The current Automania exhibit at New York City's Museum of Modern Art, which will be on view until January 2, 2022, is a kind of sequel to MoMA's Eight Automobiles* show of 1951, which kicked off the whole business of displaying cars as art, and was followed at MoMA by Ten Automobiles* in 1953. The cars pictured on the hardcover exhibit catalog, also called Automania, give you a preview of MoMA's selection of design landmarks on the way to the modern car*, but the book, and the show, are not shy about noting that we've somehow never reached automotive nirvana. Reviewing the show in the New York Times, Jason Farago noted that it would've been hard to mount an exhibit glorifying the car after a summer of record fires and floods caused by fossil-fueled climate change, and to MoMA's credit their show includes art and film highlighting the car's effects on cities, and on our lives in them. But we're going to confine this review to the book, and comment on the exhibit after visiting MoMA...
The book begins with images from the MoMA shows from 1951 and 1953, but leaves out images of a 1999 MoMA show that included the Toyota Prius hybrid and the ill-fated GM EV-1 electric. It's clear Automania aims to present an overview of the automotive phenomenon in the 20th century, and that phenomenon was centered on internal combustion. This approach is international and interdisciplinary in scope, including early automotive art and photography, images from pop art and films, the chapter "Pioneers of Modernism" including Gropius, Wright and Corbu, a chapter called "The Look of Things" on industrial design and Detroit styling, critiques of Detroit's planned obsolesence, chapters on the individual vehicles on display (for a list see Footnotes), and a concluding chapter called "Carmageddon" about, well, the auto-asphyxiation of civilization. In their treatment of car culture, curator Juliet Kinchin and contributors Paul Galloway and Andrew Gardner give more weight to Detroit's styling and mass marketing influence than, for example, to the version of car culture that exploded in post-WW2 Los Angeles. During the first third of the seven-decade span between that first show and the current one, more and more of Los Angeles, for example, began to look like the above photo from the air, and like the photo below at night...
My dad and mom moved us to LA in 1957, and we saw this happening. My dad took a job at Kaiser Steel, where the engineers rode around the plant on bicycles. We took walks around Whittier, once passing Richard Nixon's childhood home ("If Eisenhower has another heart attack, that guy could be President…"), and watching riders on horseback canter through the orange groves that would soon be cut down for more tract housing. What MoMA calls car culture was all around us, a mix of hot rodders and SCCA racers running on postwar optimism. We lived in a newer part of town on a corner lot; neighbors across the street drove "his and hers" Alfa Romeo 2500 Pinin Farina cabrios from the turn of the decade, and a nifty, teardrop-tailed DKW (ancestor of Audi) hardtop as their city car. The 3 cylinder 2 cycle sounded like a Vespa.
Across the street around the corner lived my new friends Bruce and Linda Nelson, whose older Swedish cousin Thorsten had just brought over a new Volvo, indicating, we hoped, that he planned to stay awhile. We'd never seen one; I thought it looked like a '47 Ford. One night my dad and I were walking in a part of town where there weren't many sidewalks. A policeman stopped and asked my dad where we were going. My dad explained we were just taking a walk, and noted we'd recently moved here from Chicago. The cop said, "Well, I could tell you weren't from here. Nobody walks in LA…" We left LA after around a year, because while my dad and I saw the orange groves and the horses and the beach and took an interest in all the strange cars, my mom mostly saw LA as that dark picture of a night freeway with the endless stream of traffic…
Three years after my family left LA, Road & Track, the car enthusiast's monthly source of road tests and racing news, published urban planner VIctor Gruen's Our Enemy the Automobile*, and editor John Bond thought it was important enough to headline it on the cover of the April 1961 issue. In it the planner who had fathered (with mixed feelings) the shopping mall and the pedestrian mall defines the car as ineffective intracity transport, citing stats that show retail business dropping in downtown areas over the years as car visits increase. He notes that then-current planning guidelines adopted in major American cities viewed pedestrians as nothing more than "obstacles to traffic flow." And while the Austrian-born urbanist admits to liking his car, he knows when not to use it. Gruen correctly predicts that the pedestrian malls proposed as panaceas to revive downtowns will not succeed unless they are part of a master planning effort integrating public and private transport, pedestrian routes, parks, housing and commercial space. In other words, city planning on the Scandinavian model...
In 1963, a couple years after Gruen's article appeared in Road & Track, British animator John Halas and screenwriter Joy Batchelor released Automania 2000, a darkly comic look at cities and lives dominated by the car. Plot and imagery from Automania 2000 feature prominently in MoMA's "Carmageddon" chapter. In a way, their focus on this film is a kind of shorthand for a broader discussion of cars and urban planning. What we saw around us in LA, and what the directors of Automania 2000 saw, was a more haphazard, chaotic urbanism than car-focused urbanists like Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright expected. The film anticipates a lot of phenomena that were (in the current phrase) trending well before the new century arrived. Among these were the dominant role of computers in design and marketing, the expansion of synthetics in food (and seemingly everywhere else), and the failure of proliferating freeways, street-widening projects, and parking structures (some replacing historic buildings) to reduce the gridlock that spreads from rush hour to take over the entire day in many big cities. Note the similarity of the cartoon image below to the aerial photo of LA where we began…
You can find Automania 2000 for free online, and it's worth the less than ten minutes of your day it will occupy. In scenes eerily predictive of Jean Luc Godard's traffic jam 4 years later in Weekend, we see families getting so used to traffic jams that they get groceries and dinners delivered to their cars. The mad scientist who keeps redesigning cars to be more habitable in these conditions finally eliminates production lines by designing cars that reproduce themselves, kind of like computer viruses. This leads to madly reproducing cars inundating city centers, piling up around monuments in a sea of metal. Instead of leaving us here, the authors of Automania the book give us some images of Ant Farm's Cadillac Ranch and SITE's Ghost Parking Lot, then finish with a chapter on the Smart Car. Talk about anticlimaxes...
*Footnote: The ten vehicles displayed at MoMA's Automania are listed here. Where we have featured these vehicles in previous blog posts, dates are shown in parentheses. In general MoMA has picked some pretty good exemplars of modern car design, but we think the 1959 BMC Mini conceived by Alec Issigonis had a far bigger impact than the Smart Car, and this is reflected in our essay, "The First Modern Car? Round Up the Usual Suspects…" posted Sept. 26, 2020. MoMA's vehicles: Volkswagen Type 1 Sedan ("Cars & Ethics: A Word or Two on VW", Nov. 27, 2015), Airstream Travel Trailer ("When Mobile Homes Were Really Mobile", July 30, 2017), Willys-Overland Jeep, Cisitalia 202 (Sept. 26, 2020 & April 22, 2017), Citroen DS (Sept. 26, 2020 & Feb. 12, 2020), Fiat Nuova 500 (1957 rear-engine design), Jaguar E-Type (May 31, 2019 & Aug. 13, 2017), Porsche 911 (July 10, 2016), Ferrari Formula 1 Tipo 641 from 1990, and the Smart Car Coupé.
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I too have been stared down as if I were a zombie when walking to the grocery store in LA. Excellent post, Bob. Your writing is making me rethink my potentially impending automotive purchase.
ReplyDeleteWe're going to post a piece on Godard's "Weekend" soon, as it ties in with the traffic jam theme. Also, we've noticed that the essays on movies get twice as much attn. as the average architecture piece, and sometimes are often more popular than the automotive essays...
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