21.12.2010 - 19.02.2011
A flat and non-cohesive view of the world was opposed to the ‘old myth of depth’ by a co-author of the New story. Allain Robbe-Grille’s purifying vision, restoring objects with their ‘fundamental flatness’, was also in harmony with the spirit of post-war modernisation, which removed too much from its new field of vision.
In his latest project, Zbigniew Libera reconstructs this flattened world in the third dimension, vesting vision back with its invisible areas. The project consists in building the prototype of a car that will be a visual-spatial hybrid, transposing into the third dimension the perspective deformations and visual foreshortenings of photographic and filmic recordings. Contemporary representations that superimpose themselves on the reality experienced and consumed in images.
The car’s photographs-derived appearance turns out to be much different from its actual forms and proportions. The artist mischievously demonstrates the methods of visual delusion, stripping them of their ‘hypnotic allure’. The surprising forms of his vehicle visualise the traps of vision determined by media images. He takes a similar approach in a model and sketches showing the vision-deformed shape of a bicycle. Liberating them from the power of vision, he shows how consumer culture images shape and influence the perception of reality and the creation of its myths. The project tackles themes that Zbigniew Libera dealt with in his earlier works on consumer culture (the Correcting Devices series, 1994-1997 or Lego. Concentration Camp, 1996) and the mechanisms of vision and our perception of the surrounding visual culture (Positives, 2002-2003, La Vue, 2004-2006, Untitled, 2007).
This time, the artist has turned towards one of the most heavily mythologised objects of consumer culture, the automobile – a cult object, an important shaping factor of popular tastes, an attribute of the 20th-century utopias and a central motif of modernisation ideologies, as a mass-scale mythmaking form described by leading cultural scholars such as Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard or Gillo Dorfles).
Libera, however, offers the vision of a car used not so much in real life as in the gaze, which it provides with a realisation of what the gaze is fed by advertising and media images. Libera’s ‘flat reality’ holds back the gaze getting lost in the images of contemporary design, with its totalistic lifestyle-shaping ambitions.
The project is a work in progress. The exhibition will show sketches, models, photographs and a documentary video from the construction process.
