AUTOMANIA MOMA
Vrrroom: Sexy, Fun, and Gorgeous
Since the first automobiles hit the road more than 100-years-ago, cars have left a lasting imprint on the design of our environment and reshaped how we live, work, and enjoy ourselves. Cars have altered our ideas about mobility, connecting us across greater distances at ever greater speeds. Automania at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art takes an in-depth look at a machine that has inspired innovation, social transformation, and critical debate.
Automania’s curators explained the exhibition addresses “the conflicted feelings—compulsion, fixation, desire, and rage—that developed in response to cars and car culture in the 20th century. Examining automobiles as both modern industrial products and style icons, it also explores their adverse impact on roads and streets, public health, and the planet’s ecosystems.”
The title Automania refers to the 1964 Oscar-nominated animation by Halas and Batchelor. The 10-minute cartoon satire imagines a frightening future caused by the relentless pursuit of happiness through science, feeding the public’s demands for novelty and status consciousness, and with predictable environmental consequences.
Automania brings together cars and car parts, architectural models, films, photographs, posters, paintings, and sculptures, ranging from Lily Reich’s 1930s designs for a tubular steel car seat to Andy Warhol’s Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times. The exhibition includes a recently restored Volkswagen Type 1 sedan (better known as the Beetle), a Jeep made for the United States Army during WWII, a Ferrari Formula 1, and its ultimate counterpart, the compact Smart Car. “It’s really remarkable when you think about the ways that cars can bring different kinds of audiences into a place like MoMA,” said Andrew Gardner, one of the show’s curators. “That’s a really good feeling.”
With the debate to address the climate issues and replacing fossil fuel with electricity, the rise in ridesharing through apps such as UBER and LYFT, and self-driving cars on the horizon, the love affair with the automobile may be slowly diminishing. Until then, Automania is on view at the MoMA until January 2, 2022.
