mocking the myth that the motorcar offers freedom…
A good start to the day. Tommy emails to say his print is on sale in an internet gallery specialising in bringing together artists who want to sell and customers who want to buy but don’t know how to find each other. (And this just a week after Tommy and the rest of FOUND featured in the News of the World!) Anyway, back to art.
I like the image selected by the New York gallery, 20×200.com: those unmistakeable US trucks could look menacing or toy-town-cheerful depending on your mood. But Tommy’s words have a particular significance as a UK strike of workers at Grangemouth refinery hammers home how much of our daily lives now depend on oil and the motor car.
Tommy explains why he uses the ‘language of the road’ in his Survey: UK, a visual odyssey of densely populated parts of Britain.
Under concrete and tarmac, cities become fields of grey, but within these there are small explosions of bright colour in road markings, street signs and traffic cones. Everywhere we look we can see the visual language of the road. These symbols illustrate our dependence on an oil economy with all the frightening political implications this brings. They direct and confine us, mocking the myth that the motorcar offers freedom.
The myth of freedom mocked me on a trip across town last week when I spent most of the time staring at the exhaust pipe of the car in front of me sending costly fumes into the spring air. If it seems crazy that we are happy to destroy the planet by driving when we don’t need to then it is even crazier that we are prepared to spend money on fuel going nowhere at all. (And I know I was doing the same as everyone else which makes me even more depressed – though I did try to strike a blow for sanity by switching off the engine when I could see traffic was definitely not moving).
Sitting safely at the screen I have just crossed the world on a virtual trip to New York to explore the online gallery created by Jen Bekman who opened a tiny gallery in Lower East Side five years ago because she wanted to help emerging artists and collectors. Now she’s using the internet to take the idea to a logical expansion, selling small prints in batches of 200 at $20 dollars each; hence the name 20×200.com Good for her: she has excellent taste.
And the News of the World? Well they show surprising good taste too. I would add a link to their review of FOUND in Triptych but I can’t get past the clutter of shock-horror scandals to find it online. Let’s just stick to art.
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