Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art

5. Hummer: The Cultural Militarism of Art Based on the SUV

\\ 187 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this once-beacon of cultural militarism flounders in a muddy crater, bringing home a rising consensus that the vehicle is obsolete.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 manufacChapter 5 the culturAl m ilitArism o f Art BAsed o n the suv hummer 188 // Automotive Prosthetic 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 vehiclewent 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 eighteenyear 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 Figure 5.1. Jonathon rosen, untitled illustration, New York Times, february 28, 2010. courtesy of Jonathan rosen. Hummer \\ 189 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 stateof 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 logicof this promise is the inevitableobstruction of that desire, forcapitalism’s expansion depends on...