Car culture (1992)
Excerpt fr. John A. Walker’s Glossary of Art, Architecture & Design since 1945, 3rd. ed.
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 12 April 2011
This text is an excerpt from Walker’s 1992 glossary previously published by Library Association Publishing, London.
Car Culture
Car culture is a term used by several writers to sum up the human behaviour associated with automobiles. Roland Barthes has argued that the motor car is the modern day equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals of the feudal period. As designed artefacts invested with human dreams, desires and values (mainly those of men), motor cars are themselves material, visual embodiments of culture. Their forms and styles frequently symbolize aggression, power, speed, mobility, sex, social status and wealth. Particular makes of car are often associated with particular social groups and hence are one manifestation of lifestyles and sub-cultures. Some individuals personalize standard models by customizing them or by adding stickers and knick-knacks. Certain manufacturers have commissioned fine artists to decorate their cars, hence the term "auto-art", e.g. BMW racing cars whose bodies were painted with designs by the American artists Alexander Calder, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol. The vehicles were displayed in an "Art Cars" exhibition to mark the opening of a BMW showroom, Park Avenue, New York, in 1986.
From time to time a particular make of car becomes a cult object; a famous British example was the Morris Mini introduced in 1959 and designed by Alec Issigonis. Some makes of old cars have become collectors’ items: they are treated as valuable antiques and preserved in museums. Exhibitions celebrating cars and leading automobile companies such as Fiat increasingly take place in public design and science museums. Car Culture also encompasses secondary materials such as pictorial advertisements, photographs, magazines and films about cars and car designers, e.g. "Tucker" (Lucas Film Ltd, 1988) (see review) directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
Motor cars have frequently served as the subject matter for paintings. Car styling was one of the topics discussed by the members of the Independent Group and some of Richard Hamilton’s early pop paintings were inspired by the exotic styles of American cars in the 1950s. Andy Warhol’s photo-silkscreened images of horrific car crashes in the 1960s highlighted one negative consequence of automobiles. Motor cars have also served artists as materials for making works of art, e.g. the assemblage artist John Chamberlain made sculptures from crushed auto bodies, while Arman embedded whole cars (58 of them) in a huge concrete tower he entitled "Long term parking" (1982, located in a park at Jouy, France).
See also Cult Objects, Customizing & Custom Painting, Hi-Way Culture, Lifestyle, Styling, Subculture.
References and further reading
> Ronald Barker & Anthony Harding (Eds.). Automobile design: Great designers and their work. (Newton Abbot, David & Charles, 1970).
> Peter Roberts. Any colour so long as it’s black: The first fifty years of automobile advertising. (Newton Abbot, David & Charles, 1976).
> L. J. K. Setright. The designers. (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976).
> Douglas B. Tubbs. Art & the automobile. (Guildford, Lutterworth Press, 1978).
> Malcolm Haslam. The amazing Bugattis. (Royal College of Art/Design Council, 1979).
> Angelo Tito Anselmi (Ed.). Carrozzeria Italiana: Advancing the art and science of automobile design. (Milan, Automobilia, 1980).
> Brian Laban. Chrome: Glamour cars of the fifties. (Qrbis Publishing, 1982).
> S. Bayley. Harley Earl and the dream machine. (New York, Knopf, 1983).
> The automobile and culture. (Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984).
> Frances Basham & Bob Ughetti (Photos) & Paul Rambali (Text). Car Culture. (Plexus, 1984).
> Stephen Bayley. Sex, drink and fast cars: The creation and consumption of images. (Faber & Faber, 1986).
> D. Barry. Street dreams: American Car Culture from the ’50s
to the ’80s. (MacDonald/Orbis Publishing, 1988).
> James Flink. The automobile age. (Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press, 1988).
> C. Edson Armi. The art of American car design. (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989).
> Andrew Nahum. Alec Issigonis. (Design Council, 1989).
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