A Mythological Beast for a Mechanical Age: James Angus’ Bugatti Type 35
In the first Futurist manifesto, published on the front page of the Parisian broadsheet Le Figaro of February 20 1909, the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti announced the arrival of a new art movement for the industrial age. His Futurist vision privileged the machine aesthetic and mass production over the figurative tradition and the role of the artist as a master craftsman. Of particular interest to Marinetti was the symbolism of the automobile and its subsequent impact on modern society. “We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed”, he wrote;
A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath … a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
Marinetti’s car is a mythological beast for the modern age – a chimera that spits fire and consumes bullets, an icon that surpasses the Greek Nike. However, what captured the Futurists’ imagination more than the aesthetic of this technological marvel was the manner in which the experience of automotive transportation shifted the way landscape and society were experienced and represented. Traditional conventions of classical landscape and perspective became outmoded in the race to depict familiar landscapes experienced anew at sixty miles per hour.
Giacomo Balla’s 1913 painting Speeding Car illustrates this conceptual quandary. The orthogonal lines that radiate from a vanishing point slightly skewed above the horizon line hint at the one-point perspectival system dominant in Western painting since the Renaissance, but this structure is broken by jarring rectangular shapes and spiral swirls that lie outside the traditional perspectival space. For Balla the automobile, with its ability to compress journeys and landscapes in space and time, was a catalyst for reconsidering the depiction of space and time themselves.
The status of the automobile as an artistic and technological marvel is rekindled in James Angus’ 2006 sculpture Bugatti Type 35. It is a work which, like Balla’s painting, takes as its starting point the iconography of the automobile in an attempt to recast modes of viewing. The subject of Angus’ work – informed by the iconic status of the marque in automotive history – in many ways represents the apogee of Marinetti’s automotive fetishism. The Type 35 Bugatti is one of the most successful race cars of all time – the victor of over 2,000 races in the 1920’s and 30’s, including the iconic 24 hours of Le Mans and the first ever Monaco Grand Prix. Bugatti came to prominence again in 2005 when it produced the Veyron which, capable of achieving speeds over 400km/h, became the fastest production car in history. The Bugatti then, is an object that holds its own particular symbolism as an industrial marvel that pushes the limits of engineering and human experience.
Bugatti Type 35 plays on the status of the marque as a technological icon, but through a focus on form, scale, material and craftsmanship, Angus reclaims the vehicle from being a purely functional object and forces the viewer to consider its aesthetic qualities. Appropriately, this approach is in line with the vehicle’s original design vision. Ettore Bugatti, the eponymous founder of the motor car company, came from a notable arts family. His father was a furniture and jewellery designer in the Art Noveau style, his younger brother was a sculptor and his grandfather an architect and sculpture. Ettore himself spent time at art school before moving to cars. As a result, he considered his cars carefully crafted works of art, an approach that was carried throughout the production of his vehicles. Though individual parts were machined, each car was meticulously hand crafted – engine blocks were hand finished so that surfaces were so flat that gaskets were not required for sealing them. A similarly meticulous approach to construction features in Angus’ re-imagined Bugatti, and in creating it from scratch the artist attempted to utilise real materials and processes where possible.
Though the finished work is life-sized, closely based on the original, and has been described by Angus as having been made to look like “a working prototype, the kind of thing you might see at a motor show”, the resemblance is only partial. Like Balla’s painting, Angus’ sculpture skews traditional perspective and encourages new modes of viewing the aesthetics – and interpreting the symbolism – of the car. In Angus’ work, this is achieved by manufacturing the car at a 30 degree tilt, which displaces its centre of balance, causing it to fall to its side. As with Angus’ other works, such as his Truck Corridor (2004), this slight and unexpected distortion of a familiar form causes the viewer to – as the artist describes – “re-enact [a] moment of absolute disbelief”.
Paradoxically, this tilt emphasises both the bespoke nature of the artwork as an imitation as well as the experience of viewing a real, functioning vehicle. On the one hand, the viewer is encouraged to consider the sculpture for its formal qualities as an object divorced from its function. As the artist describes, as a result of the tilt “the wheels become ellipses, squares become parallelograms” – an effect that slightly masks their original function. Yet simultaneously, the tilt functions kinaesthetically to generate an immense sense of motion in the still object. Balanced precariously on its side it seems in perpetually suspended animation, while the distortion of the wheels evokes the experience of capturing partial, distorted glimpses of a car as it speeds past a bystander.
The ultimate irony in the work is that though it evokes speed and power, this particular race car is impotent. While Angus’ work draws its power from the strength of the Bugatti as an icon of the industrialised era, this realisation encourages us to look beyond the icon itself for the work’s meaning and it is at this point that Angus’ vision departs from that of Marinetti and Balla. These Futurists saw in the car a symbol for the breaking of conventional representation and the rise of an industrial society in which technology was inextricably linked with social power – a disquieting ideology which found common ground with fascist militarism. The product of a different time and place, Angus utilises the car to raise contemporary issues regarding technology and art practice. Though his car is a technological marvel, it is ultimately a romantic view of a Modernist moment; though highly engineered, it is masterfully and painstakingly crafted. In this way it both speaks to the viewer as a reflection of modern society even as it encourages reflection on the value of this experience.
Publication: Look, June 2011.