In the 20th century, cars, being the designed object par excellence, were often the target of attacks. Just think of Doug Michel’s “Cadillac Farm”, Wolf Vostell’s “Concrete Traffic”, or the crushed car scrap works by John Chamberlain. Now, in the 21th century, the end of the automobile is being ever more vehemently propagated and predicted.
Paul Virilio, for one, describes it as a “de-realisation” that human beings – sitting in a car – block their own vision of the world as it really is. With their foot on the accelerator, their view through the windscreen is focussed on a point in the distance. The driver does not see what is flying by the windows to the left and right. Virilio also simply calls it “loss of the panoramic view”.
The French anthropologist Marc Augé coined the term “non-place”. Non-places are inter alia “receding poles, mobile dwellings”. According to Augé’s definition, the car – which poses a challenge to the city, in particular – is a non-place, the prototype of a place designed and dwelt in by human beings. The million-fold dissemination of non-places, that is to say cars, deprives the city of its “poetic seduction and identification”, according to Augé.
“The Baroque water sculpture” is the sinking of a non-place in what appears to be another non-place, a duck pond, which by virtue of this shift in context becomes a waste pool.”
Text: Thomas Mießgang