Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art

Acknowledgments

\\ xi Acknowledgments The spatial remoteness of Dallas and Forth Worth coupled with their rich and singularcontemporaryart cultures created a perfect storm forcreativity: a senseof being farawayand 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.Thankyou to all the undergraduate and graduate students at Southern Methodist Universityand theUniversityof 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. THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK Automotive Prosthetic THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK ...