Zbigniew Libera reconstructs in the third dimension a world that has been depicted and flattened by vision. The project is to construct an automobile that would be a spatio-visual hybrid, rendering perspective deformations and foreshortenings characteristic for photography and film in the third dimension, in reference to representations of a reality experienced and consumed in images. The car’s photography-derived forms are a far cry from its actual shape and proportions, as Libera exposes the methods of visual seduction, stripping them of their ‘hypnotic allure’. The vehicle’s surprising forms visualise the traps of media-shaped vision, a point that is also emphasized by the model and sketches of a vision-deformed bicycle. Freeing them from the power of the gaze, Libera demonstrates the influence consumer images have on the perception of reality and myth creation.
In sketches and models that reproduce photographic images the artist makes us aware of the naturalization of the vision of things that turn out highly unnatural. In the drawings, the bicycle’s shapes and dimensions change depending on the way they are viewed, as the ‘reality effect’ in them turns out to be an effect of the ideologization of vision. Captions in the drawings refer us clearly to the reality-effacement processes described by Jean Baudrillard, in which image is subject to precession generating the successive mutations. The bicycle’s ellipsoidal wheels or the car’s flattened shapes and distorted proportions show us something that does not exist, a deformation we have come to regard as ‘natural’.
In Flat Reality Libera addresses one of the most mythologized objects of consumer culture: the automobile. As cult object, central element and attribute of the 20th-century utopias and modernization ideologies, mass-scale myth-making form and reflection of changing cultural and consumerist trends, the phenomenon of the car has been analyzed by numerous cultural studies scholars. In Libera’s project, we have to do with a car used not so much in practice as in vision, which this flattened vehicle provides with a realization of what the gaze is fed in the illusions of media images.
Bożena Czubak
