Meditation Through a Windshield
Henri Matisse, The Windshield, 1917
I had not seen nor known of Matisse’s painting, The Windshield, until a few years ago. It is a painting depicting a landscape seen through the windshield of a car of a country road lined with trees. In the foreground, propped against the steering wheel, is a sketch pad.
Looking at this painting, I realized that the car interior was, at that time, a truly new kind of interior space.
Art is about seeing. The history of art-making can be understood as the artistry with which an artist constructs the space an object occupies, or draws the viewer into that space to create a meaningful experience. The choice of space is not arbitrary. Where has the viewer been placed? From what vantage point are you seeing what is being depicted? In the case of this Matisse painting, you are in the driver’s seat. You are seeing the world through the artist’s eyes.
At the time this painting was created, the car was still very much a new thing, both in its technical advancement and in our relationship to it. It had not fully replaced the horse or the horse-drawn vehicle. It was rare enough to still be a curiosity; a novelty whose significance had yet to be understood for the impact it would come to have on us.
The arc of the car’s depiction is a bell curve whose baseline is its velocity. Depictions quickly ascend the arc as more and more artists used its image to capture speed as a symbol of new-found power. Along with speed, the car becomes a celebration of technological and design advancement with all its promise of a brighter future. As it achieved its status as a symbol of manliness, sexiness, wealth and class, this vehicle moved swiftly to the very center of our lives.
Art of the car has adroitly captured the effects of what advertising has sold us.
In the mid-1960’s, the car crash as subject matter was introduced into the lexicon of car depictions. From that point forward, like all things fossil-fueled, gender-stereotyped, and class-based, the awareness of the car’s impact on us and on the planet has created a profound ambivalence toward this machine which is at the center of our lives. What began as a curiosity has become a struggle to articulate and resolve the ambivalence we have toward the our love, hate, anger, pleasure, fetishistic attachment, camaraderie, masculinity, class, wealth and dependence we have with the car.
Prior to the car, the driver, along with its source of power (horse, ox, donkey), was always external to the cabin. Drivers sat on top, sat in front, or walked beside it. Although the power source is still external, the design of the car placed the driver inside the capsule, along with passengers and cargo. The word “automobile” acknowledges that our relationship to vehicles has changed significantly. Auto- as a prefix indicates an attachment of the “self” to the object. By bringing the “self” inside the car, the interior becomes a profoundly intimate space, metaphorically mirroring our mind/body relationship. Like our mind trying to negotiate and navigate our bodies in relationship to others, so too the car. This fundamental investment of self-identity into the car is why our relationship to the car is so complicated. Now, with our growing awareness of the negative impact this machine is having on our own survival, how do we extract what is positive from what can no longer be sustained? The pressing question for us these days is: how do we disentangle our identities from this powerful mechanical exoskeleton?
– Eric Fischl
