Holy Motors

Peppi Bottrop

Sara Mehrinfar

Calvin Miceli Nelson

Nicolas Shake

Marika Thunder

Curated by Grant Edward Tyler

Rattled by the calamities of two global wars, the postmodern American psyche finds itself at home in the car. Through the windshield, all things pass like a film. The climate is controlled. Entertainment is always within reach. The sculptural sensuality of the car body expresses in abstract the latent impulses of the collective libido. Each model is pressed with identical exactness on the assembly line and yet appeals to each driver as an outward expression of their inner selves. This is the ultimate triumph of the American way of doing things. The open highway rushes by, the illusion of individuated freedom hauling down the predetermined line cut sharply through the landscape. The national and international network of highways bounding local grids to one another, sprawling continents like spiders' webs. This is the original Internet. The car experience epitomizes the American character of the second wave of the Industrial Revolution. It anticipates our present networked conundrum. The information network infrastructure from Arpanet to its fruits in AI and crypto is but an echo of this first global network endeavor. Where today's technological frontier invokes a sense of volatility and mercurial shiftiness, of global connectivity and individual atomization, yesterday's highways appear romantic and grounded. The fading sites of the car's cultural hegemony—the freeway-accessible shopping mall, the drive-in movie theater, the roadside attractions—these appear on the horizon like Thomas Cole's Ruined Tower. Car culture has shrunk to only its most pragmatic aspects, its magic is lodged forever in the past. What's left are ghost images, the phantasmagoric residuum of America's greatest export.