Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art

Introduction

\\ 1 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 ofaesthetic and taste-making cultures, such as thevernacular, 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-cumoutsider 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 introduCtion 2 // Automotive Prosthetic 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 ofwell-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 lookingthrough , the automobile functions as an apparatus—a prosthetic connected to the bodyand 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 Introduction \\ 3 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 knifeedge exactitude of science but with an undeniable presence of difference. Scrutiny of the exhibitions that fall within...