Auto-Intoxication in Los Angeles

By Wolf Von Eckardt

A new museum's look in the rearview mirror

American automobile production is only as old as the century: in that brief span the car has probably changed our lives as much as any invention in all the previous epochs. It was time that some courageous museum looked in the rear-view mirror and mounted a show to celebrate and lament those alterations. The exhibit is called "Automobile and Culture," and it is housed in the new Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA).

Warehoused might be a more appropriate term. In an old factory in downtown Los Angeles that has been remodeled to give the effect of a vast, raw artist's studio, some 30 antique and modern cars are displayed like icons. Around the Pierce Arrows, Packards and Mercedes-Benzes are nearly 200 paintings, graphics, sculptures and photographs dedicated to what Historian Lewis Mumford called our "mechanical mistress." The exhibit amounts to a striking critique of industrial society as well as the vehicles it has produced.

In the early years of the century, the seems as obsolete as the hand crank. In 1909 the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti decided that "the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace." Fellow Futurist Antonio Sant'Elia drew plans for a Utopia of skyscrapers pierced by freeway ramps built of concrete and gleaming steel.

For a generation, the horseless carriage remained an exclusive possession of the rich, an ideal object of conspicuous consumption, a perfect excuse for a dashing new wardrobe of matching goggles, cap and scarf. But in 1913 a mechanic named Henry Ford began turning out Model Ts on his newfangled assembly line. By the mid-'20s Ford was producing a car every ten seconds. Price: as low as $265. Mobility was suddenly within reach of the average family, and an egalitarian society was no longer some impossible ideal. Automobile ownership, reported Robert and Helen Lynd in Middletown, soon became "an accepted essential of normal living." Even in the abyss of the Depression, families clung to their cars as the American emblem of self-respect.

As the automobile won the public, though, its impact began to lose the artists. Diego Rivera, in his great murals Detroit Industry, showed the dehumanizing effects of assembly-line labor. So did Charlie Chaplin in his film Modern Times. Edward Hopper in Western Motel and similar paintings revealed the sterility of an emerging roadside culture. The architects, sympathetic to the potentials of technology, had a different view.

In the early '20s Le Corbusier, with his drawings of a Contemporary City for Three Million People, proposed a massive urban complex built to accommodate the automobile in, around and out of high-rises. At the 1939 New York World's Fair, visitors to the seductive General Motors pavilion rode in moving chairs through a 1,700-ft. display of vast expressways designed to effortlessly handle the projected traffic flow of 1960.

But, as the publication that accompanies this show indicates, by the time the '60s rolled round, cars were no longer seen as shuttles to paradise. They had become villains responsible for turning America into a dystopia. Autos were described as gas guzzlers, road eaters, monsters that plunder the countryside. They had brought about a nation scarred with billboards, motels and drive-in restaurants, banks and even churches. When Joni Mitchell sang, "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot," millions of listeners joined in the chorus.

"Automobile and Culture" is more concerned with the social impact of the automobile than its beautiful past or enormous possibilities. The show does not shy away from depredation. Indeed, a viewer who concentrates only on the contemporary seems besieged by editorials in oil, metal emulsion paper.

Larry Rivers depicts The Accident in a curiously detached, deadpan manner. The faces on scores of superb photographs are filled with ennui. James Rosenquist's 1960-61 billboard-like painting President Elect portrays John F. Kennedy as metallic, slick and cold as the 1963 Corvette.

Although the violence of car crashes is grimly depicted in Carlos Almaraz's expressionistic, fiery canvas Beach Crash, other artists are obsessed more with the auto's effect on collisions of male and female. E.E. Cummings describes the delicate and bittersweet technique of breaking in a new car as analogous to making love to a virgin. Chicago Artist Luis Jimenez's pastel study for his sculpture The American Dream shows a car, as Gerald Silk describes it in the museum publication, "ravishing a voluptuous nude female; breasts rhyme visually with hubcaps and headlights, hair with fenders, belly and buttocks with hood and trunk." Edward Kienholz's sculpture Back Seat Dodge '38 shows a truncated car, its front seat removed. In the back, a chicken-wire man and plaster woman are wrapped in beer bottles and each other. The license plate reads C692, EVERYWHERE, USA.

As the show repeatedly indicates, artists have contributed little to the design of the automobile itself. Architects, though, have occasionally gone to the drawing board to produce their visions of a well-designed vehicle; in 1928 Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret proposed a clever small car that was never produced. In the Annan's Parking '30s Bauhaus Founder Walter Gropius designed various solid-looking bodies for Adler luxury convertibles. American artists instead used standard models as a kind of canvas or armature. Examples: the aggressive Pegasus by James Croak, featuring a stuffed horse with paper wings crashing through the metal roof of another '63 Chevrolet; The Bicentennial Welfare Cadillac by James Roche, decked out with mirrors and flags; and Ghetto Blaster by Scott Prescott, an Impala converted into a menacing gray tank. French Sculptor Arman has a towering indictment: his Long Term Parking piles 60 cars on top of one another and embeds them in concrete (MOCA shows a model).

These broadsides are often as strident as a traffic jam at the end of the world. But the message is countered by the displays of old automobiles built at a time when progress was desirable, not threatening. There is, after all, nothing inherently wrong with mobility, and for many Americans, the freedom granted by the car has been an unwritten codicil of the Declaration of Independence. The naive but still appealing designs of the futurists, the lines of the classic cars, retain the power to move an audience. They still raise hopes that manufacturers and city planners can yet produce excellence instead of excess, livability instead of untrammeled automobility.

The machine in the garden, the beautiful conveyance and its disturbing effect, is a central theme of the show and a dilemma of the 20th century. Will the automobile drive us to distraction or delight? This exhibition provides no answers, but it poses some of the most provocative questions of the year.

--By Wolf Von Eckardt