Project äutöshøw
The äutöshøw examines the will to go faster and the aesthetics of speed through a series of works that focus upon the mystique of the vehicle as it appears to us now in its “decayed” form. Since its invention and mass-production, the car has always been a symbol of progress. Its sleek design, its throbbing, harnessed power, the almost sexual thrust of its architecture, all point to a fast, orchestrated, climactic future that we possess through speed. This installation and multi-disciplinary exhibition is, at its center, a re-examination and a reinterpretation of the car as a symbol of progress at a time when progress seems impossible and accidents seem inevitable.
In 2007 there is an unavoidable irony implicit in the beauty of technology. In the past, beauty could (sometimes) be synonymous with technology. If we think of the hard-driving Futurists like Marinetti, technology was always beautiful. Today, technology is no longer beautiful, because it is NOT bringing us closer to perfection/peace/individual freedom. The corporate designers and marketers of technology still attempt to create beauty in their machines. But it is the context that has changed, not the craft of producing technological wonders like the contemporary automobile. Silver and chrome symbols of a bright, progressive, hopeful future make no sense in 2007. Today, the automobile, no matter what its stamp or price tag, is gaudy, glitzy and tawdry, and it only feigns beauty.
According to Paul Virilio, telecommunication and live broadcasting have overturned our traditional understanding of time and space. We are barraged by endless repetitions of accidents in media images. News coverage piles up accident over accident, wreckage over wreckage without ever allowing us space or time to think about them, to conceptualize them - to understand them.
IM issue no.1 2005. <Virtual Virilio>.<Saul Newman>. © IM/NASS 2005
These works may also foreground a class difference in Canada, because there are those who equate social power and status with machines (especially ones with combustion engines) because they can afford to get the newest, flashiest models and replace them often. The literary precursors for this group exhibition are J.G. Ballard, Dick Hebdige, Ana Kavan and Paul Virilio. The art works of Carlin, Johnson and Wilson are “filtered” through the antiquated and strangely humorous manifestos of Marinetti and Hans Arp, the films of David Cronenberg, and the music of David Byrne, Robert Fripp and King Crimson.
We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath - a roaring motorcar, which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth itself hurled along its orbit.
(Giacomo Marinetti, 1909. Manifesto of Futurism)
The progressive spread of catastrophic events do not just affect current reality, but produce anxiety and anguish for coming generations. Daily life is becoming a kaleidoscope of incidents and accidents, catastrophes and cataclysms, in which we are endlessly running up against the unexpected, which occurs out of the blue, so to speak. In a shattered mirror, we must then learn to discern what is impending more and more often-but above all more and more quickly, those events coming upon us inopportunely, if not indeed simultaneously. Faced with an accelerated temporality which affects mores and art as much as it does international politics, there is one particularly urgent necessity: to expose and to exhibit the Time accident.
(Paul Virilio, Forward from Unknown Quantity, an Exhibition for Foundation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain)
Virilio has written that attendant with every technological advancement are the accidents, the dangers, the abuses and misuses of that technology. These are the accumulating catastrophes that colour our world today. But the French writer also believes that speed is equated with power.