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Garagisme

02.03.2018 — Design

Gender Bending Engines

Gender Bending Engines - © Garagisme

This article was previously published in the third issue of GARAGISME in 2013

Text:

Alice Pfeiffer

Photography:

Gilles Uzan

In Stephen Bayley’s mind, car design and rules of attraction frolic gayly. The writer, professor and world expert on all things that matter (automotive thoughts, sexuality and dolce vita), is also a pioneer in the analysis and curation of design in Britain. He began by being assigned the direction of decade-marking exhibition the Boiler Room at London’s Victoria&Alberts Museum by Terrence Conran. He went on the found the Design Museum, to which he is currently the chief executive. He has since been named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French minister of Culture, and has written numerous books on design, cars, sex, and most recently, the notion of ugliness. The little free time he has is filled revealing secrets about art history in the Observer (Boticelli’s model for The Birth of Venus was, he revealed, was a woman of lowly morals named Simonetta Vespucci). GARAGISME met Stephen Guru’ Bailey and enquired about notions of gender, sublimation and lifelong passion for the four wheel tin toy.

Alice Pfeiffer

You have written about the perception and construction of ugliness in society. What makes a car ugly?

Stephen Bailey

Ugliness was once caused by ineptitude. Just look at the AMC Gremlin or the Suzuki SC100. The Californian artist Phil Garner used to carry a picture of the latter with him everywhere, along with the workshop manual of an Austin Maxi. These he would produce in order to stimulate creative conversations about the nature of genius and its opposite. For much of the automobile’s history, the quest was to democratize beauty. This was an adventure which made halting, but generally positive, progress. So much so that by the early years of the twenty-first century, a settled opinion about automobile beauty was available in all advanced countries. So, in that reversal familiar from the history of taste, the most sophisticated designers began to explore disruption. By 2003 BMW, for example, had exhausted the Bauhaus language of clean lines. Aesthetically, there was nowhere else to go. So Chris Bangle decided to make shapes that were fussy, fidgety and irrational, shapes with complex surfaces. For different reasons, Patrick Le Quement at Renault decided his large cars could not compete with the Germans, so created the heroically curious Avantime and Vel Satis. The idea being to give Renaut presence” in an unfamiliar sector. This was achieved, except the presence was not much enjoyed by consumers. Meanwhile, Porsche, in defiance of its founder’s design principles, produced the Cayenne, a shape intended to confront and abuse, rather than delight or seduce, the customer.

Alice Pfeiffer

Which model would you say is your favorite‘ugly’ car?

Stephen Bailey

Some ugly cars are dismaying, but others are delightful. In this sense, perhaps they are not ugly at all. This is why ugliness is such a perplexing subject. No question, my favourite ugly” car is the 1961 Citroen Ami 6, sometimes known as the 3cv. Every aspect of this extravagantly odd vehicle is wrong. To the magnificently minimalist mechanics of the old deux chevaux has been added, bodywork which queasily and inappropriately suggests the 1957 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser. That rear glass with re-entrant angle is a hideous motif also admired by SNCF and the designers of the contemporary Ford Anglia. But being French, the Ami 6 is more jolie-laide than plug ugly. The car has a charm that makes it nearly chic. Of course, the weirdest thing about is this: the designer was Flaminio Bertoni whose masterpiece was the great DS, surely the most beautiful car of all time.

Alice Pfeiffer

How did your love of cars begin? Do you cherish any automotive memories of your childhod?

Stephen Bailey

I grew up with cars. My father took cars more seriously than houses. The first picture of me – about three months old — shows me not with a teddy bear, but sitting by the headlight of a Georges Roesch Talbot. This car contributed mightily to my flawed psychology. It provided an impressive sense of grandeur, but because it had a piston missing contributed also to my life-long sense of things not being entirely right. But nonetheless, ever since, I have found cars more comforting than homes. As a child I learnt that cars could be psychological protection, emotional comfort and powerful symbols of well-being. I was a lonely and introspective only child and grew up not playing football, but sitting in the back of my father’s Jaguar reading books. Later, the great art historian Nikolaus Pevsner told me that cars are mobile controlled environments”. Indeed, they are. They are architeture. After Pevsner, I read Roland Barthes. Even truer was his notion that cars today are our cathedrals”. I do still believe that.

Alice Pfeiffer

What car do you drive or have you driven? What was the motivation behind each of these choices?

Stephen Bailey

The very day I am writing this, I have just ordered my new car. This is a 2013 Mercedes-Benz CLS Shooting Brake C350 AMG Sport. In black. I love its sesquipedalian name. I am deeply critical of oil-based energy policies and of traffic in towns and firmly believe that it is five minutes to midnight for the private care. But still, I am ridiculously excited at the prospect of my new car. This is their magic : against all rational considerations, I am acquiring a large amount of expensive metal which will never be used to its full potential. And yet it makes me happy and fulfilled. And you could write my biography in terms of the cars I have owned.

Alice Pfeiffer

For decades, cars and sex have gone hand in hand in popular imagination. Why do you think this association is so frequent?

Stephen Bailey

In the mid-eighties when I had just written an encyclopedic book on the history of design, my publisher took me out for lunch and said : That’s enough about design. What are you really interested in ?” My reply : Since you mention it, I suppose it is sex, drink and fast cars”. He said : Write it !” So I did. Cars are inextricable from sex in the same way as oysters are. It is not that oysters are chemically aphrodisiac, simply that eating them is suggestive of pleasure and indulgence that leads inevitably to thoughts of coition. With cars it might be what Freud said about trains, that the vibration and motion are themselves stimulating. But there is an intense occult eroticism about the notion of controlling power and of public display.

With cars it might be what Freud said about trains, that the vibration and motion are themselves stimulating. But there is an intense occult eroticism about the notion of controlling power and of public display.

Stephen Bailey

Alice Pfeiffer

How and why have cars themselves become the object of fetishization?

Stephen Bailey

An American from Kansas once wrote to me, enclosing a photograph of himself in cowboy costume accompanied by a pet lion, and asked Do I like Volkswagens”. I drily replied that I was indeed a great admirer of the work of Dr Ing h.c. Ferdinand Porsche. He persisted in asking if I really liked Volkswagens. The correspondence continued and he revealed that he could only achieve sexual gratification by intercourse with one or other orifice of his Beetle.

Alice Pfeiffer

How do you feel about the common claim that all cars today look alike? Is there less diversity in design than there used to be?

Stephen Bailey

Well, in any given age things have qualities in common. Thus, Brunelleschi’s Pazzi Chapel is a little like Bramante’s Tempietto. But not very much. I am always bewildered by the charge that all cars today look the same. The evidence for this charge cannot be the coexistence of the Toyota iQ and the Maserati Quattroporte. Can it?

Alice Pfeiffer

What are in your opinion the most phallic and the most feminine’ car today?

Stephen Bailey

The language of car design is now so diverse and sophisticated, I am not certain that any simplistic phallic/​feminine morphology exists. That said, the Audi Q7 is certainly an emphatically masculine car. That’s if your concept of masculine is of a flatulent, larded, atrophied rugby-player with poor social skills and boorish presence. And the most feminine ? Obviously, the Ferrari 458. It is sensuous, inviting, explicit, but not vulgar, and sports all the creases, folds and intimate revelations that make women’s bodies so wonderful. 

Alice Pfeiffer

How do you explain one’s attraction to a car part?

Stephen Bailey

Picabia was quite correct to see in the carburettor a diagram of sex. Overt and covert sex is everywhere in the motor car. I love Marcel Duchamp’s faux vagin” mash-up with his Volkswagen. Even the Otto Cycle of Induction-Compression-Ignition-Exhaust (Suck-Squeeze-Bang-Blow in demotic English) sounds like a description of coition. You know, electric cars will never be exciting. There is, I believe, something fundamental about the irrationality of the heat engine that inspires designers and excites consumers. Obviously, the piston reciprocating in its sleeve, the vibration, the surges of power have a sexual equivalent. Jouissance and petite mort? These are also experiences you have when driving.

Alice Pfeiffer

You refer in your book to a lot of mid 20th century artists, at this time car were a major symbol of progress, however if a lot of artists still work on the matter of cars, their relation to the subject seems more distant and critical, what do you think of those more recent works (From Sylvie Fleury to Richard Prince to name the most famous).

Stephen Bailey

Early Modernists were so intoxicated by the liberating potential and the exciting aesthetic of the car, their appreciation of it was entirely without irony. By the twenty-first century, Richard Prince, for example, has necessarily acquired an ironic detachment. After all, we are all somewhat disenchanted by the automobile’s success. Still, elements of veneration remain in Prince’s treatment of the car. It simply proves the overwhelming semantic power which automobiles possess. Still, for me, Harley Earl and Virgil Exner remain much greater artists than Prince.

Cars are inextricable from sex in the same way as oysters are.

Stephen Bailey

Gender Bending Engines - © Garagisme

Francis Picabia — The Child Carburettor, 1919