Perhaps
it's the perennial bait of speed. Perhaps it's the romantic prospect of navigating
one's own individual killing machine/deathtrap. Perhaps it's the sheer joy of
observing something so inorganic–the mother of all appliances, if you will–
being so relentlessly aestheticized. Or perhaps it's just a natural adolescent
reflex to gravitate to anything as shimmering as chrome begging a spit-polish.
It's difficult to rationalize the peculiar place that the automobile occupies
in the human psyche. Whether one is willing to embrace it philosophically or
finds it an evil, polluting, alienating thing, it's near impossible not to at
least love the automobile and its vehicular brethren from Vespa and Lambretta
scooters to Japanese bullet trains, for the sake of aesthetics and sport. Such
auto-inspired mania is depicted in films like Kenneth Anger's 1963 short Kustom
Kar Kommandos, 10-odd minutes of a beefy sailor-type lovingly polishing
his ride (shot practically as if it were an Esther Williams water ballet). This
same love of the automobile is realized in hot rod/car customizing and low rider
cultures, and it's easy to identify with. J.G. Ballard's classic novel Crash
further epitomizes an extreme of car love, drawing a car crash-orgasm paradigm.
A handful of the more colorful autoerotic fatalities are, if less likely to
spark identification, no less entertaining.
Every individual ever given to fits of such car-derived aesthetic mania undoubtedly has his own fantastic schema for the ideal automotive museum. Mine would involve gyroscopically rotating Jaguars and Lotuses, wall- and floor-covering Von Dutch and Big Daddy Roth pinstripes, projections of prime color '40s and '60s car film footage over the pinstripes, etc.
But the Petersen Automotive Museum exists on a whole other level–- one entirely divorced from any love of cars as aesthetic objects. Conceived by Petersen, a publishing company notorious for its lack of visual sense, as an outgrowth of their prized cash cow, Motor Trend, the museum is such a monumental misfire in its every attempt at equaling the aesthetic quality of its best vehicles that it has all the charm of a ten-car pileup. And we all know how difficult it is to refuse the lure of a ten-car pileup–especially a 300,000-square foot one in the center of the Miracle Mile.
Taking
it as a given that the museum is an epic failure as a showplace for its automobiles
or as any sort of aesthetic endeavor, the whole experience becomes fascinatingly
like traveling through the wreckage of what it was intended, or ideally would
have been intended, to be. Everything about its decor–- the stale atmosphere
instilled by its black and gray walls, hideous neon and other fluorescent lighting,
the clunky seams of its attempts at Vegas glitz–- lends itself to the uncanny
numbed and sterile feel of a crash site or auto graveyard. But what really clinches
it is the overwhelming sense of stasis. Time seems to stop in the Petersen,
the entire place registers as comatose, and as such walking through it one feels
likewise anaesthetized–- indeed like floating in space, or floating over
a crash scene that one has already experienced. There could just as well be
conveyor belts carting spectators throughout. Sounds of motors revving and sound
bites like "You have to have a car in Los Angeles, it’s like an extension
of your body" from various speakers and video monitors intermittently grazing
the ears only add to the surreal experiential sum total. As for the visuals,
the collision of so many desperate stabs at various aesthetic styles and the
total lack of spatial contiguity between the vehicles renders everything like
a giant mangle of debris.
Or perhaps it’s more appropriate to think of the entire museum as analogous to one giant wrecked vehicle. In which case the building’s amusingly heavily keyed-up mirrored exterior becomes either part of the car’s veneer or encasement for the remains. Ludicrous sub-wax museum historical tableaux introducing the first galleries serve as the bashed-beyond-recognition grill and front-end, with any semblance of anything attractive about the paint job chipped off and lost. The ridiculous soundtrack to the offensive montage "tribute" to car-customizing culture (here dubbed "youth culture"-–a subject that in any other auto museum would have gotten real exploration) ring as the last feeble squawks from a dying radio. The nondescript autos and environments that make up the bulk of the museum’s center serve as the leveled-almost-beyond-recognition interior, while the few genuinely gorgeous and remarkable vehicular showpieces are jewels randomly strewn among what’s left of the car seats: a white-and-red pod-like racer with a fully enclosed domed roof, a pair of elegant Michael Powell-esque vintage British Land Rovers, a miraculous '68 Buick LeSabre dubbed a "Land Yacht", with an open (sheepskin) driver's seat constructed like the helm of a ship in a wavelike form over and behind the enclosed passenger seats, or "bridge". And lastly two stunningly beautiful tableaux function as the wrecked car’s intact back-end. A recreation of a '30s Arco/Richfield gas station, a marvel of faux-Italian-futurism,is stunning in spite of its being propaganda for a petroleum company. Complete with an arc of gas pumps of radiant red steel and insides that look as if they should contain Tesla coils, its apex nearly reaches the gallery ceiling. Another recreation of a '40s "speed shop" for the DIY mechanic to rebuild his engine for speed, features cascades of chrome in the form of engines, bearings, etc., as well as a brilliant '45 Bell Special Midget Racer, like a deep-red pod, with a plush leather seat, Plexiglas windshield, door that opens upward in the manner of a coffin, and an engine almost directly fastened to the wood and steel steering wheel.
Functioning as either a car-customizer’s last flourishes or mocking asides, are two displays one of drawing board sketches and the other of crash fatalities. The sketches are a large ingratiating display of a grid of light boxes illuminating transparencies of colored, almost Larry Johnson-like enlarged drawing board sketches. It's entertaining to think of these as a mocking reminder of the now-obliterated ideal. The other display is an actual smacked-up auto flanked by green highway signs which provide aptly gruesome statistics about car-wreck deaths.
Of course the Petersen administration wouldn’t like anyone to think of their museum in any of these terms, not because they regard it as something to be sanctified but because it might make for a commercial liability. The museum exists for absolutely venal means-- to whip up fervor in present car consumers and, through "educational children’s programs," breed future car consumers seemingly from birth. However,the fact that its real points to savor are entirely subversive and antithetical to its intended goals only makes enjoying it slightly less of a guilty pleasure. The crowning achievement that ultimately makes the museum worth seeking out is that, in trying to build a museum from a cash cow and not a mania, its creators have inadvertently built a shrine to the most primitive of universal mania, and the absolute base element at the root of all life in the backward dystopian cesspit that is Los Angeles–carnage and debris.