Car Fetish at Museum Tinguely Explores the Automobile in Art

The exhibition 'Car Fetish' at Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland, from June 8 to October 9, 2011, examines the automobile as a central motif in 20th-century art. Curated around Jean Tinguely's use of cars in his kinetic sculptures, the show features works by over 20 artists including Gerhard Richter, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Roman Signer, Erwin Wurm, Sylvie Fleury, and Chris Burden. The ground floor uses a hubcap-inspired scenography to trace the car's role in modernism, from Futurism to Nouveau Réalisme and Pop Art, organized thematically around speed, retreat, traffic, and accident. The basement displays Tinguely's monumental pieces, such as 'Lotus und die Fünf Witwen von Eva Aeppli' (1972) and 'Pit-stop', a mobile made from two R40 race cars. The exhibition also includes a drive-in cinema in the museum courtyard screening films like 'Week-End', 'Crash', 'Rebel without a Cause', and 'Death Proof'. A catalog accompanies the show. Critic Térésa Faucon notes the separation of Tinguely's works from others, except for the horn from 'Homage to New York' in the Nouveau Réalistes room, but praises the thematic connections across floors, such as Kudjoe Affutu's wooden Hummer coffin and Jitish Kallat's bone rickshaw echoing Tinguely's 'Safari de la mort moscovite'.