gareth James on Colin de Land,” Artforum International 41, no. 10 (Summer 2003), 29–30 (obituary commentary by several individuals in the art world). 30. From a discussion with the art and language artist Michael Corris, who lived in New York at the time. 31. Spector, 43. 32. Spector, 43. Spector quotes Jeff Rian’s essay “In the Picture.” 33. Spector, 41. 34. Prince, “In Propria Persona,” 330. 35. http://dictionary.law.com/Default.aspx?selected=975. 36. Spector, 43. 37. Prince, “In Propria Persona,” 333. 38. For the etymology of the word “fiction,” see the entry at http://dictionary.oed .com.libproxy.utdallas.edu; for the etymology of the word “fetish,” see William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish,” Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (Spring 1987), 24. 39. Pietz, “Fetish, II,” 24. 40. Carrie Lambert-­Beatty, “Make Believe: Socially-­Engaged Art and the Aesthetics of the Plausible,” http://www.blumology.net/CarrieLambertChicago.pdf; 2; a longer version of this article is available as “Make Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility,” October 129 (Summer 2009), 51–84. 41. Lambert-­Beatty, 2. 42. Grabner, 51. 43. Prince in an excerpt of an interview with Barbara Kruger from Bomb (Spring 1982), quoted by Grabner, 52. 44. www.dictionary.com. 45. Spector says the “Ballard interview should be read at face value, as almost possible in the way that Prince’s appropriated photographs are almost believable” (23). 46. Richard Prince, “Extra-­ordinary,” in Spiritual America (New Haven, CT: Eastern Press, 1989), 9. 47. Prince, “Extra-­ordinary,” 10. 48. Prince, “Extra-­ordinary,” 11. 49. Three novels by Ballard correspond to these descriptions: Drowned World (1962), The Unlimited Dream Company (1979), and High Rise (1975). 50. Jack Bankowsky, “Ciao Rensselaerville,” in Richard Prince, by Nancy Spector (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2007), 342–343. 51. Richard Prince, “Collecting: Bringing It All back Home,” in Richard Prince: American English (London: Sadie Coles HQ, 2003), unpaginated.

Notes to Pages 237–244 \\ 301

52. Prince, “Collecting.” 53. Bankowski, 343. 54. J. G. Ballard, “Airports,” first appeared in the Observer, September 14, 1997, now available at http://www.jgballard.com/airports.htm. 55. J. G. Ballard, Crash (New York: Picador, 2001), 53. 56. Ballard, Crash, 28. 57. Ballard, Crash, 104. 58. J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, an Autobiography (London: Fourth Estate, 2009), 238. 59. Ballard, Miracles, 239. 60. Ballard, Miracles, 240. 61. Lisa Phillips, “Charles Ray: Castaway,” in Charles Ray, ed. Russell Ferguson and Stephanie Emerson (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998), 102. See also Virginia Rutledge, “Ray’s Reality Hybrids,” Art in America 86, no. 11 (November 1998), 96–100, 142–143. 62. Prince, 4×4. Both 4×4 and The Girl Next Door (Los Angeles: MAK Center for Art and Architecture, 2000) are affiliated with exhibitions of photographs that took place in spring 2000, the former with a show at the MAK Galerie in Vienna and the latter with the exhibition Upstate at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles. 63. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911). 64. Prince, 4×4, 51. 65. Steve Lafreniere, interview with Richard Prince, Artforum International 41, no. 7 (March 2003), 71. 66. Lafrienier, 71. 67. Richard Prince, Why I Go to the Movies Alone (New York: Tanam Press, 1983), 53–59. 68. Prince, Movies, 55. 69. Prince, Movies, 55. 70. Prince, Girl, 18–19. 71. Ralph Rugoff, “Yard Work,” International Artforum 39, no. 1 (September 2000), 155. 72. Gael Sweeney, “The King of White Trash Culture: Elvis Presley and the Aesthetics of Excess,” in White Trash: Race and Class in America, ed. Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray (New York: Routledge Press, 1996), 249. 73. Sweeney, 250. 74. Mike Hill, “Can Whiteness Speak?” in White Trash: Race and Class in America, ed. Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray (New York: Routledge Press, 1996), 155–156. 75. I thank New York–based artist Ryan Humphrey for the connection between Gauguin in Tahiti and Prince in the white trash outback. 76. Julia Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-­mêmes (Paris: Folio “essais,” 1991). 77. Nathaniel Mackey, “Other: From Noun to Verb,” Representations 39 (Summer 1992), 53.

302 // Notes to Pages 244–254

78. Mackey, 53. 79. Mackey, 51. 80. Walton Muyumba, The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 141–143. 81. Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray, introduction to White Trash: Race and Class in America, ed. Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray (New York: Routledge Press, 1996), 2. 82. Kristine McKenna, “First House: A Project for Artforum by Richard Prince,” Artforum International 32, no. 4 (December 1993), 57. 83. Images of First House are available at http://www.regenprojects.com/exhibi tions/1993-­04-­richard-­prince/. 84. McKenna, 57. 85. McKenna, 57. 86. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (New York: Penguin Books, 2003). Also available at http://people.emich.edu/acoykenda/uncanny1.htm and http://people.emich.edu/acoy kenda/uncanny2.htm. 87. Glenn O’Brien in an interview with Richard Prince, “Are We Having Fun Yet?” Blind Spot 11 (1998), unpaginated. 88. Prince speaking with O’Brien, unpaginated. See also Dominick Ammirati’s interview with Prince, “Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere,” Modern Painters (September 2007), 67–73. 89. See the press release from 2005 available at http://www.guggenheim.org/new -­york/press-­room/releases/press-­release- ­archive/2005/617-­april-­29-­guggenheim-­mu seum-­to-­acquire-­richard-­princes-­qsecond-­houseq. 90. Randy Kennedy, “Art: The Duchamp of the Muscle Car,” New York Times, September 23, 2007. 91. Freud, The Uncanny. 92. Kristine McKenna, She: Works by Wallace Berman and Richard Prince (Los Angeles: Michael Kohn Gallery, 2009). 93. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1977), 54. 94. Richard Prince quoted in Carol Squiers, “Is Richard Prince a Feminist?” Art in America 81 (November 1993), 118. 95. Squiers, 119. 96. Bernadette Wegenstein, Getting under the Skin: The Body and Media Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 26. 97. Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 3. 98. Louise J. Kaplan, Cultures of Fetishism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 75. 99. See Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty, Ecological Urbanism (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2010). 100. Mary Marples, “The Human Skin as an Ecosystem,” in Ecology: The Shaping Enquiry, ed. Jonathan Benthall (London: Longman, 1972), 116–117.

Notes to Pages 254–261 \\ 303

Conclusion

I owe thanks to Sophia Terranova for reference to the Tom Ford interview on Fresh Air. 1. Barbara Hess, “Sylvie Fleury,” in Women Artists: In the Twentieth and Twenty-­First Century, ed. Uta Grosenick (London: Taschen, 2001), 137. 2. Adrian Dannat, “Marketing and Minimalism in Fleury’s Fictional Femininity,” Parkett 58 (May 2000), 79. 3. Ford. 4. Peter Baofu, The Future of Posthuman Engineering: A Preface to a New Theory of Technology (Cambridge, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 5–8. 5. Mark B. N. Hansen, Embodying Technesis: Technology beyond Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 7. 6. David E. Cooper, Existentialism (Oxford, England: Blackwell Press, 1990), 127–146. 7. Ford. 8. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1995), 12. 9. Gilbert Simondon, “Technical Mentality,” trans. Arne De Boever, Parrhesia, no. 7 (2009), 23. 10. Simondon, 23. 11. Simondon, 23. 12. Ford. 13. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­ Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge Press, 1991), 152. 14. Ford. 15. Ford. 16. Ford. 17. Haraway, 154. 18. Haraway, 150. 19. David E. Cooper, Existentialism: A Reconstruction (Oxford, England: Blackwell Press, 1990), 148. 20. See Cotten Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Paul Mason Fotsch, “The Buiding of a Superhighway Future at the New York World’s Fair,” Cultural Critique 48 (Spring 2001), 65–97; and Sanford Lakoff, “Autonomy and Liberal Democracy,” The Review of Politics 52, no. 3 (Summer 1990), 378–396. 21. Jean-­Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 1–46. 22. Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays, 35. 23. Jean-­Paul Sartre, “Freedom and Responsibility,” in Essays in Existentialism, ed. Wade Baskin (Toronto: Carol Publishing Group, 1999), 63.

304 // Notes to Pages 266–273

24. Jean-­Paul Sartre, The Emotions: Outline of a Theory, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 2000), 201. 25. Jean-­Paul Sartre, Nausea (New York: Penguin Modern Classics, 2007), 127. 26. Brian Massumi, Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 27–28. 27. Brian Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 104. 28. Jonathan Wiley, “The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema: Contrasting Practices in the Sixties and Seventies,” October 103 (Winter 2003), 28.

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Index Acconci, Vito, 45 Adorno, Theodor, 24, 190–191, 195, 202– 205, 211 advertising: and J. G. Ballard, 245– 246; and Roland Barthes, 48, 197; and Tom Ford, 269; and Dan Graham’s Homes for America, 168, 170; and the Hummer, 199; and Marshall McLuhan, 48; and Richard Prince’s work, 230–231, 235, 257–258 AEGIS, 224 affection-­body, 100, 104–106, 109, 113 affectivity, 115–124, 147, 165, 275 Afghanistan, 190, 196, 201, 205 Agamben, Giorgio, 104n39, 281 agency, 16, 44, 105, 109, 155, 190–195, 205, 217, 219–226 Akins, Tara, 263 Alberro, Alexander, 95, 161, 167 Altman, Robert, 24; and the film Nashville, 118, 145–146, 149 American Dream, 5, 151, 169, 256 American Fine Arts, 237 AM General, 188 André, Carl, 158 Ant Farm, 24, 118, 128, 130–133 Anzieu, Didier, 25, 260–261 Appleyard, Donald, 174–177 Arcangel, Cory, 23, 59, 109–112 Aristotle, 203 Artforum, 10, 30, 82, 169, 186, 255 Artlab (Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine Richard), 24, 128, 134 Arts Magazine, 161, 163 Atlas Group, The, 255 Austin, Texas, 274 automotive prosthetic. See prosthetic/ prosthesis

Baldessari, John, 23, 52, 59–62, 84–86 Ballard, J. G., 8, 25; and advertising, 252; and Crash, 241–245; exhibition at Arts Lab gallery in London, 246; personal car wreck of, 246; in Charles Ray’s work, 248; and symphorophilia, 8, 245, 246; and Quentin Tarantino, 275 Barnett, Jason, 263 Bartana, Yael, 24, 118, 147–149 Barthes, Roland: and “Death of the Author,” 80, 133; and Mythologies, 47–51, 196–197 Basevich, Andrew J., 201–203 Bateson, Gregory, 9–13, 67 Baudelaire, Charles, 18, 268, 270 Baxter, Iain, 23, 71–72 Baxter, Ingrid, 71–72 Benjamin, Walter, 24; and Internet art, 112; and “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 143–146; and “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 154–155, 231 Berman, Wallace, 257 Bildungsroman, 1, 274–275 billboard(s), 32–33, 41, 70–71, 111, 165– 177 biopolitics. See Foucault, Michel Birnbaum, 111–112 Black Mountain College, 52, 56 Bloom, Harold, 144 Blum, Michael, 255 Bois, Yve-­Alain, and entropy, 79–80 Bolter, Jay David, 105, 107, 113 Boston, Massachusetts, 174–177 Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 4 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 217 Bowery, New York, 90–95 breasts, 261–262

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Buick Grand National, 257–259 Bullitt, 238–239, 275 Burnham, Jack: and relations, 37, 122, 123, 186, 192, 203, 217, 260; and Software, 11, 200; and systems aesthetics, 9–10, 18, 186, 268 Burrows, Tom, 82 Bush, George H. W., 202 Bush, George W., 198, 199, 202, 212 Cabrera, Margarita, 193, 203, 205–208 Cage, John, 11, 48, 51–53, 62, 73 Campbell, David, 196 Cannonball Run, The, 137 car art, 1, 6, 8–9, 11, 28 Carter, Jimmy, 202 Cartier-­Bresson, Henri, 62–64 Cebelenski, Chris, 263 chance, and agency, 25, 64, 87, 138, 191, 195, 219–226 Chandler, John, 27 Chicago, Illinois, x Chevrolet El Camino, 258 Chevy Nova, 274 Chrysler, 6 Citroen DS, 50–51 clinamen, 25, 144 Clinton, Bill, 2o2 collage, 78, 152, 231, 251 conceptualism: vii, ix, 10, 23, 27–30, 35, 44, 59, 74, 77, 81–82, 105, 155, 158, 164–165, 167, 169, 186, 231; conceptual art, 2–12, 15–16, 22–23; and conceptual car art, 6, 8, 11, 14, 22, 27–56; and the conceptual turn, 8, 19, 23, 35–36, 41, 47–55, 59, 64, 106, 112; and photoconceptualism, 6, 23, 57–114 Conrad, Tony, 73 contemporary art, x Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE), 211–212 Corso, Gregory, 55 Corvette, 270

324 // Automotive Prosthetic

Crary, Jonathan, 12, 14–17 Crash exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, London, 242–244 Creative Time, 193, 218 Crewdson, Gregory, 115–120, 126, 133 Crimp, Douglas, 63 Cubism, 35 cultural militarism, 187–226 Cunningham, Merce, 56 cybernetics. See perception Cybernetic Serendipity, 11 cyborg, 12–19, 23, 29, 44, 45, 49, 59, 74, 85, 96–98, 100, 178–186, 268, 271–277 Dallas, Texas, x, xi, 135, 210, 211, 212; and Dallas Morning News, xi; and Dallas Observer, xi Death Proof. See Tarantino, Quentin de Duve, Thierry, 35 de Kooning, Willem, 231 de Land, Colin. See Prince, Richard Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, 17, 73 DeLillo, Don, 116–120, 126 Deller, Jeremy, 193, 203, 217–219 dematerialization, 6, 9, 14, 35 Derrida, Jacques, 17, 58, 270 Descartes, René, 139 Dick, P. K., 252 di Suvero, Mark, 75 documentary: and film, 128–134, 141, 148; in Dan Graham’s work, 165, 168; and photography, 38, 63, 74, 77–82, 89–108; in Angie Waller’s work, 193– 194; and Youtube.com, 219–226 Dodge: Dodge Challenger referenced in Richard Prince’s work, 243; in the game Ship’s Mast in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, 275; Edward Kienholz’s Back Seat Dodge, 100; Richard Prince’s reproduction of a 1970 Dodge Challenger, 228–229; in Vanishing Point, 239

Doppler effect, 124 Drexler, Arthur, 4 Drezner, Amy, 263 Duchamp, Marcel, 35, 48, 50, 59, 80, 110, 229–230, 237 Duel, 135–136 Düsseldorf NRW-­Forum Kultur und Wirtschaft, 4 Dutch Electronic Art Festival, 122 ecology. See perception eidos, 260 embodiment, 31–32, 36, 97–100, 109, 121 enaction, 104, 149 entropy, 23, 74–80, 147, 174, 262 Esquire, 164 Export, Valie, 259 exteriority, 17, 170 Facebook, 111, 262–263 Fast and Furry-­ous, ix feedback loop, 2–12, 18–19, 22, 25, 42, 44, 84, 163, 166–186, 262 Feininger, Lyonel, 167 Ferus Gallery, 70 fetish, 25, 28, 51, 99, 120, 227–264; and Sigmund Freud, 228–232, 256–260; and Karl Marx, 230–232; and mischief in Richard Prince’s work (see maleficium); and Michael Taussig, 233–235 fiction: and Tom Ford and body modification, 269; in Hollywood catastrophe, 196; and parafiction, 240–242, 255; and Richard Prince’s autobiography, 241–242; and Richard Prince and J. G. Ballard, 243–245; and Richard Prince and P. K. Dick, 252; in Richard Prince’s work, 233, 235–236, 237–244; and science fiction in Dan Graham’s work, 76, 178 Fine Arts Gallery, University of British Columbia, 82

Flavin Dan, 75, 158 Fleming, Dean, 75 Fleury, Sylvie, 266–268 Flick, Robbert, 59, 207–208 Fluxus, 45, 52, 55 Flynt, Henry, 73 Fogle, Douglas, 62–64 Forakis, Peter, 75 Ford, Tom, 265–266 Ford Motor Company, 6 Fort Worth, Texas, xi, 211 Foucault, Michel, 15, 152; and biopolitics, 15–16, 155, 169, 266 Frank, Robert, 7, 23, 55, 59, 62 freedom: and consumer choice, 3–5, 15, 215; and existentialism, 59, 120, 217, 272–274, 277; and liberal democracy, 96, 205, 216, 265, 276; and the open road, 16, 53, 139, 145, 227, 265 Fresh Air, 267 Freud, Sigmund, 17, 25, 32, 154, 192. See also fetish Frieze Fair, 228–229 General Motors, 6, 187 Gesamtkunstwerk, 246 Ginsberg, Allen, 55 Gitlin, Todd, 196 Glasstire.com, xi Godzilla, 199 Grabner, Michelle, 237, 240–241 Graham, Dan, 24; and architecture, 157–177; and the car, 152–156; and feedback city, 177–186; haptic unconscious, 151–157; and Homes for America, 152–168; and Marshall McLuhan, 183; and Radical Software, 183–184 Green, Jeff, 264 Greenberg, Clement, 38, 42–43 Greenough, Sarah, 6 Gropius, Walter, 167 Gross, Terry, 266–269

Index \\ 325

Grosvenor, Robert, 75 Grusin, Richard, 105, 107, 113 Gucci, 269–270 Guggenheim Fellowship, 60 Guggenheim Museum, New York, 7, 231, 256, 257 Guimard, Hector, 33 Haacke, Hans, 19–20 Hansen, Mark B. N.: and the affection-­ body, 100, 104–106; and embodiment, 23, 32; and enaction, 149; and retention and protention, 122–123; and technesis, 16–17, 46, 270; and the time of affect, 121–127 haptic unconscious. See perception Haraway, Donna: and the cyborg-­subject, 23, 44, 49–50, 98, 269, 271–272; and prosthesis, 17–18 Harper’s Bazaar, 161 Harvard University, xi Harvey, Jonathan, 218 Harvey, William, 19 Hayles, N. Katherine, 23; and cybernetics, 97–100 Heartney, Eleanor, 91, 231 Heidegger, Martin, 17 heimlich/unheimlich, 257 Herodotus, 139 Higgins, Dick, 55 High Museum, 4 Hiratsuka Museum of Art, 4 Hopper, Dennis, 23, 38, 59, 69–72 Horkheimer, Max, 24, 190–191, 195, 211 Hubbard, Teresa, and Alexander Birchler, 24, 139–143 Hugo, Victor, 47 Hummer, 24, 45, 187–226; and the Real, 190–193, 219–226; and repression, 190–193, 195–202; and sublimation, 190–193, 203–219 Humphrey, Ryan, 263 Humvee, 188

326 // Automotive Prosthetic

Husserl, Edmund, 121–123, 127; and epoché, 127–128, 144 Huxley, Aldous, 68 infrastructure: and J. G. Ballard, 244; and billboards, 172; and Harold Bloom, 144; the body and systems of, 2–4; and Boston, 176; and conceptual formation of, 31–32; and Dan Graham’s Homes for America, 165; and Marshall McLuhan, 66; and networks of, 22; and Julian Opie, 41; and the phenomenology of motion, 57–58; and Charlotte Posenenske, 131; and Richard Prince, 249, 253, 261, 262; and Gilbert Simondon, 271; and war destruction of, 219 Ingwersen, Anna, 263 Institute for Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 172 Iraq War, Second, 189–226 Iron Man film franchise, 17 James, William, 23, 134 Jameson, Fredric, 17 Jean, Marie Josée, ix Jetztzeit. See nows Johnson, Philip, 167 Joselit, David, 178–179 Joseph, Branden, 73 Judd, Donald, 75–76, 158, 229 Junge, Andrew, 193, 203, 207–209 Kafka, Franz, 73 Kaprow, Allan, 45 Katrina (hurricane), 198 Kelley, Mike, 73 Kerouac, Jack, 48, 51–55, 62 Kienholz, Edward, 23, 59, 100–109 kinetic art/kineticism, 33, 46, 120, 186 kitsch, 31, 169, 229–230 Klein, Yves, 62–63 Kline, Franz, 239

Kluijver, Robert, 218 Krauss, Rosalind, 6, 35–36, 62, 79–80, 154–155; and post-­medium condition, 6, 42, 46 Kristeva, Julia, 17, 254–255 Kruger, Barbara, 241 Kurjakovic, Daniel, 126 Kury, Michael James, 263 kybernetes, 2, 16, 22, 96 KZM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany, 7 Lacan, Jacques, 17; and desire and the Law of the Father, 220, 221, 225–226; and the real, 24–25; and Slavoj Žižek, 190–195, 212–213 Lafitte, Jacques, 13 Lafreniere, Steve, 251–252 Lambert-­Beatty, Carrie, 240, 255 Las Vegas. See space Lawther, Margaret, 23, 59, 64–66, 70 Lebanon, Tennessee, 274 Lee, Pamela M., 38, 113 Leslie, Alfred, 55 LeWitt, Sol, 75, 81–82, 158 Lichtenstein, Roy, 63, 76, 154, 160–161, 169 Light, Jennifer, 172–175 Ligon, Peter, 193, 203, 210 Lippard, Lucy, 27 looking-­at versus looking-­through. See perception Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 4 Lunden, Duane, 82 Lynch, Kevin, 174–177 Lyotard, Jean-­François, 102–103 machismo, 192, 222, 228, 238, 239, 274 Mackey, Nathaniel, 254–255 Magar, Anthony, 75 maleficium, 227, 232–236 manhood, 227–228 manufacturing: American automotive

market, 68; and American dominance, 48; and armaments, 195, 197; and automotive urbanisms, 30; and city centers, 174; and cybernetic networks, 12; and Fordist and Just In Time, 3; and freedom, 139; and Humvees, 188; and Margaret Lawther, 66; and obsolescence of, 120; and Julian Opie, 39; and Richard Prince, 234, 240, 252 Marples, Mary, 261–262 Marx, Karl, 25. See also fetish Maserati, 270 Massachusetts: Adams, 118; Cambridge, ix; Lee, 118; Pittsfield, 118 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 11, 172, 175–176 Massumi, Brian, 275–277 Mattison, Robert Saltonstall, 52–53 McCarthy, Paul, 23, 38, 59, 69–72 McDonald’s, 64, 196 McKenna, Kristine, 256–257 McLuhan, Marshall: amputation and auto-­amputation, 58; and architecture, 160–161; and Gregory Bateson, 67; and exteriority, 270; and feedback, 178; and Dan Graham, 183, 186; and the highway, 84; and hot and cold media, 18; and Margaret Lawther’s work, 66; and posthumanism, 98; and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 43–44, 47–50 McQueen, Steve, 238–239 mechanology. See Simondon, Gilbert mediation: and architecture within Dan Graham’s work, 157, 161, 171; and conceptual art, 28, 29, 36, 62–64, 74; and critic and artist Brian O’Doherty’s thinking, 32; and Robbert Flick’s work, 107–108; and Edward Kienholz’s work, 103; and Marshall McLuhan, 43–50; and moving-­image art, 124, 129, 137; and the mutable

Index \\ 327

subject-­object in Dan Graham’s work, 177, 179–180, 186; and Julian Opie’s work, 39–42; and Richard Prince’s work, 234, 236; and remediation, 106–107, 109–110; and Tony Smith’s drive along the New Jersey Turnpike, 33–34, 45–47; and technology, 6, 23, 35; in Angie Waller’s work, 193; and Raymond Williams, 36–37; and YouTube.com, 220 medium, 18, 33–47 Melcher, Tamara, 75 Meraz, Jesse, 263 Mercedes, 243 Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice, 97, 121–123 Messianism, 144 Metropolis, 269 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 48, 154, 156, 167 military metaphysics. See Mills, C. Wright Mills, C. Wright, 189, 194, 201 mimesis, 53; in Dan Graham’s Homes for America, 158, 165; in Dan Graham’s video work, 178; in representations of the Hummer in art, 192–193, 203– 205, 211–214, 217; in Martha Rosler’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, 93; in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, 274 minimalism, 34, 158, 169 Mitchell, W. J. T., 124 mobility. See Hummer; perception Moholy-­Nagy, Laszlo, 35, 48 Monster Trucks, 249 Montreal, Canada, ix, 4, 8, 77–79 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 4 Morris, Robert, 11, 75 muscle car: in the work of Richard Prince, 227, 228–230, 237–240, 243– 244, 248, 254–255; in the work of Jonathan Schipper, 8, 19, 21, 25, 116, 120, 126; in Quentin Taratino’s Death Proof, 275

328 // Automotive Prosthetic

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 4 Museum of Modern Art, New York, 3–4, 12, 19–20 Myer, John R., 174–177 Myers, Forrest, 75 Namuth, Hans, 239 Nashville. See Altman, Robert Nashville, Tennessee, ix National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, 5 National Public Radio, 267 Neel, Alice, 55 N. E. Thing Co. See Baxter, Iain network(s): absence/presence, 99; in Dan Graham’s work, 151–186; pattern/ randomness, 99 Neurath, Otto, 39–41, 126 New Jersey Turnpike, 23, 29, 34, 37, 39, 42–43, 45, 53 Newton, Isaac, 19, 116, 120, 139 New York Times, 187, 188, 196, 251 Nicosia, Nic, 24, 118, 128, 133–135 Nintendo, 111 nows, 115–124; and compresence, 125– 127; and deep now of the long perpetual road, 124–136; and the episodic and narrative, 136–142; and Jetztzeit, 112, 143–149 Obama, Barack, 202 O’Brien, Glenn, 256 O’Doherty, Brian, 29–33, 154 Oldenberg, Claes, 206 Olson, Charles, 56 Opie, Julian, 23, 33–44, 59, 109–112, 125– 127 Oursler, Tony, 73 Owens, Bill, 164 Panama Canal Zone, 241–242 Pasha, Esham, 218

Pat Hearn Gallery, 237 perception: and cybernetics, 8–9, 11–13, 17, 19, 57, 97, 160, 167, 172–174; and ecology, 5, 8–10, 18, 39, 64, 67, 101, 109, 208, 249, 261–262; and haptic unconscious, 22, 24, 151–156; and looking-­at versus looking-­through, 1–8, 10, 14, 51, 102, 279n4; and mobility, 57–114 phenomenology, 12–14, 19, 22, 57–58, 97, 273; pop phenomenology, 29–34, 154 Philadelphia Museum of Art, 170–171 Phillips, Lisa: and Charles Ray, 247; and Richard Prince’s early work, 88–89 photoconceptualism. See conceptualism photoconceptual view to the road, 60–96 Pichler, Franz, 7 Picon, Antoine, 178 Piper, Keith, 104–105 Pliny, 240 Plymouth, 135–136 Pollock, Jackson, 239 Pontiac: and J. G. Ballard, 246; and Charles Ray, 247 pop phenomenology. See phenomenology Porsche, 270 Posenenske, Charlotte, 24, 130–132 posthuman, 10, 12, 96–105, 266–272 posthumanism, 98 post-­medium condition. See Krauss, Rosalind Prince, Richard, 7, 23, 25, 59; and Abstract Expressionists as method actors, 239; and automotive fetishes, 227–262; and J. G. Ballard, 241–246; with Colin de Land as John Dogg, 232–233, 237–239; and the othering of white trash culture, 249–256; and photographic skins on cars, 257–262; and Rennselaerville, NY, 251, 257; and Spiritual America (1989), 228; and views to the road, 87–89

Prokopoff, Stephen S., 172 prosthetic/prosthesis, ix, xi, 17–18, 43–44, 58–59, 66, 98, 106; automotive prosthetic, xi, 8–10, 57–114, 115–150 Raʾad, Walid, 255 Radical Software, 24, 183–184 Rand Corporation, 172 Rauschenberg, Robert, 11, 38, 48, 51–55, 56, 62 Ray, Charles, 247–248 Reagan, Ronald, 202 remediation, 106–113 representation: and entropy, 75–77; and Tom Ford, 269; and Dan Graham, 158, 164–165; and Hummer/SUV art, 203, 205, 210–211; and minor beauty, 73; and photoconceptualism, 59; and Richard Prince, 249, 253; and remediation, 106–107; and Martha Rosler, 90; and technology, 6, 39 Richards, M. C., 56 Riesman, David, 180–181 Rivers, Larry, 55 Road Runners (exhibition), ix–x Rosen, Jonathon, 187–188 Rosler, Martha, 23, 59, 89–96 Rotman, Brian, 14, 36, 109 Rowe, John Carolos, 195–196 Ruda, Ed, 75 Rudofsky, Bernard, 4 Rugoff, Ralph, 252 Ruscha, Edward, ix, 23, 59, 70, 80, 81, 108 Russell, Bertrand, 38, 125–127, 133 Russell, Kurt, 274–275 Sartre, Jean-­Paul: and Nausea, 273–274; and No Exit, 272–273 Schipper, Jonathan, 8, 19, 21, 116, 120, 140 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 66–68 Schmidgen, Henning, 20 Schneeman, Carolee, 45, 259

Index \\ 329

Schumacher, Joel, 24, 118, 145, 149; and Falling Down, 146–147 Serexhe, Bernhard, 7 Shelley, Mary, 169 Shepperton, UK, 245 Shunk, Harry, 62 Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machines, 187 Siegel, Katy, 120 Simondon, Gilbert, 12–22, 271; and mechanology, 8–9, 12–13, 17–19 skin: and J. G. Ballard, 245–246; and Gregory Bateson’s “Mind,” 24; and Margarita Cabrera’s soft sculptures, 206; and ear-­eye-­skin continuum, 57, 105; and Sylvie Fleury’s work, 266, 268; and kybernetes, 22; and Marshall McLuhan’s sense of housing, 160–161; and Richard Prince’s photographic skins, 25, 257–263; and Erwin Wurm’s work, 267 Smith, Benedict, 263 Smith, Grant, 263 Smith, Roberta, 35; and Didier Anzieu’s skin-­ego, 260, 273–274; and microbial population, 261; and Gilbert Simondon, 271 Smith, Tony, 23, 29, 33–35, 42–43, 53, 113 Smithson, Robert, 75–76, 80, 84, 158 Smokey and the Bandit, 137 Sony Portapak, 36–38 Southern Methodist University/SMU, ix, xi, 211 space: and automotive urbanism, 5, 30; and Baghdad, 24, 219–224; communication space, 151–187; and highways, xi, 5, 12, 22, 68, 73, 76, 145, 152, 159, 166–178, 249, 253; and Las Vegas, 29–33, 169, 172, 177 space-­time mobility: in communication space, 151–186; in moving images and automobiles, 115–150; in trains, 66–68

330 // Automotive Prosthetic

Spielberg, Steven, 135–136 sports utility vehicle (SUV), 38, 188, 191– 198, 210–213, 220–221 Stiegler, Bernard, 123, 134, 160 Styrofoam, 207–208 suburbia, 76, 140, 151, 154, 158–160, 164, 181, 184 Sunset Boulevard, ix, 69–71, 80–81, 108 Sweeney, Gael, 253–254 Swiss National Radio Broadcast, 126 symphorophilia. See Ballard, J. G. systems aesthetics, 9–10, 19, 57, 120, 186 systems theory, 10–14, 18, 24, 39, 41, 75, 90–93, 97, 99, 124, 161, 165, 261–262 Tampa Museum of Art, 207 Tarantino, Quentin, and Death Proof, 265, 273–275 Taussig, Michael, 204, 233–235 Taut, Bruno, 167 technesis, 17, 46 technology: analogue, 11–13, 31, 63, 97– 108, 121, 245; digital, 11–13, 31–36, 97– 123, 178, 193–194, 203, 222, 225, 262 television/TV, 46, 47, 55, 67, 118, 131, 136, 252; and cultural militarism, 195–196, 219, 220, 245–246; in Dan Graham’s work, 160–166, 173, 177, 178, 179, 181, 183, 185 Terranova, Sophia, 263 Thelma and Louise, 276 Thompson, Nato, 218 Thucydides, 139 Time Life, 235 Tinguely, Jean, 46, 120 train, 66–68 Transformers film franchise, 17 Tribe, Kerry, ix–x Tudor, David, 56 tyché, 191 United States Military, 223–225 University of Texas at Dallas, xi

Valledor, Leo, 75 Vanishing Point, 229, 275 Van Ness, David Winslow, 263 Varela, Francisco, 23, 121, 127–135, 144, 149 vast defeatured urban landscape, 74–96 Vazan, Bill, 23, 59, 77–79 Venturi, Robert, and Denise Scott Brown, 4, 24, 33, 154–172, 177 video, ix, 6, 8, 23–24, 28, 39, 41–42, 47, 69, 105, 108–149; and cultural militarism, 191–193, 196, 199, 203, 205, 213– 215, 220, 221–226; in Dan Graham’s work, 152, 158, 160–166, 174, 177–185; and YouTube.com, 24, 111, 189–191, 194, 198–226 Vidler, Anthony, 95–96 Villar, Alex, 8, 193, 203, 213–216 Virilio, Paul, 122 Vitruvian man, 180

Warhol, Andy, 30, 38, 215, 246–247, 270 Weaver, Dennis, 136 Wegenstein, Bernadette, 260 Weibel, Peter, 7 Wenders, Wim, 24, 136–142 Wheeler, Dennis, 82 whiteness, 254, 258 white trash culture, 228, 233, 236, 239, 249–263 Wiener, Norbert, 18–19, 160, 173 Wilcox, Donald J., 152 Williams, Raymond, 37 Wills, David, 58 Wilson, Fred, 255 Wilson, Woodrow, 202 Wurm, Erwin, 266–267 Wyeth, Andrew, 231–232

Wagstaff, Jr., Sam, 34, 37, 43, 45 Walker Art Museum, 62 Wall, Jeff, 23, 59, 64, 74, 82–83, 109, 165– 166, 204 Wallace, Ian, 23, 59, 82 Waller, Angie, 8, 193, 203, 213–215

YouTube.com. See video Yves Saint Laurent, 269

XV Motorsports, Irvington, New York, 229

Zionism, 148 Žižek, Slavoj, 194, 220–222

Index \\ 331