Warhol, Duchamp, and Futurism

 "We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. 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." --Futurist Manifesto


"We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman."--Futurist Manifesto


"Futurism strives to imagine its own brand of celibate creation" --Christian Bok

"Check that vehicle stops within required distance and does not pull, grab or swerve."

--UF Vehicle Inspection Form

"In opposition to the vertigo of acceleration, Duchamp proposed a vertigo of delay" --Octavio Paz

"Warhol’s art [Death and Disasters] will convey the range, power and empathy underlying his transformation of these commonplace catastrophes. Finally, one can sense in this art an underlying human compassion that transcends Warhol’s public affect of studied neutrality."

--Walter Hopps, foreword to Andy Warhol: Death and Disaster, p. 9 (http://edu.warhol.org/aract_dedis.html)

"Well you signed up for a car crash/When you signed up with me"

--"Bodybag," The Films

 

 A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status -- all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing).   --J.G. Ballard

 

"Marinetti plays a game of chicken to see which artist, which driver, first loses the nerve to enact a collision between two different categories that can convey a poetic trope" --Christian Bok