Artists have been inspired by the automobile since the moment of its invention as an emblem of the progress and destruction that is possible in the world. Even before the first automobiles were actually built, artists and visionaries, including Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer, depicted self-propelled machines that could be used for grandiose effect or a singular purpose. Over the years of its evolution, the car has compelled artists to grapple less with its actual mechanical innovations and technological developments and more with what the machine has symbolized from the moment it hit the road: personal freedom, a unique sense of possibility, and speed.
The experience of speed—a new experience of motion that only the automobile could offer—was an important element in the artistic representations of cars and car culture from the very beginning. In 1896, the same year that Henry Ford built his first four-wheeled car model, and only three years after Germany had begun to successfully manufacture and market the automobile, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec sketched a driving figure composed of squiggly lines and hatch marks— shoulders hunched, eyes goggled, hands gripping the steering wheel and gear shift—hurtling into the future. It was the driver’s sensation of forward propulsion that Toulouse-Lautrec felt compelled to represent rather than the automobile itself, which is only evidenced by a glimpse of the engine cover and steering mechanism.
For several years following the production of Lautrec’s lithograph, art and the automobile were conjoined mainly in advertisements for the various motor races held across Europe that promoted endurance and the dependability of the vehicle over its speed. The winner of one such race—Emile Levassor—has the distinction of being the subject of one of the grandest public monuments to honor the automobile, and one of the earliest sculptures of a car. The Monument to Emile Levassor, 1907, can be found at the Porte Maillot in Paris. Carved from marble, it portrays the driver and his winning automobile as if bursting from a Greco-Roman archway erected on the spot of the original finish line for the Paris-Bordeaux-Paris course. To win the race in 1895, Levassor traveled non-stop over seven hundred miles, at speeds averaging 15 miles per hour, for close to forty-eight hours, a feat unrivaled for several decades.
In 1909, with the publication of the "Manifeste du futurisme" in Le Figaro, the Italian Futurists embraced the automobile as the symbolic embodiment of the tenets of their beliefs: a rejection of the past in favor of modernization, machinery, youth, and speed. For the Futurists, the automobile set a new aesthetic standard, “We say that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot—is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” In fact, the automobile served as the subject of hundreds of paintings, drawings and prints by artists like Giacomo Balla, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini. Balla alone created more than one hundred works whose subject matter is the “speeding automobile or a visual record of its effects.”
Borrowing the pictorial vocabulary of fractured lines, overlapping planes and simultaneous perspectives from the Cubists, the Futurists strove to depict “speed and dynamism,” which they saw as the essence of the new reality, brought about by recent technological developments and the energy created by invigorated urban environments. Artists had previously included the image of the automobile in street scenes or racing announcements to signal its importance, but the Futurists represented the car as motion itself: sliced into sections, its form barely discernable through the planes of color and the curved or angular lines that propelled it forward in space and time.
The Futurists were not the only artists to recognize the powerful potential the automobile had in conveying this new world order. Dada artist Francis Picabia credits his excursions to America as provoking a revolution in his artistic production, portending the dominant role America would soon play in the artistic representation of the automobile when he declared, “Almost immediately upon coming to American it flashed on me that the genius of the modern world is machinery, and that through machinery art ought to find a most vivid expression.” Spark plugs, cooling fans and other elements from car engines had a profound influence on Picabia’s art. His erotic object-portrait series from 1915-1917 portrays figures from the artist’s life as the machine parts themselves, with the human form replaced by the seductive elements of motors. It is no surprise that the artist is said to have owned over one hundred cars in his lifetime.
The promise represented by automobiles in works of art from the turn of the century through the 1920s gave way in the 1930s to a more sobering and critical view. Influenced by the economic collapse of the Great Depression, depictions of the highways and byways of the United States as leading to a bright future were soon replaced by desolate stretches of road, intermittently populated by the derelict auto garage found in Aaron Bohrod’s Landscape Near Chicago (1934), and marked by the perilous curves of Grant Wood’s Death on the Ridge Road (1935). Perhaps more than any other artist at the time, Edward Hopper captured the profound loneliness and alienation wrought by life on the road in his paintings of solitary figures seated in roadside diners and waiting in desolate motor lodges. It’s as if the speed and progress of previous decades had slowed to an almost interminable pace of desperation and failure.
With the resurgence of automobile production after WWII came a renewed interest in the car as emblematic of the profound changes taking place in American culture. Automobiles once again symbolized the positive aspects of culture at a time when upward mobility and mass-production became the American ideal. British and American Pop artists embraced the automobile with a passion not seen since the Futurists. They did so however with a more satirical eye. In the 1960s, Richard Hamilton, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselman strategically painted images of automobiles in ways that explored the various psychological dimensions of pop culture. Around the same time, Arman, John Chamberlain and Edward Keinholz used cars as the basis for sculptural works, both abstract and representational, that conveyed darker and more violent aspects of the automobile and culture at large.
This sculptural trend continued through the 1970s and ‘80s with such iconic works as Ant Farm’s Cadillac Ranch (1974), consisting of 10 Cadillacs buried front end into the ground in Armarillo Texas, and Arman’s Long Term Parking (1975-1982), a 65 foot tall column of concrete in which 60 cars are embedded. In a more performative vein, Chris Burden had himself crucified onto the back of a Volkswagen Beetle for Tans-Fixed (1974), and built a functional automobile, B-Car (1975), capable of going 100 miles per hour and getting 100 miles to the gallon. Don Potts’ sculpture The Master Chassis (1966-1970), consisted of only wheels and a motor; with no seat for a driver, there was only the capacity for speed. These works demonstrate a marked shift away from the car as subject and towards an interest in the car itself as the work of art, whether hand built or appropriated as raw material.
More recently Gabriel Orozco sliced a Citroen in thirds, removed the center section and welded it back together for La D.S. (1993), thereby rendering the vintage model more sleek and beautiful but also totally dysfunctional. Sylvie Fleury combined fashion and feminine stereotypes with crushed and compacted cars in the series Skin Crime (1997), which consists of demolished car forms coated in various shades of pink nail polish. It is interesting to note that Fleury also started a racing club for women in her native Switzerland, the She-Devils on Wheels. Richard Prince primed and Bondoed the forms of Hot Rod hoods and hung them on the walls of galleries, calling them paintings, while Jason Rhoades exhibited art work inside his Impala SS, which he toured around Europe, calling it a museum.
We must prepare man for his imminent and inevitable identification with the motor, encouraging and perfecting an incessant interchange of intuitions, rhythms, instinct and metallic disciplines.
Today the automobile has become as commonplace as almost any household item. It still promises personal freedom, potential (or, simply, economic status), and speed, but the automobile has now been so thoroughly absorbed into the American consciousness that rarely does it carry with it the shock of the new, even in art.
Matthew Day Jackson resuscitates the potential of the automobile as both a cultural symbol and an artistic statement with his Super Comp Dragster Racing Team. Descended from a long line of racecar drivers, Jackson represents the fourth generation of a family whose relationship to cars has been built on speed and on testing the limits of car and driver. For Jackson, that history combines seamlessly with his interests in human explorations in culture and science—physical and intellectual ventures that push the boundaries of experience into new territories of good and evil.
Together with an assembly of artists, engineers, and drivers, Jackson will build a custom dragster and race it professionally for one year, or until it is no longer drivable, whichever comes first. The final form of the work will be determined by what remains from this enterprise. In order to be successful in his endeavor, Jackson relies on skill and intuition, the same qualities necessary to create great works of art. He is testing the limits of his own potential through driving a racecar in much the same way as when he is making sculptures and paintings. The art of this piece lies not only in the physical vestige of the endeavor but also in the very desire to experience firsthand with the body the limits of motion, of the human and mechanical limits of speed on terrestrial earth. The idea is, in essence, to become speed. In this pursuit, Jackson is the motor, the catalyst for making the impossible, possible and the means through which we recognize the beauty of pushing oneself first to the very limit of what is possible, and then, beyond.
Jenny Moore
