Today's guests are curator Neville Wakefield and Fairfax Dorn of Ballroom Marfa.
They'll be discussing, AutoBody, a new show curated by Wakefield. It explores the mythology of the American automobile through the carcasses of an industry turned art. From Robert Frank to Richard Prince, the automobile has been the driving force of American freedom: its promise of escape provided in an image of mobility. However, as JG Ballard pronounced over 40 years ago, “the car as we know it is on the way out… for as a basically old fashioned machine, it enshrines a basically old-fashion idea: freedom.” The American dream that it once represented, and freedom—the idea it once enshrined—may, like the car itself, be turning obsolete.
With a nod to those windshields that cinematized landscape, AutoBody features the newly commissioned four-channel video work, North of South West of East, by emerging artist Meredith Danluck and produced by Matthew Shattuck. Shot on location in Detroit, Michigan and Marfa, Texas, North of South West of East uses the car as an entry point, a subtle connective tissue, between the equally loaded but seemingly disparate archetypes of the Cowboy, the Rebel, the Immigrant, and the Actress. Eschewing the simplification of abstraction, the film employs the mainstays of narrative with a strong focus on temporality. Each of the four character’s retention of the past, attention to present actions and future anticipation play out on separate screens simultaneously manifesting both mobility and stasis—the chronic existential crisis that is American identity.
