Automotive prosthetic  technological mediation and the car in conceptual art

contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Conceptual Car Art: Rethinking Conceptualism through Technology 27Chapter 2 Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthet

Automotive Prosthetic

o n

C e

p t u

a l a rt

C h

a r

i s s

a n t er r

Copyright © 2014 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

 Automotive prosthetic : technological mediation and the car in conceptual art /

by Charissa N Terranova — First edition.

  pages  cm

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-0-292-75404-1 (cloth : alk paper)

1 Automobiles in art. 2 Conceptual art—Themes, motives. I Title.

N8217.A94T47 2014

743′.89629222—dc23

2013016700 doi:10.7560/754041

To Caroline, Camille, Mimi, and Sophia

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contents Preface ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Conceptual Car Art:

Rethinking Conceptualism through Technology 27Chapter 2 Mobile Perception and the Automotive Prosthetic:

Photoconceptualism, the Car, and Urban Space 57Chapter 3 The Nows of the Automotive Prosthetic:

Moving Images, Time, and the Car 115Chapter 4 Communication Space:

Automotive Urbanism in Dan Graham’s Work 151

The Cultural Militarism of Art Based on the SUV 187Chapter 6 Richard Prince:

The Fetish and Automotive Maleficium 227

ConClusion The “Freedom” of Automotive Existence 265

Notes 279

Bibliography 307

Index 323

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In writing about the genesis of this book, I might look deep into my past for the sources of influence and inspiration: to the wry collision of distinct forces that was growing up as part of a family of classical musicians in the capital of country music, Nashville, Tennessee; to being, like so many Americans, an automotive citizen for as far back as I can remember; or to my early gradu-ate training as an art historian by scholars who viewed this discipline through the prism of landscape and architecture Yet, the more resonant, even causal sources of this book are located in the shallows of deep memory, in the first years of my time in Dallas

I came to Dallas from Cambridge, Massachusetts, in January 2004 to teach contemporary art history at Southern Methodist University in what was then called the Division of Art History After years traveling the edges

of the intellectual universe on a ship called architectural theory, I was not so much happy to land as I was curious and open to explore yet again new ter-rains, the discipline of art history some eight years after my departure from

it within a small liberal arts school in the heart of Texas The constraints on

my teaching were minimal and the collegiality high I incorporated a fair bit

of architectural theory in the form of structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction into the two- semester survey of contemporary art of which

I was in charge And it is from the second semester of this yearly course that

Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in tual Art emerged What had started as a single lecture on conceptual art

Concep-and language bifurcated, for there were, in my opinion, several photo- text pieces that were simply not done justice by this rubric So emerged two lec-tures on what was long ago a new kind of art: “Conceptualism I: Language and Semiotics” and “Conceptualism II: Architecture, Urbanism, and Land-scape.” The second lecture became the engine of the book and, more pre-cisely, Chapter 2

Seeing Marie- Josée Jean’s sharply curated exhibition Road Runners in

March 2009 at VOX, Center for the Contemporary Image in Montreal, marked another pivotal moment in the project Jean’s exhibition brought

together the fine- arts populism of the Warner Brothers’ 1949 cartoon Fast

and Furry- ous, the stately, golden- age conceptualism of works like Ed

Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), and new works by young artists, such as Kerry Tribe’s disparate yet recursive Near Miss (2005), a video

installation unfolding around the reenactment of a car crash in a snowstorm The exhibition was about the road but not the repercussions of uniting con-ceptual art and the car While not recognizing or theorizing this union, Jean had put together an extremely smart exhibition in precisely the realm with which I was toying In its first incarnation, the book was to be about the car and contemporary art; however, I found that too daunting a task Contem-porary art is far more amorphous and expansive a field than conceptual art,

or so it seemed at the time The experience of Jean’s show gave me the fidence to explore the reaches of this project, to write this book and develop the ideas about the automobile, conceptual art, and technology

con-And then there is Dallas, Texas, a city not prized for its love of tuals but porous and open enough to provide comfortable homes to more than a few I would never have been able to write this book while living in a city other than Dallas, under the watchful eyes of certain of those inside the intellectual bubble—that is, a number (not all) of the people defining the parameters of the greater field of art and architectural history and theory, many of whom are located in the cities where I lived and institutions where

intellec-I was trained Liberating most of the time and painful on occasion, being here outside of the bubble, writing along the periphery, gave me the neces-sary space, autonomy, and simply put, distance from those who decide what

is allowed and what is not allowed to complete Automotive Prosthetic.

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 + Unfet-

tered 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 Uni-versity 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 uto-pian 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 “automo-tive prosthetic” and “double aperture” at Southern Methodist University in

2006 Thank you to all the undergraduate and graduate students at Southern Methodist University and the University of 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

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Automotive Prosthetic

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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

of aesthetic and taste- making cultures, such as the vernacular, film, zation, and industrial design There are cars bedecked with odds and ends—buttons, plastic toys, and longhorns—which are the basis of the craft- cum- outsider 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

customi-of these automotive cultures Instead, it customi-offers an alternative reading customi-of the car and art In making this distinction, I find it helpful to describe two ways

introdu

Ction

in which the car has been linked to art within the history of art and the mobile: in terms of looking- at and looking- through In the list of well- 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 automo-bile 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

auto-By contrast, in works of art in which the car functions in terms of looking- through, the automobile functions as an apparatus—a prosthetic connected

to the body and systems of infrastructure—through which to see and ence the world, both in motion on the highway and as a citizen intercon-nected to other citizens of the world Here the car is fathomless It is a mode

experi-of communication roving through a system experi-of roads and within, as we will find, the culture of conceptual art It is a fount of unforeseen phenomeno-logical 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 itly 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 lit-erally, 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,

explic-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

to a mass audience, they are perhaps thus also powerful forces in the ation of the overarching semiotic structure within the art world, academic and otherwise, by which we understand the car and art together—and the

cre-car within art more precisely The cre-car- centered exhibitions that have

oc-curred in art museums and galleries over the last century set in relief this distinction, looking- at versus looking- through, not so much with the knife- edge exactitude of science but with an undeniable presence of difference Scrutiny of the exhibitions that fall within these categories of the automo-bile in art reveals two vastly different epistemological and ontological takes

on the machine- human relationship

In car and art exhibitions formed around the rubric of looking- at, the automobile is a technological commodity of value on the global market of consumer products The car portends the freedom of consumer choice, eco-nomic status, unlimited open road, manifest destiny, liberal democratic free-dom, and an understanding of beauty that comes together around formal delight Though often more about industrial design than fine art, the car implies a conventional experience of the art object that epistemologically privileges the sense of vision over the roving body and its other senses Such exhibits broaden and popularize the definition of “art” and, especially in recent times, expand the museum audience The typical automobile show

in a museum, particularly those focusing on the design of the car, tends to offer a means of populist education These exhibits are premised on long- held notions of the work of art produced ex nihilo by the artist- as- genius or the object of industrial design as a matter of unfettered inspiration.1 There

is rarely reference to the manufacturing order, Fordist or Just In Time, from which the car came They do not account for the situatedness of automo-tive beauty, the ways in which it is the result of an interactive network of ongoing technological transformation, the development of infrastructure, global interaction and exchange, systems of mass manufacturing, or class hierarchy In similar fashion, and by connection, they do not account for the complexities of aesthetic and perceptual mutation as it occurs around and as a result of the technologies of the car and road The following study focuses on the latter: the aesthetic experience of motion and the car, which

is communicated in a group of conceptual artworks

In keeping with its reputation as a bellwether of the fine arts, the Museum

of Modern Art in New York was the first to place the automobile within the white- walled precincts of the gallery Since its inception in 1929 MoMA has presented six exhibits on the car, all of which subscribe to the looking-

at paradigm: Eight Automobiles (1951), Ten Automobiles (1953), Around the

Automobile: Paintings, Sculpture, Assemblages, Prints (1965), The Racing Car: Toward a Rational Automobile (1966), A Classic Car: Cisitalia GT

1946 (1972), and Different Roads: Automobiles for the Next Century (1999).2

The exhibition Roads at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1961,

curated by Bernard Rudofsky and Arthur Drexler, was an exception lar to the exhibitions to come in the new millennium, it contextualized the automobile as a midwife of perception.3 Made up of large- scale photographs

Simi-of roads, cloverleaf intersections, and infrastructure, and Simi-of drawings Simi-of ways by artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Frank Lloyd Wright, the exhibit considered the road synthetically—or ecologically—as one filament among

road-many in the weave of a technologized fabric of everyday life The Highway is

a related exhibition that originated at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in 1970 that was curated by Stephen S Proko-poff The show focused on works of art, mostly paintings and photographs,

in which the automobile or road appeared Although the exhibition catalog includes a short analytical essay by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, the show was not inflected by the sociotheoretical side of architecture, as was

MoMA’s Roads This exhibition tended to focus on the beauty of the open

road and the car, conceptualized as inert objects The car, though a matter

of fine art, once again is a matter of looking- at rather than looking- through This object- oriented looking- at direction of the automobile in art has by far been predominant, with exhibitions occurring in major institutions in cities such as Montreal, Los Angeles, Boston, Atlanta, and Hiratsuka City, Japan

Such exhibits include Automobile and Culture (1984) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Moving Beauty (1995) at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Auto- Nom: The Car in Contemporary Art at the Düs- seldorf NRW- Forum Kultur und Wirtschaft (2003), Speed, Style, and Beauty:

Cars from the Ralph Lauren Collection (2005) at the Boston Museum of

Fine Arts, BMW Art Cars (2009) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,

Car Design History—Nissan Passion and Beauty of Function (2009) at the

Hiratsuka Museum of Art in Japan, and The Allure of the Automobile (2010)

at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.4

For the most part, museums have yet to recognize the full richness of the car within art, as it is the force of a critical dialectics that interrogates modes of being- in- the- world, from daily movement, perceptual mores, and city form to national politics, actions on a global forum, and war As the car became a standard form of movement and transportation in the developed

world during the mid- twentieth century, so did it increasingly become a means of communication within art While the art that is at the center of this study—the car and art based on looking- through—is not reducible to statistics on the car and highway from mid–last century, the following data illuminate a technological backdrop conducive to related changes in the human- machine interface and human perceptual experience This infor-mation is foundational to a cybernetic ecology of forces that includes the car, art, human perception, the highway, and automotive urbanism I use the word “cybernetic” here as it refers to a holistic system the fluctuations of which occur through a feedback loop of self- maintained balance The auto-mobile within art as such brings to bear a similar aesthetic experience: one does not simply look at the work of art for meaning but looks through the prism of technology within art, entering into a network of political and eco-nomic relations The car, highway, and urban sprawl created a new mode of experiencing space and time distilled in the logic of the “automotive pros-thetic,” and the related technique of looking- through the car A pivotal mo-ment in this evolution of the human- machine interface and its correlative perceptual norms is the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of

1956, passed under President Eisenhower The U.S emerged from WWII as the top automotive manufacturer Today there are 46,726 miles of highways and a new urban condition called urban sprawl By 1965, the mass motor-ization of the country was largely complete and the United States was a car nation By 1960, 34 in 100 Americans owned cars, compared with 11 in France, 9 in West Germany, 11 in Great Britain, and 3 in Italy Those num-bers continued to increase in the next decade, with Europe catching up By

1970, 43 in every 100 Americans owned a car, compared to 24 in France,

23 in West Germany, 21 in Great Britain, and 19 in Italy.5 Current statistics point to an American identity bound to the automobile, with 85 percent of personal travel taking place by the automobile.6 Americans eat up the road, consuming 3 trillion miles a year, 4 million miles of roads, and 180 billion gallons of fuel.7

Idylls of the “American Dream” include car ownership and free, leisurely movement along public, tax- subsidized highways The “road” to success in the automobile industry, though, was rapid but not necessarily smooth In the early stages of the machine’s history, American dominance of the auto-mobile market was taken for granted In the 1920s, the U.S was well on its way to becoming a car nation, with total automobile sales numbering almost 4.5 million in 1929 The Great Depression proved to be a stumbling

block for expansion of the industry, with that number dropping to 1.1 million just four years later There are many makes, models, and brands from this time—Peerless, Pierce- Arrow, Dusenberg, Franklin, Marmon, and Stutz—that disappeared during the 1930s economic downturn Those names are lost to the annals of history Generations of car drivers will never know that Willy’s was once the third largest American carmaker Willy’s went bank-rupt in 1933.8 Even in the 1950s, with the country’s economy stable and far removed from the depression, the automotive industry was still working out the chinks One need only invoke the Ford Motor Company’s poorly de-signed “Edsel” to evoke past obstacles.9 By 1965, things had changed and the course of the automotive industry in the U.S was smooth rolling We find the automotive industry once again in trouble as a repercussion of the 2008 market crash of the global marketplace After government bailouts, the “big three”—GM, Ford, and Chrysler—seem moderately stabilized.10 The car—and perception of the landscape through car windows—has also become normative Following from the numbers above, this perceptual standard, at least in North America, was prevalent by 1950 In part a result of this shift in transportation technology and perception, we begin to find the automobile functioning as an existential object and perceptual device in new forms of art The car in certain forms of art would begin to function more as a critical lens through which to experience the world than an object of delectation The art to which I refer is not so much rare, but is more overlooked: a strain of conceptual car art that does not fit the preexisting framework of conceptual art as a matter of dematerialization and communication through language rather than conventional form.

As becomes apparent in Chapter 1, we can draw a connection between technology and the rise of what Rosalind Krauss has called the “post- medium condition,” or what I refer to in terms of the feedback- loop- inspired sense

of “mediation.” Though an overlooked technological tool within the few extant histories of technology and art, the car appears as a rhetorical device functioning as a mode of representation, framing device, means of debase-ment, and conduit for the generalized explosion of media beyond the con-ventional fulcrum of painting and sculpture.11 By the end of the twentieth century, and into the new millennium, we find this particular perceptual expression unfolding around the car in all forms of conceptual art, from photoconceptualism to video and new media There emerges by way of this art a new cybernetic and interconnected understanding of the art object and viewer and, by association, of the machine- human relationship.12 Rather

than an inert object catalyzed by human command that is otherwise rate from the human body, the automobile from this perspective transforms viewer and world, changing the mores of bodily sensation and observation and the broader political economy of culture, incorporating discrete reaches

sepa-of the world into one homogeneous automobile culture The car in ceptual art is evidence of this reciprocal relationship, or what I would like

con-to call a feedback- loop aesthetic Despite this broad body of conceptual art work based on seeing and experiencing the world through the car, it is only since 2005 that curators have approached art and the automobile in this way Two exhibitions in New York and one in Karlsruhe, Germany, direct us in

preliminary fashion down this alternative path: Spiritual America (2007), a

retrospective of the work of Richard Prince at the Guggenheim Museum,

Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans” (2009) at the Metropolitan

Mu-seum of Art, and Car Culture (2011) at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany Spiritual America, put together by Nancy Spector of

the Guggenheim Museum, was an overview of the Pictures Generation ist Richard Prince Since 1990 Prince has been making paintings and sculp-ture around the automobile, the most provocative of which are from 2008,

art-a series of cart-ars wrart-apped with photogrart-aphic lart-aminart-ate skins showing imart-ages of

naked women Curated by Sarah Greenough, Looking In was an exhibit of the Swiss- born Robert Frank’s photo- book, The Americans The book consists

of black- and- white photographs Frank took during a drive across the United States with his wife and two children in a 1950 Ford Business Coupe, while

on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955 and 1956.13 While only indirectly about the car, these exhibits highlight the automobile as a means of transforming perception and, by connection, the work of art generally conceived Perhaps

it is precisely in their circuitousness—they are not about the automobile

as an object but about artists who happened to use the automobile in the making of their work—that they become about the automobile as a media-tor of interaction with the world and about the means of looking- through

as well Curated by Peter Weibel, Bernhard Serexhe, and Franz Pichler, the

German exhibition Car Culture is more directly about the car as a simple,

straightforward object than the New York exhibitions, but because the tors linked new media devices to the automobile under the broad theme of mobility, the car operates between categories and powerfully becomes one mediating device among others.14

cura-It is in small galleries and Kunsthalles where we find more poignant ings of the automobile functioning in art as a prosthetic extension: Custom

fram-Car Commandos (2009), an exhibit of four video projects by Nancy

Daven-port, Lars Mathisen, Alex Villar, and Angie Waller at Art in General in New

York; Jonathan Schipper: Irreversibility (2009), an exhibit of “high- concept mechanics” including The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle, a

work in which two pristine muscle cars collide into one another slowly over

a six- week period, at Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn, New York; and Road

Run-ners (2009), a brilliant exhibit curated by Marie- Josée Jean at VOX Image

Contemporaine in Montreal of works of conceptual art from the 1960s to

the present In January 2010, Gagosian Gallery London hosted Crash, an

exhibition in homage to the British science fiction and fantasy writer J G Ballard While the exhibition featured work by many different artists, the

show was inspired by Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash, based on symphorophilia—

sexual arousal from technological catastrophe (in the case of his novel of the same name, the car crash) Contemporary curators were finally responding

to the works of art based on a shift in perception that I call the automotive prosthetic

the perceptual experience of the automotive prosthetic:

ecology, Cybernetics, Feedback loops, and Mechanology

Let this kernel of information, the car and art exhibitions in museums and galleries, launch us into our discussion of the automotive prosthetic Let it

be the introductory evidence supporting my argument that there is another

kind of car art that is conceptual in nature, which hews closely to the looking- through paradigm and tells of a different ontological standing of technology and the viewer The overarching goal here is to set in relief this condition, the automotive prosthetic, by way of works of conceptual car art that are either plainly overlooked or wherein the car is central but ignored They are works of conceptual art engaging the view to the road, the car as a device of the mass media and consumerism, and urban and suburban landscapes In turn, I argue that this body of urban and technologically grounded concep-tual art reveals something unique about conceptual art itself, namely that it

is a sensibility and attitude broadly practiced as the “conceptual turn” in the past and present rather than a past and completed “- ism” with a tendency to

be recapitulated every twenty or thirty years in a “neo- ” version Finally, we will find an alternative understanding of conceptual art that, functioning

outside of and in addition to language, structuralism and poststructuralism,

is rooted in the systems aesthetics of Jack Burnham, media theory of shall McLuhan, and thus more generally speaking “an ecology of mind” and cybernetic set of relations This car art thus requires a different set of philo-sophical loadstars: ecology, systems aesthetics, cybernetic interconnection, and mechanology

Mar-Mid- twentieth- century British anthropologist and cybernetics theorist Gregory Bateson developed overlapping theories of ecology, cybernetics, and “mind” in essays written in the 1950s and 1960s that would later be

published in Steps to an Ecology of Mind It is to his thinking that I look

in order to explain the ecological understanding of being- in- the- world that correlates to my theory of the automotive prosthetic Bateson’s book begins with a series of short essays called “metalogues,” hypothetical discussions with his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson originally published in the early 1950s The topics are often articulated in the form of a question, such as

“Why Do Things Get in a Muddle?” “Metalogue—Why Do Frenchmen?”

“How Much Do You Know?” Not to be confused with the Socratic dialogue and related dialectics, the metalogue for Bateson functioned something like

a feedback loop Knowledge folds back on itself, re- creating its contents bit

by bit not in order to discover an a priori truth but to arrive at an a posteriori knowledge that does not deviate from the original subject but initiates its evolution Bateson explained that the metalogue follows the logic of evolu-tionary process; it is a matter of phylogenetic embeddedness with the origi-nal topic always contained within its latest incarnation He described it as a

“conversation about some problematic subject [wherein] the conversation

as a whole is also relevant to the same subject.”15 Before getting into how the metalogue functions as a template for much of Bateson’s thinking, I would like to suggest its role here, in this book, as an evolutionary template in the discourse of art history and visual and urban studies Let us say that I have initiated a metalogue about the history of conceptual art not in order to de-viate from its understanding as a reduction of art to language, specifically the “dematerialization of the object” in the name of theory, but to expand

on this premise and wind it in a different direction Through the metalogue

I make here, conceptual art impinges upon, even exists within, the bile, architecture, and urban form Thus, the metalogue here instigates the evolution of conceptual art through interrogating the role of technology and urban context within its unfolding I suggest that media and new media

automo-theory are the best links to be added to this ever- shifting chain of ing events otherwise known as “conceptual art.” In short, this book seeks to resituate conceptualism in terms of technological provenance.

interact-Bateson’s metalogue is one way of getting at the logic of the overall thesis

on the “ecology of mind,” with its open- feedback- loop sense of conversation serving as a means for arriving at cybernetic interconnection writ large Like the metalogue, where two people communicate through a general meta- question, the third vector in a developing network of thoughts, Bateson’s

“mind” is an ecological reticulum, an interaction of ideas.16 Daniel man explains Bateson’s rethinking of the philosophical universal “Mind” as

Fox-it is constFox-ituted by an open and loose- ended fabric of woven particulates

“‘Mind’ is neither contained in the brain nor bounded by the skin.”17 Mind connects inside and outside, the immanent to extrinsic and environment to machine and body Tautological in its framing, mind is made up of a hive of other minds It is part of “the ecology of ideas in systems or ‘minds’ whose boundaries no longer coincide with the skins of the participant individu-als.”18 In outlining an idea of “mind” that supersedes the outer containment

of the skin, Bateson devises a systems sense of community “whose aries do not at all coincide with the boundaries either of the body or of what

bound-is popularly called the ‘self’ or ‘consciousness.’” “And,” Bateson continues,

“it is important to notice that there are multiple differences between the

thinking system and the ‘self’ as popularly conceived.”19 While the “self”

is a oneness of identity and individuality, the “thinking system” is made up

of diverse interacting, deferring, and colliding beings, both artificial and natural, machine, mammal, and more Bateson’s ecological thinking offers the groundwork for a posthuman existence that is posthumanist in its philo-sophical leaning

While Bateson’s systems understanding of natural, artificial, and social formations little affected the discourse of contemporary art, the idea was central to curator, historian, and sculptor Jack Burnham’s take on concep-

tual art at the end of the 1960s.20 Published in Artforum in 1968, Burnham’s

essay “Systems Esthetics” brought Bateson’s ideas of human ecology to bear

on the “new information art” of the time As with the shift discussed above from a paradigm of looking- at to looking- through, Burnham claimed that

“we are now in transition from an object- oriented to a systems- oriented

cul-ture.”21 Burnham argued that art had adapted the logic and order of

cyber-netics insomuch as “relations between people and between people and components of their environment” had replaced the object- centric nature

of art.22 Like Bateson’s multifarious sense of “mind,” Burnham’s idea of information ranged from computer data to earthen soil Explaining how the new logic of systems aesthetics manifested in the work of artist Robert Morris, for example, Burnham described a shift in “sculptural concerns,” which “involves precise information from surveyors, landscape gardeners, civil engineering contractors, and geologists.”23 We understand a similar network of environmental forces coursing through the conceptual car art

in this book, seeing the art as a connector between observer, context of stallation, greater environment, and local and world political economy Two

in-years later, Burnham launched the exhibition Software at The Jewish

Mu-seum in New York, which brought together these ideas as they materialized

in the work of then- emerging conceptual artists By the time of the tion, Burnham referred to conceptual art succinctly in terms of cybernetic interconnection and “transactional” form.24 In his essay from the brochure accompanying the exhibition, titled “Notes on Art and Information Pro-cessing,” Burnham claimed, “The concept of cybernetics now represents

exhibi-a kind of historicexhibi-al snexhibi-apshot, the germ of exhibi-an insight expexhibi-anded exhibi-and fied far beyond its origins.”25 Writing a decade later, Burnham recounted the greater force and enthusiasm over art and technology in the late 1960s

modi-and early 1970s from coast to coast in the United States, listing his Software

as a seminal incarnation of this momentum, among four others, including

Billy Klüver, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Cage’s Experiments in Art and

Technology, which started in 1965; the 1968 British exhibition curated by

Jasia Riechardt, Cybernetic Serendipity; MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual

Studies, launched in 1965; and Maurice Tuchman’s Art and Technology tiative at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which lasted from 1967

ini-to 1971.26 By 1980, Burnham looked back on the collective chutzpah with scorn, viewing the entire effort as a failure for economic reasons as well as for its overreaching and misguided intellectualism Though Burnham’s view on

this momentum and each embodiment of its energy was negative, a Sturm

und Drang sensitivity I interpret as an existential response that is not far from

his original enthusiasm about the possibilities of technology within art, the events and institutions he criticized are a reminder of the technological plat-form, in addition to that of language and protest, from which conceptual art was formally launched

Of course, the curators, artists, and engineers involved with each of these institutional forces were concerned with computers, information, and rising

digital technology, and not the analogue technology of the automobile The

Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition, The Machine as Seen at the End of the

Mechanical Age, held November 27, 1968, through February 9, 1969, is

fur-ther evidence of this general shift in technological emphasis away from the analogue toward information technology It is by way of this shift, though, from analogue to digital technology, that we find the creation of a caesura, a gap into which falls the conceptual art about the car that is the subject of this book While largely analogue in its formation, the automobile itself as a ma-chine is part of a cybernetic network of manufacturing and highways And beyond the car’s literal qualification as a player within a cybernetic network

of interconnections, it is the art at hand, the conceptual art about the car, which I argue gives form to a cyborg subject in its experience and full under-standing So, the theoretical model of the automotive prosthetic is about thinking: it is about perceiving art and the world in a unique way Moreover, there is an observer who has evolved and mutated from the standard para-digm of the viewing subject She is similar to the figure of the “observer” at

the center of Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer (1990), discussed

below, but further along in the mutation of the technological mortal coil somuch as she is accustomed to her posthuman condition and posthumanist existence in a world of interconnected urban nodes In keeping with the very logic of interconnection and the feedback loop, two ideas that are central to cybernetics, the technological tools at her hands and connected to her body bear a phylogenetic interconnection with other tools The logic here is that

in-these tools immanently bear the logic of techné that is the property of not

only their past incarnation but also that of other past tools Functioning like

a meme that is active and unfolding rather than simply symbolic, the car has a bio- evolutionary effect because of its ability to transform human per-ception within a generation

This is the position of the late philosopher of technology and scientist

Gilbert Simondon Though he is best known for his L’individuation

psy-chique et collective (1989), it is Du mode d’existence des objets techniques

(1958), an existential theory of technological tools, that is more of interest to the study at hand.27 Simondon’s existential take on the machine will be our bridge to an affective—failed, uncanny, exuberant, and sublime—interpre-tation of the car, as it works it way through conceptual art More precisely, I would like to use his mechanology as a stepping- stone from analogue to digi-tal technology in my discussion of the cybernetic subject, or cyborg, which is the observer and percipient of the automotive prosthetic—the cornerstone

of the subjective experience of conceptual car art Distinct from

cybernet-ics, which offers a pattern of thinking that is different from the causality of scientific determinism in that it is based on past error, prediction, followed

by self- correction, mechanology is a genre of studies about machines In the preface to Simondon’s published dissertation, John Hart writes that Simon-don’s mechanology is a “science of machines” rooted in the writing of the

historian of technology Jacques Lafitte, who wrote Réflexions sur la science

des machines (1932).28 Through Lafitte to Simondon, mechanology allows

users of technology, in this case analogue technology, to “perceive the sibility of incorporating the machine into the family of human things as part

pos-of a global cultural renaissance.”29 Simondon’s mechanology is a “true nomenology of machines and proposes a theory of technological evolu-tion.”30 The phylogenetic nature of technology was central to Simondon’s mechanology For Simondon, there is a direct evolutionary relationship be-tween the parts of given technological tools, including the automobile (an example to which he often refers), which exists from machine to machine, engine to engine, creating a certain mise- en- abyme pattern Like Bateson’s tautological sense of mind, wherein mind is made up of minds, it is a pattern

phe-of nesting made up phe-of other nestings that extends, at once vertically and zontally, upward and outward into the universe creating a mechanologized ontology Simondon explains:

hori-The fact that there exists an organic character of thought and a mode of being in the world obligates us to suppose that the origin of technological

objects [objets techniques] bears repercussions on other human

produc-tions, on the attitude of man facing the world If this mode of existence

is defined by its genesis, it is a genesis not only of objects, or even a nological reality: it comes from further out, it is part of a vaster process which continues to engender other realities after the appearance of tech-nological objects.31

Indeed there is a qualitative difference between analogue and digital nology and, by parallel, mechanology and cybernetics But this is precisely the difference I am trying to bridge: though unique and with special charac-teristic properties, they are evolutionarily connected in Simondonian fash-ion Following after this statement, the crosspiece I would like to forge is between the machine technology of the automobile and cybernetic sen-sibility, in particular as it is articulated in the cyborg observer that is foun-dational to conceptual car art There is a dialectical relationship between

tech-the phenomenological tool and phenomenological observer If Simondon’s phenomenology of technological tools shores up the existential side of the mechanical object, then the reciprocal percipient is different—unique as changed by the tools through which the world is apprehended With its parts interconnected within and without itself, as a gestalt and part of a continuum

of technological development, the automobile is an existential object of human use, and in this case, the object by which the driver- cum- visual sub-ject experiences the world uniquely and according to her interaction with the world, that is, by way of the automotive prosthetic Brian Rotman cre-ates a similar bridge, relating the “machine intervention” to advanced tech-nologies in contemporary medicine, such as “gene analysis, brain mapping, body scans, and internal scopic procedures.”32 Rotman transforms the line

of separation between the mechanical and the cybernetic into a zipper- line suture that, a bit like Frankenstein, rebirths the human corpus as “a body which is revealed as increasingly exogeneous—made and conceived from its bio- techno cultural environs.”33

The forerunner of this cyborg subject is the “observer,” the viewer- figure conceptualized by Jonathan Crary in his short history of vision in the early nineteenth century The present study of conceptual car art owes much to Crary’s pithy book, having inherited from it a basic rethinking of art his-tory’s teleological, style- based construction by way of technology In many ways my book creates a metalogue with Crary’s, building on it in order to reveal a missed technological force in the history of art and technology—the car In his book, Crary claims that there was a shift in subjective vision

in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the thirty years ceding the invention of photography It is in this period that scientists and various optical technologies heralded the abstraction, rather than the ma-terialization, of vision.34 The abstraction and scientification of vision—its dematerialization into schema and data and, by connection, removal from the body— continued throughout the century, hastened by several ensu-ing proto- cinematic machines, such as the diorama, thaumatrope, phena-kistiscope, stereoscope, and stereography In elaborating this transforma-tion, Crary finds it useful to devise an alternative viewing subject in the form of the “observer” as opposed to the “spectator.” Like Burnham describ-

pre-ing the shift “from an object- oriented to a systems- oriented culture,” Crary

makes a distinction that resonates with the division between looking- at and looking- through:

Unlike spectare, the Latin root for “spectator,” the root for “observer” does

not literally mean “to look at.” In a sense more pertinent to my study,

observare means “to conform one’s action, to comply with,” as in

observ-ing rules, codes, regulations, and practices Though obviously one who sees, an observer is more importantly one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and

limitations If it can be said there is an effect of an irreducibly

hetero-geneous system of discursive, social, technological, and institutional tions There is no observer subject prior to this shifting field.35

rela-In Crary’s text, he has footnoted this section with a reference to the writing

of Michel Foucault, describing his own study of vision and the rising tion of the optical experience in terms of Foucault’s concept of “genealogy.” Genealogical studies do not simply begin with history, its subject assumed, universalized, and implied, but rather by accounting for the “constitution

abstrac-of the subject within a historical frame.”36 I do the same here by recasting the viewing body- self of the subject who reads this text and perceives a given body of conceptual art as a cyborg citizen At the same time, I would like to suggest that there is a set of limitations in the cyborg field of aesthetic action similar to Crary’s “irreducibly heterogeneous system of discursive, social, technological and institutional relations” that is best described by the paral-lel Foucauldian idea of biopolitics Foucault first articulated the biopolitical

in a series of lectures at the Collège de France in Paris in 1979 To begin, the central core of the biopolitical is “population,” the enumeration of people and the reduction of a person to a number in the repeated recapitulation

of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism, which is further rooted in the felicific calculus.37 I would say that it is Bentham’s eighteenth- century architectural concept, the panopticon and its functionalist trappings, which is at the foun-dational core of what Foucault describes as the “liberal art of government.”38 For the sake of brevity, it is the liberalism—the prescripts of liberal demo-cratic freedom and their relationship in the West to free- market liberalism and to unfettered global capitalism—that births a biopolitical arrangement

of people and government, the counting, and thus reduction and limitation,

of every citizen body that is also at the root of habeas corpus much earlier

in history.39 Today this arrangement exists like an invisible network of tual incarceration, what Foucault elsewhere calls the “carceral,” in which the designation of freedom is also a form of identification and limitation In

vir-being “free” one becomes a citizen and part of the collective of democracy,

an enumerated participant in all of its accouterments of identifying, from voting, debt, home ownership, and Social Security to local and federal laws, the jurisprudence system, and penalization Biopolitics describes the free-

dom with limits of the kybernetes- agent who is, at the same time, the cyborg

subject—registered, licensed, insured while rolling along in her car—that experiences the road and works of conceptual art about the road Likewise,

it is the underbelly of this freedom, its limitations by way of a virtual

net-work of counting and identification, which describes automotive freedom and the proverbial open road

While similarly limited by the conventions outlined in Crary’s field of action, the theory of the automotive prosthetic is not solely conducive to the abstraction of vision Crary intends his history of the abstraction of vision in the early nineteenth century to explain how at the turn of the millennium

“visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer

in a ‘real,’ optically perceived world.”40 Crary’s book is a prehistory of ization and the supposed disembodiment of the viewer- observer in the new millennium While sharing the discursive field of action, and related Fou-cauldian sense of limited agency, this book harbors no such limitations of the aesthetic experience Rather, there may be an “abstraction” of vision in the experience of the automotive prosthetic, but it is an abstraction that occurs

digital-by way of a deeply corpus- borne aesthesis The perceptual experience of the highway kybernetes is embodied This does not, however, rule out abstrac-

tion, but rather takes it as a routine set of circumstances The abstraction of vision might also be considered one of manifold repercussions, if not also one

of several existential responses, be they dumb and obvious or profound and subtle, which describe the experience of the automotive prosthetic within these works of art The present book looks not to philosophers, scientists, and machines of vision, but rather to a particular form of technology—the automobile—as it exists within a field of others, and as it transforms the subject- spectator to subject- cyborg ontologically circumscribed by several works of conceptual art It is my opinion that, in what is a keystone text, this component of Crary’s thesis, his idea that there exists within contemporary visual experiences a deleterious form of “abstraction” that evolves out of tech-nology, is somewhat faulted in its tenor Mark B N Hansen sees positions like Crary’s as opportunities for rethinking semiotic- dominated strategies

of interpretation according to the “robust materiality of technology.”41 In thinking technology beyond writing, Hansen reevaluates the “wholesale re-

re-pression of the ‘radical exteriority’ of technology” at work in the writing of Jameson, Heidegger, Freud, Derrida, Lacan, and Deleuze and Guattari—a point that might also be applied to Crary’s writing.42 Hansen argues for a shift away from the language- oriented and negative take on technology, or what

he calls the technesis of the thinkers listed above, toward a position that is at

once open and embodied The problems of such approaches are thus not surmountable “The negative presentation of technology, like the negative presentation of the absolutely great and small, remains a temporary setback,

in-a provisionin-al phin-ase on the win-ay towin-ard in-a successful cognitive in-adin-aptin-ation.”43 Simondon describes a related sensibility in the “misoneism oriented against machines which is not so much a disdain for the new but refusal of a strange reality.”44 Echoing the work of Julia Kristeva, I argue by contrast to Crary that the machine bears a kindred spirit to the stranger within.45 Or, in Simondon’s words, “The machine is the stranger: it is the stranger in which the human

is locked up.”46 It is, reciprocally, the foreigner within us

prosthetic: Between Mechanology and

Cybernetics, soma and system

As does the car within art, the prosthetic device operates in manifold fashion

Of course, it appears in blockbuster Hollywood movies such as Transformers (2007/2009/2011) and Iron Man (2008/2010/2013) in the form of fantastical technological attachments, car to human in the Transformers and robotic carapace to human in the Iron Man franchise The automotive prosthetic is

both a position and a theory that, admittedly, bears only a minimal ship to these two popular versions of the prosthetic, indeed because the car operates as a literal, but non- miraculous, attachment to the human body In the study that follows, the prosthetic is at once literal and figurative, a refer-ence to the automobile machinery about which we wrap ourselves when we set out to drive as well as to a philosophical position As Donna Haraway put

relation-it, “Prosthesis becomes a fundamental category for understanding our most intimate selves Prosthesis is semiosis, the making of meanings and bodies, not for transcendence but for power- charged communication.”47 Prosthesis

as a discourse recognizes the technological being as normative and, by nection, that nature and putative human nature have changed They have moved beyond “justifications of domination, especially of domination based

con-on differences seen as natural, given, inescapable, and therefore moral.”48

Prosthesis bodes a progressive artificiality that goes back to Baudelaire in the mid- nineteenth century and Huysmans and the decadent writers of the late nineteenth century, which then culminates in high form with Marshall

McLuhan’s illuminating list of technological “extensions” in Understanding

Media: The Extensions of Man McLuhan conceptualized a broad range

of technological extensions, from the written word and roads to the graph and, yes, the “motorcar,” and their relationship to the human body according to the feedback loop Humans do not simply use technology in causal, unidirectional fashion, as a user simply utilizing an object in terms of figure A using tool B to act upon object C Rather, each use of every distinct kind of technology creates a relationship whereby human and technology are transformed Our use of the automobile affects self and landscape in a changeful ecology of space and time, architecture, urbanism, and world relations McLuhan connects the advent of the car to a “complete revolu-tion in transportation and in housing and city arrangement” and “the turn

photo-of our economy to making and servicing motorcars, and the devotion photo-of much leisure time to their use on a vast new highway system.”49 He offers examples of not only the feedback loop at work, but also the feedback loop

as a way of thinking This he brilliantly articulates in the distinction between

“hot media” and “cold media.” Here we find the usual adjectival tives “hot” and “cold” functioning not as commonly understood, that is,

descrip-as literal modifiers of the technological medium at hand Rather, he uses each designation in a kind of metaphorical counterlogic, describing one’s relationship and interaction with a mode of technology and the amount of concentration and labor required to interact with it “Hot media are low

in participation, cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.”50 These two categories describe “effect rather than meaning.”51 Influenced by McLuhan’s feedback- loop pattern of thinking, Jack Burnham describes prosthetic- oriented robot and cyborg art according to a Norbert Wiener–esque leap into the autogenetic realm of self- creation, with cyborg art distended away from and unattached to the body It is nonetheless in keeping with the outward connection of prosthesis and prosthetic devices,

as it is art that connects, viz relates, things to people and outward to the world Robot and cyborg art, for Burnham, marks “a refocusing of aesthetic awareness—based on future scientific- technological evolution—on matter- energy- information exchanges and away from the invention of solid arte-facts.”52 Related to Haraway and McLuhan, Burnham saw a rising “systems consciousness” in the conduit created by art and technology.53

Burnham’s idea of systems aesthetics emerged from a combination of careful scrutiny of the art of his time and the writing of the scientist Norbert Wiener The differences between Wiener’s theory of cybernetics and Simon-don’s mechanology reconfirm the connection between Burnham’s system aesthetics and the present book We arrive, once again, at a crossroads How,

one asks, does Hans Haacke’s MoMA Poll (1970), an information- based work

of art where the percipient and a questionnaire function as a feedback loop,

connect to Jonathan Schipper’s Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle:

Slow Motion Car Crash (2008), a sculpture with a machine advancing two

full- sized muscle cars into one another over six days in the simulation of an actual car crash (see Figures 0.1–0.4)? Broadly speaking, both offer articu-lations of technology at work within art—the former by way of the techno-genesis of humans as binary code (their answers in the polling are reduced

to “yes” or “no”) and the latter by way of a machine- initiated car wreck But, perhaps more profoundly, it is in their sharing of the conceptual turn and cyborg- subject that they meet Thus, rather than seeing cybernetics and mechanology as separate, I would once again like to link them, and thus also Haacke to Schipper, to reveal not so much their similarities but how they might fit together like parts of a machine or something like the input and out-put information of a feedback loop Comparing the two modes of thinking, John Hart locates the forebears of each mode of understanding technology, citing the seventeenth- century mathematician and scientist Isaac Newton for Wiener and the sixteenth- century anatomist William Harvey for Simon-don.54 It follows thus that “while the central notion of cybernetics was the system, the comparable concept in mechanology is the soma.”55 The system within cybernetics is to the soma within mechanology

The two actually met in person at a conference in 1964 Norbert Wiener was the keynote speaker at a conference titled “Concept d’Information dans

la Science Contemporaine,” organized by Simondon and held at an Abbey

in Asnières sur Oise, in northern France Simondon introduced Wiener and his theory of cybernetics in terms of “the time of Newton,” expounding that it was “without a doubt” a similar context in which they would listen to Wiener speak that day.56 Though effusive in his introductory comments, Simondon had already distanced himself from certain aspects of Wiener’s thinking In his delineation of a phenomenology of mechanical tools, Simondon criti-cized cybernetics for a missed opportunity Cybernetics was too rigid and taxonomic, he thought “It accepted at the get- go what technology should refuse: a classification of technical objects organized through the criteria

of genres and species.”57 Simondon sought a discursive yet cogent take on technology Henning Schmidgen explains, “His point was that Wiener had made the wrong choice relying on a quasi- Linnean, stable classification.”58 Simondon had developed a dynamic system of understanding mechanical technology that was made up of three components: the element, the indi-vidual, and the ensemble.59 Each component, decisive and unique, works together in the creation of an elastic and changeful fabric of culture and technology The terminology is quite self- evident, with the element repre-Figure 0.1. hans haacke, MoMA Poll, 1970 © hans haacke/Ars courtesy of Paula

cooper gallery, new york.

Figures 0.2–0.4. Jonathan schipper, Slow Inevitable Death of

American Muscle: Slow Motion Car Crash, 2008 courtesy of

Jonathan schipper and Pierogi gallery, new york.

senting the component of a given machine, the individual being the user, and an ensemble constituting a complex of machinery, as in a factory or laboratory The terms, all of which are interrelated, helped Simondon estab-lish the importance of context, what I have called elsewhere the situatedness

of technology, its phenomenology and phenomenological connections to a given locus There thus exists a unique yet shared strain of bio- dynamism within each mode of thinking through technology For Simondon, it is in the anatomical- cum- ecological approach to technology in the world, the idea that mechanical and human beings are both parts of an interconnected skeleton of the “inner and outer milieus or Umwelten”—the surrounding world.60 Wiener found that machines could mimic if not enact the same process of logic as mammals in what is a nonlinear feedback loop, or an ex-panding, interconnected, and supra- effectual network of moving informa-tion that exists in biological as well as technological form.61 Wiener in effect described the biological template of a computer motherboard In bringing the two senses of dynamism together we get, as Hart says, soma and system,

or, if stretched a little, a body roving through a network of information, and the car in a reticulum of infrastructure and looping highways As human

body, the kybernetes at the helm of the car, she bears what I call in Chapter 5

the haptic unconscious—a mode of perception wherein the memories of tactile experience, seeing and feeling the road, are deeply embedded in the subconscious of the body as a whole And this existential side of mechanical technology, in this instance the automobile, is brought to bear in the work

of Simondon, as well as the conceptual car art at the center of this study

The skin of the kybernetes—car and self combined—is a porous membrane

and celluloid- like pattern holder of the body’s unconscious, and the nomics of the car- body- road trifecta, or the machine ensemble, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch called it, make an imprint on the mind’s body as opposed to the mind’s eye She does not consciously know or recognize her movements but performs them by habit; just as in many of the works of art at hand, the car is there without being consciously recognized

ergo-This book is thus about a new subject position—the theory of the motive prosthetic—as evidenced in conceptual art about the car It is not

auto-a sociologicauto-al study or auto-a sociauto-al history of the cauto-ar; rauto-ather it is auto-a theory auto-about the car and us, the empirical proof of which is located in conceptual art in,

of, and about the car Six chapters survey the condition of the automotive prosthetic from 1951 to the present Chapter 1 focuses on the structure of thinking by which I am able to arrive at the theory of the automotive pros-

thetic I start by resituating Tony Smith’s famous account of his drive down the New Jersey Turnpike during the late 1950s in terms of the technology that is its creator, the automobile, and a more recent quote from the early 1990s by contemporary artist Julian Opie In comparing Smith’s account to Opie’s thinking on the car and the road, my goal is to bridge two periods of time and thus expand our notion of conceptual art This pairing launches my development of the “conceptual turn”: a new take on conceptualism that is chronologically broader and, rather than being an - ism limited to a few years

in time, is a decision- making process and sensibility that came to the fore in the post–World War II period, and that is now normative The chapter ex-plains the relationship between the conceptual turn and technology by way

of a related theory of “mediation,” while homing in on the oft- overlooked role of the automobile in conceptual art

Chapter 2 focuses on a large body of photoconceptual views to the road, arguing in the introductory section the unique nature of this work by com-parison to a very important but more conventional modernist view to the road by Robert Frank The chapter works through the manner in which the car is evident as a critical- minded frame in several works of photo-conceptualism, some canonical and others not, by Margaret Lawther, Jeff Wall, John Baldessari, Paul McCarthy, Martha Rosler, Dennis Hopper, Ian Wallace, Iain Baxter, Ed Ruscha, Richard Prince, Bill Vazan, Ed Kienholz, Julian Opie, and Cory Arcangel I develop the logic of the automotive pros-thetic here by way of “entropy and the vast defeatured landscape” and the

“tropes of the car in photoconceptualism,” to quote Jeff Wall.62 I elaborate the subjective implications of the experience of the automotive prosthetic outlined in these photoconceptual views to the road by way of the cyborg- subject Based on the writings of Donna Haraway, N Katherine Hayles, and Mark B N Hansen, I argue for a viewer position the epistemological for-mation of which comes out of the embodied subject of new media theory This figure, a cyborg- subject, is a relational being, a viewer looking at art that extends from artist to viewer- self, which in turn implies an ecological para-digm of artwork and world

Chapters 3 and 4 are somewhat symbiotic in that together they constitute the time and space of the automotive prosthetic Chapter 3 focuses on the subjective temporality, the affective time, according to Hansen, of the in-terior experience of the automobile as exemplified in moving- image artwork, both film clips and video art There I connect various philosophical senses

of the “now,” including the ideas of Francisco Varela, William James,

Ber-trand Russell, and Walter Benjamin, to moving- image pieces wherein the car functions as a womb- like pod of existential dread, fear, and deep rumina-tion in films by Joel Schumacher, Wim Wenders, and Robert Altman and in video art by Charlotte Posenenske, Artlab’s Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine Richards, Ant Farm, Nic Nicosia, Teresa Hubbard, Alexander Birchler, and Yael Bartana Chapter 4 is about the spatiality of the automotive prosthetic, the urbanism of the car, looking to the implicit and explicit role of the auto-mobile in Dan Graham’s work on architecture and the single- family home

In this chapter, I further elaborate the “haptic unconscious” of the car, necting it to the highway- based architecture projects of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown The overarching theme of the chapter is the idea of

con-“communication space,” wherein I link infrastructural systems and systems theory to the rethinking of the viewer- subject and art- object, linking high-ways to Graham’s use of video, and surveillance cameras to his early discus-sions of “radical software.” I make several connections here, linking the car and highway to the suburban landscape, to the time- delay video projects in the overall parsing of a sense of “communication space.”

Chapter 5 focuses on cultural militarism in art that engages the SUV, in particular the Hummer I have divided the chapter according to a triangle

of psychoanalytic positions: repression, sublimation, and the real I take my understandings of “repression” and “sublimation” from the Freudo- Marxist analytics of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno Under the category of repression, I place actual Hummer drivers, those who drive the now- defunct civilian version of the warfront Humvee down neighborhood streets acting out fake war in civilian space in what amounts to the repression of actual war They are faux warriors playing at war as though it were a matter of video gaming, costume, and eschatological apocalypse Under the category of sublimation, I delineate a group of sculptural, video, and installation works based on the Hummer Several are mimetic in nature, distilling the Hum-mer as painted or life- size three- dimensional form; two are works of video art focusing on the SUV and Hummer; and one is a traveling installation piece that comes together around a blown- out car from Baghdad I argue that, politically speaking, these works reach the delimitation of art as a po-litical device, insomuch as they bring light to the problematic of cultural militarism by sublimating it into the form of fine art In the final category

I coalesce clips from YouTube.com under the rubric of the Lacanian real These include Hummer commercials and violent videos of American sol-diers forging through Baghdad traffic and taunting Iraqi children I close

with a careful reading of ethical moment in Lacan’s thinking on the real, the linchpin of which is the clinamen swerve—the chance- based decision

to take a position against unwarranted and unlawful American intervention

in foreign countries

I have devoted the final chapter, Chapter 6, to the question of the “fetish”

in the car- based work of Richard Prince After founding the discussion on well- established philosophies of the “fetish” by Freud and Marx, I develop the mischievous nature of Prince’s layered form of fetishism, underscoring

the prankishness and misdoing, or maleficium, of his fetish From the

ap-propriation of the reproduced image, to the muscle car as sculpture and painting, to images of white trash culture, to feigning personas such as J G Ballard, Richard Prince is the master maker of the fetish in his art Look-ing to his most recent work, wherein he pulls a photographic skin over the bodies of cars from the 1980s, I argue that these works might best be under-stood according to the concept of the skin fetish Based on the French phi-

losopher Didier Anzieu’s concept of the skin- ego (moi- peau), these cars by

Prince set forth a form of roving image- as- desire and image- as- self: the car

as self- created picture, objectified thing and person, and a remainder; proof that the act of appropriation, and its core of want and wish, bear the logic of

a feedback loop, rolling back on itself in never- ending reproduction of desire