Au t o m o t i v e P r o s t h e t i c 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. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 http://utpress.php/rp-form ♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Terranova, Charissa N. Automotive prosthetic : technological mediation and the car in conceptual art / by Charissa N.
pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-292-75404-1 (cloth : alk. Automobiles in art. Conceptual art—Themes, motives.7560/754041 To Caroline, Camille, Mimi, and Sophia THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK 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 Chapter 5 Hummer: The Cultural Militarism of Art Based on the SUV 187 Chapter 6 Richard Prince: The Fetish and Automotive Maleficium 227 c o n c lu s i o n The “Freedom” of Automotive Existence 265 Notes 279 Bibliography 307 Index 323 \\ vii THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK 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 gradu- ate 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 ter- rains, 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 Concep- tual 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 lec- tures on what was long ago a new kind of art: “Conceptualism I: Language and Semiotics” and “Conceptualism II: Architecture, Urbanism, and Land- scape.” The second lecture became the engine of the book and, more pre- cisely, 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 \\ ix installation unfolding around the reenactment of a car crash in a snowstorm. The exhibition was about the road but not the repercussions of uniting con- ceptual 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. Contem- porary 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 con- fidence 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 intellec- tuals 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 neces- sary 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 + Unfet- tered 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 Uni- versity 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 uto- pian 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 “automo- tive 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. \\ xi THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK Au t o m o t i v e P r o s t h e t i c THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK 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, customi- zation, 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 \\ 1 in which the car has been linked to art within the history of art and the auto- mobile: 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 automo- bile 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 experi- ence the world, both in motion on the highway and as a citizen intercon- nected 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 phenomeno- logical 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 explic- itly 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 lit- erally, 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 cre- ation 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.