James Ballard Plays Burnout is a video montage of simulated car crashes performed in Burnout Paradise (Criterion/Electronic Arts, 2008). The soundtrack features recordings of “real” automobile wrecks mixed with the sounds of a woman moaning and groaning.
If C’etait un rendez vous
numerique was a reflection on simulated speed, James Ballard Plays Burnout
deals with the pornographic violence of its unintended consequence, the
Accident.
LINK: james ballard plays burnout (2009)
Here are five artworks that inspired my project:
Dirk Skreber
Dirk Skreber, "It Rocks Us So Hard Ho Ho Ho" (2002), oil on canvas
"Dirk Skreber paints car wrecks with a high-gloss sheen. These soft-focus catastrophes speak the language of commodity and sterile seduction, filling enormous canvases like lurid billboard adverts. Deserted trains and houses loom in the middle of monochrome landscapes, Skreber’s luminescent palette giving a hyper-realist polish that dissolves at closer viewing into painterly realism. (Frieze)
Jonathan Schipper
Jonathan Schipper "SLOW INEVITABLE DEATH OF AMERICAN MUSCLE - SLOW MOTION CAR CRASH (2007), installation
"This sculpture is a machine that advances two full sized automobiles slowly into one another over a period of 6 days, simulating a head on automobile collision. Each car moves about three feet into the other. The movement is so slow as to be invisible." (Jonathan Schipper)
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol, "Orange Disaster" (1963), silkscreen
"The Car Crash paintings that Warhol made between late 1962 and early 1964, form the most varied and extensive group of pictures in his seminal series of Death and Disaster paintings. Drawing on six different documentary source photographs each outlining six separate, horrific and increasingly bizarre fatal accidents, Warhol's Car Crashes remain among the most powerful, challenging and provocative paintings made by any artist in the Post-War era." (Christie's)
Related: [Gerard Malanga's commentary on Warhol's Death and Disaster series]
Charles Ray
Charles Ray, "Unpainted Sculpture" (1997), scultpure
"Nearly two years in the making, this work is a life-size fiberglass cast of a 1991 Pontiac Grand Am that was totaled in a deadly accident. Like many of Charles Ray’s works, Unpainted Sculpture was in part the result of a chance occurrence. During a dinner conversation with a student whose car had been repeatedly involved in accidents, Ray suggested that he simply reconstruct the car’s dented bumper, cast it in fiberglass, and reattach it. When another student pointed out that this would be a good idea for one of Ray’s sculptures, a project was born. The artist spent more than two months searching insurance lots, looking for wrecks in which fatalities had occurred. He hoped to locate a vehicle that would transcend the specificities of any particular accident and would therefore attain the level of a “perfect” version of a crashed car." (ArtsConnected)
Jeff Bubsy
"Busby’s collection of photographs deserves to stand on its own as a stark meditation on the pleasures and perils of one of the key technologies of modern times. The pictures were taken at night. A mournful atmosphere pervades over these dismembered, abandoned machines. They look serene, almost like they are sleeping; yet their dreams are full of violence, still reverberating with the aftershock of death. There is no text whatever to accompany the images, and the desolate close-ups of shattered glass, panels and dashboards hold no traces of human presence. I found myself searching closely for traces of blood or other organic matter, any remnant that may bespeak of what happened to the missing victims. But nothing. The very configuration of automobile interiors, ergonomically designed to tightly accommodate the human body, seems to amplify the absence of these (presumably dead) bodies." (Andres Vaccari, Ballardian)
brrrilliant!
Posted by: alex penzo | 09/24/2009 at 05:25 AM