RUDIMENTS, pt. 175
Making Cars
For a while I had this thing
about streamlining. I wanted
to streamline the truth, have
reality streamlined, even time
itself. It was an easy grasp. On
my wall, there was a large poster
I'd somehow gotten, through my
father, who'd presented it grandly
to me, from General Motors. It
was a selection, each illustration,
date, and info, arrayed, with the
car photos each about the size of
a large postage stamp, of a good
selection of GM cars over the
years, leading up, I guess it was,
to about 1960 or so. Can't remember
that. I always enjoyed the photos.
There was always something about
cars to me, not the mechanical
aspects, not the running, but the
design work, the sculptural parts.
How the unity of motion-ideas and
design went into hard-goods, metal,
glass, and steel, to somehow capture
the essence of what the thing itself
was. I don't think, say, a toaster or a
radio, had that. They did try. All that
Raymond Loewy design stuff - the
curves and smooth steel, the reflection
of chrome and the shine, capturing
something in the concept. Streamlining.
We'd only a decade previous been
bounced back from an air-war wherein
streamlining and aircraft together had
played a big part : reason be damned,
it was death and destruction that had
to be catered to, through forms cutting
through air, the high curvature of
sleekness, to deliver death, fire,
bombs and destruction. Now, all
that had quieted down and the same
industrialized push, in the most
primitive of ways, was being allied
with motion, travel, rubber, wheels
and the ground. Not so much any
longer for death and destruction -
though for so many it ended up
bringing that anyway - but for the
supposed pleasant and positive deeds
of travel, visual sight-seeing, and
pleasure. America was 'turning on a
dime' as leisurely as any good car
ought. But, and there's always a
but, everything was lagging behind
the concept. The idea may have been
to streamline, but sometimes the
automobile aspects of that were
pretty hideous. Slow. Ponderous.
-
As in any other art form or 'work'
piece, when a fine concept gets
worked at by a second-tier
workman, the results can often
be off-mark by a smidgen or
more. It was like that with autos.
American man had achieved the
concept, as a workable paradigm
of itself anyway, but it took a lot
of works of back-and-forth, live
give-and-take to achieve, well,
something. I'd look at these forms
as representative (and not just
GM, the other car companies
too) embodiments of a sort
of mass-mind at work, the
entire working nation trying
to work something out - like
a philosophical proposition or
question presented, a large
whole (and hole) out of which
the particulars still had to be
drawn. It seemed a bit like
sculpting in the dark - through
the 1940's those huge, bulbous
shapes with separate fenders and
light bulges, not yet quite sure
of absorption-past-utility into
the design whole. And then a
sort of reckoning, a quiet period,
those stark-humble designs of
the early 1950's, sedate, quiet,
almost meek auto-designs,
thinking themselves through
something private. Like a
large, silent room. And then
in 1955 lightning strikes and
these preliminary forms begin
coming together in a finer
blend, a more perfect mix. By
1955 the visual apparatus, not
yet overtly flamboyant, was
presenting itself in a primacy
of decorum, and well-balanced
whole. (Again, I'm not talking
of the mechanics nor the runnings
of these things; just sculptural,
art and design proclivities made
evident). Everything, after all,
represents something, and there
are no voids.
-
Mankind is a working beast -
and whether he knows that or not
(Mankind, not man) - underneath
things are always the workings of
other concepts, the formulations of
different meanings, going on. By
1957/58, all of that had burst out
into the open. It was, for a few
years, as uncontrollable as sin. So
many other concepts were trying to
be said - fierce competition, sexuality,
sleekness and speed, aircraft references,
blunt trauma, liquid-form. Cars went
berserk for a few years. And then,
one day, the dawning. The cars of
1961 suddenly and overnight represented
something else entire - cut-off
everything, stark again, truncated and
flattened back ends, sedate fronts, a
very business-like mien. The 'down
to business' boys had taken over.
The Robert McNamara's and Lee
Iacocca's of the mind had stepped in.
The same guys, of course, who'd gift
us all with the Vietnam War in about
2 years, but, no matter. That huge step
backward was kept unspoken. Cars
themselves went square. The 1965
anything was a box-shaped echo of
whatever had gone before. None of this
was on my poster, but my logical delivery
of thought brought it ti me nonetheless.
-
The really funny thing about any of this
was the rabbit-hole of time down which
we all fall, must fall, eventually die into.
None of it matters now at all. Somewhere
over the years, after I'd left, the poster
came down, the room was re-used, the
paper crumpled, discarded, and forgotten.
Time had taken it over. No one thought
again about any of the concepts that wall
or room once had held, through me. The
foolish world went on, along its way. Car
design became a computer game, with
all these incidentals lost - CAD assisted
formats had turned right angels into globs,
curves and swirls became wind-equivalences,
glass became resistance, and then became
design too. Now, as I look out, it's all still
there, you can still go buy a car, but it
now represents nothing at all. Nothing.
Presenting, the new Nothing, by Chevrolet!
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