Auto-portret z kraksą
Self-portrait with a Car Crash

Summary/Abstract: When you invent the car, you also invent the car crash – Paul Virilio convinced his readers. It turns out that to invent the automobile means also to turn upside down or, at the very least, to question the heretofore aesthetic, symbolic, and spatial order and even the order of experiencing the sacrum. Marinetti regarded the roaring automobile to be more beautiful than Nike of Samothrace. Several decades later Barthes recognised the automobile to be a counterpart of Gothic cathedrals, an object that has “fallen from the sky”. In what sort of condition does the car reach the period of late modernity? What remains today of the former enthusiasm? How alive are the foundation mythologies? Are we already witnessing the twilight of goddesses, and should the motif of the car crash, recurring more and more often in pop-culture and the arts, be interpreted as a new form of iconoclasm?

• Details
• Contents