Distortions and Illusions

Bożena Czubak: Design came up in the conversation we had for “Magazyn Sztuki” sixteen years ago¹. Our principal point of reference at the time was, of course, your Corrective Devices. Speaking about these devices, which fitted perfectly into the aesthetics of the market, you emphasised the importance of their technological quality, commercial image and everything that turns a product into an attractive market proposition. The devices were instruments for modelling personality and producing standards of behaviour, clearly demonstrating design’s repressive dimension. But this was the 1990s, a time of intoxication with the benefits of the market and the glamour of advertising. Today we are more aware of being products, consumers of our own image. Hal Foster compares the contemporary design of lifestyles to the “total design” of Art Nouveau: the project of merging art and life, expressing individuality through every nail. In the ubiquity of design he even sees capitalism’s revenge on postmodernism². In your recent works you no longer impersonate a designer, yet they concern precisely this ubiquity of design. In the bicycle drawings you evoke, on the one hand, Constructivist ambitions to design the world and the way it is seen and, on the other, a Baudrillardian loss of oneself in images. In the Corrective Devices you “released a virus” into products; now, in the bicycle and car projects, vision itself has become infected.

Zbigniew Libera: In the 1990s, discovering that the world had been designed was still quite innocent, although it went hand in hand with discovering what Michel Foucault wrote about in The Birth of Biopolitics. We were no longer dealing with the old political model, but with the biopolitics of power: a power that designs our lives and looks after our health and fitness like a “good shepherd” tending his flock. In the recent works with the car and bicycle, the point of departure is the image: the flat image that has become an attribute of our civilisation. An image that is a sign, an abbreviation, which merely represents something as three-dimensional. We have been trained to associate these flat images with the things they represent. This elaborate system of signs and symbols, through which we navigate so efficiently, takes us ever further from knowing what reality actually is. The earliest means of articulating and recording thought — language and writing — already distanced us from reality. Hieroglyphic writing still referred in some way to a consciousness that is not verbal. We do not, after all, think in words. The hieroglyph could refer to that, whereas the written word cannot, because it is too specific. William Burroughs once said that language is the first instrument of enslavement, that language and its written form were invented to control what we think. Today we have computers and the Internet, and we use with great efficiency tools that are meant to give us access to reality but in fact deprive us of it. I keep thinking about Strzemiński’s argument that a change in the way a given historical formation sees signifies a change in the power exercised over vision. Today power is associated with a flat, extraordinarily sign-like and abstract mode of seeing. Revealing its mechanism may therefore help to change the way it is managed. The car seems to me a phenomenal example through which to demonstrate this vision: when something photographed and flattened into two dimensions is translated back into a three-dimensional object, it no longer corresponds to the original at all. Here we have a car — a three-dimensional object reduced by photography to a flat image and then recreated in three dimensions exactly according to the rules of that image, but without, as it were, understanding its code. This is where the virus creeps in: the object proves strangely deformed and reveals what the image or photograph does to the thing it represents. In what it does, in all these distortions, I would see a metaphor for the way we communicate.

B.C.: A language that takes the unreal for the real. Your car contradicts the naturalisation of vision. Looking at its hybrid shapes, we see that what we accepted as natural in the photograph proves to be an unnatural distortion.

Z.L.: A pure illusion…

B.C.: Speaking of language, you mentioned Burroughs. Writing about your works in the past, I used the metaphor of the pharmakon — Plato’s, and later Derrida’s, metaphor of distrust towards language, writing and the image, towards that which supports memory and forgetting at once, the disappearance of what it preserves.

Z.L.: When making the bicycle drawings, I used a term associated with Baudrillard but taken from physics. In physics, precession is a departure from one’s own shape; virtually everything we encounter is subject to such distortion. Once we are aware of this phenomenon, we know that nothing is as it appears. This knowledge may be highly useful in relation to what Strzemiński wrote about: challenging and delegitimising the language we use, the language of power. All this may sound rather anachronistic — Derrida, Burroughs, Baudrillard, deconstruction… However unfashionably leftist it may seem, it interests me.

Even if it were ultimately to prove an illusion, it would still be worth investigating. The entire project is somewhat demodé anyway — post-Neo-Avant-Garde, I would say. It may recall Krzysztof Wodiczko’s experiments with a ladder or stool in the 1970s.

B.C.: Wodiczko was also concerned with the role of illusion and the deceptiveness of visual representation, but his stool and ladder were quasi-laboratory objects. The car, by contrast, is a symbol of the twentieth century, one of our civilisation’s most mythologised and myth-making products, a leading exhibit in major design exhibitions and the most eloquent exponent of a lifestyle. In her excellent book Fast Cars, Clean Bodies³, Kristin Ross draws attention to the connections between the motor and film industries and, above all, to the extraordinarily significant fact that in France the cultural discourse on the car preceded its mass use: Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord and Alain Touraine on the one hand; Françoise Sagan’s novels and popular magazines such as “Elle”, where Boris Vian published enthusiastic reports from successive motor shows, on the other. In a sense, cinema and literature prepared the ground for the market; in any event, the car was consumed first on the screen, in the press and in books.

Z.L.: The choice of a car is not accidental. Wodiczko reached for banal objects unburdened by meaning. I wanted the opposite: something saturated with meaning. And the car is one of the most sexual products there is. People are fascinated by cars — or rather, by their sexuality. Even by the sexuality of death in car crashes; David Cronenberg made a film about it titled Crash (1996). Consider Albert Camus’s death: handsome, exceptionally intelligent, and killed in a car crash in a fast-moving car. Or the legend of James Dean, living, driving and dying at breakneck speed. The sexualisation of the car resembles sexual aberrations, accepted in much the same way as the image of a car that we read as true, but which proves false when translated into a three-dimensional object. The deformations and distortions — the ways a car deceives us in the flat image — become a point of reference for its sexuality and the various meanings attributed to it.

B.C.: Baudrillard, who devotes so much space to the car in The System of Objects, compares the effect of speed and the fascination with driving at a dizzying pace to losing oneself in an image of the world reduced to two dimensions. Put briefly, driving fast is a state of becoming immobilised within an image.

Z.L.: American road movies show it best. In Vanishing Point, Kowalski drives so fast that he almost dematerialises. Speed no longer matters; instead of moving forwards, he rises upwards. Think of the fascination with travel and with being in constant motion — in other words, nowhere — and finding a sense of freedom in it. These are the illusions to which the deformed car refers.

B.C.: In connection with the production of these illusions, one could survey the iconography of the car’s different views, close-ups and curves…

Z.L.: The best views are from the front and slightly below, so that the front end and mudguard are largest while the rest, seen in foreshortening, almost disappears. The car becomes monumental and looks exceptionally attractive. Such shots appear in numerous films and music videos. Rappers use cars with good suspension, and their rhythmic rocking is ostentatiously sexual. In comic strips and animated films we find cars with eyes, cars that speak — the car is anthropomorphised. I have the impression that we tend to naturalise different artificial products. But the car is an exceptional product, extraordinarily receptive to the projection of different illusions.

1. See The Art of Legitimising Rebellion, Zbigniew Libera in conversation with Bożena Czubak, “Magazyn Sztuki”, no. 15, 1997.

2. See Hal Foster, Design and Crime, Verso, London and New York, 2002, pp. 13–26.

3. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, 1996.