Dr Ken wach critical essay

Let’s expand upon the idea of a vehicle. 

The privately owned car is not merely a mechanical means of personal transport. Certainly, a vehicle carries a load, yet it also conveys a message. In this special sense both the car and its owner may be considered as being partnered in the creation and communication of individual identity. 

There are eco cars and ego cars, each driven by the dynamic urges and desires of selfhood. Ride, drive; take the air; catch the breeze – remember one thing: no-one has lived this moment before. The desire to be, the need to feel – these are our fuels. 

For our purposes, it is instructive to imagine the car as a pre-packed parcel whose contents and qualities reach far beyond its useful convenience as a means of direct transport. In this introspective mode of thinking the private car may be instructively viewed as a public presentation of self – thus considered, it functions not so much as a personal “expression” but more as a psychosocial marker. Many contemporary theorists and researchers have found such observations fascinating and much is written about their enticing connections. 

Such sealed bubbles of self – such vehicles of content – are also of considerable interest to visual artists. For them, vehicles also carry and convey - although they use these two words in very different senses. Artists, with their inherent visual literacy, are often drawn to the image-based challenges posed by cars’ sensuous shapes and surfaces. As well, artists seem to recognize and respond to cars’ value-laden contents and through their interventions they attempt to imbue those contents with value-added elements. When successful, the highest level of achievement is reached when one witnesses the development of non-decorative artistic enhancements that accelerate attention; that highlight head- turning uniqueness, and that transform cars into museum-pieces, exclusive assets, or highly prized collectables. 

In the final analysis, contemporary artists tend to work in ways that add types of “optical pop”, “visual weight”, billboard spread, splash screen, “grit-screen” or “image-stitching” effects to vehicles in ways that mask their normal functions through the use of layered figure-ground compositions. Broadly, visual artists aim to enhance the highly refined form of cars by the balanced placement of contrapuntal images and the use of appropriate colours and application techniques. Their overall purpose is to transform a mechanical marvel into an aesthetic wonder – to “hatch” it into a new life. 

This type of transformative strategy lies at the core of all Art Cars. After all, the aesthetic (promoting perception through the senses) is always preferable to the anaesthetic. Essentially, it is a matter of extending sensory refinement – for example, a meal on a paper plate might well be wonderful, but the same meal on a hand-painted English Bone China plate induces a richer sensory response. It’s the heightened experience that is the driver. 

In many allusive ways artists are magicians in that they can transmute the ordinary into the extraordinary and snap the mundane into the marvellous – the artistic finger of the human imagination moves to enliven all. With this observation in mind, the early pioneering efforts of artists such as the French painter Sonia Delaunay in 1925 and the “democratic visuality” of her late-Art Deco times (where almost everything was worthy of artistic intervention) now seem particularly far-sighted. Following her ground-breaking lead artists thereafter often turned their hand to painting on the surface of vehicles. Value-adding artistic intervention was born and subsequently contemporary artists such as Alexander Calder, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Sandro Chia, Jenny Holzer and Jeff Koons among others, contributed their specific creative inputs to this new genre of global artistic practice. 

The internationally-active Melbourne-based artist Sankar Nadeson joins these ranks and has developed an artistic schema that is well-suited to the historical background and aesthetic qualities of the latest Koenigsegg automobiles. He favours using the densely symbolic iconography of ancient Norse mythology in analogical ways that add emblematic meanings to complement the cars’ exterior forms. In addition, he has also completed extensive investigations with the celebrated artist Jon Cattapan (Emeritus Professor at the Victorian College of The Arts and past winner of the prestigious Bulgari Award) that aim to create an evocatively artistic “skin” that will clothe a Koenigsegg Jesko in ways that add a gossamer-like “constellation” of layered associations. 

Artistic creativity adds swoon to a car. It activates desire; it moves us with style and is suffused with sophistication. The take-home truth is that it is a happy union – think of it in this way: creativity marries human flair to engineering passion. 

Associate Prof. Ken Wach
Former Principal Research Fellow and Head of the School of Creative Arts The University of Melbourne