A symbol of freedom or a 4,000 pound tool of destruction? The car’s legacy faces a reckoning

The influential architect Le Corbusier compared them to ancient Greek temples. The writer and urbanist Jane Jacobs labeled them the “chief destroyer of American communities.” Cars, in all their glory and all their faults, have come to symbolize a cornucopia of contrasts.

At a time when the pandemic has led to a spike in private car use at the expense of public transport in the U.S.—and when traffic death rates in the country are the highest in a century—Automania takes a look at the history of cars and poses urgent questions about their future.

“Cars are accessible and ubiquitous industrial products that are key to understanding the modern world in which we live,” says the exhibition’s curator Juliet Kinchin, whose team largely drew from MoMA’s collection to create the show. There is a life-size, plexiglass dummy that designers used to envision how an average male body might fit in the car seats (his name was Oscar, and to this day, he has no accurately designed female counterpart, despite the fact that this omission leads to more women dying in car crashes).

There is Picasso’s Baboon and Young—a bronze sculpture for which the painter famously confiscated his son’s car toys to meld them onto the baboon’s head. And there is Andy Warhol’s monumental, 1963 screen print “Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times,” which was created in a year when there were over 40,000 road deaths in the U.S. (Today’s average hovers around 38,000 a year—for comparison, that’s the equivalent of 115 fully-loaded Boeing 787 Dreamliners crashing every year.)

Since the 1950s, the United States has spent nearly $10 trillion in public funds on highways and roads, many of which were designed to facilitate suburban commutes for white Americans at the expense of Black and brown communities. For the millions of Americans who live near these highways, noise and air pollution is a constant menace, but the environmental impacts of cars and motor vehicles are much more widespread.

Automania touches on this with several exhibits, including a scale model of American artist James Wines’ work of land art, “Ghost Parking Lot,” completed in 1978. By pouring concrete (a petroleum product) over a row of cars (which consume petroleum) in a parking lot in Hamden, Connecticut, Wines evoked the dominance of the car and the destructive power it wielded on the landscape.

“We have reached a critical moment in our relationship to the automobile that makes this topic particularly important right now,” says Kinchin, citing growing concerns about the impact of a pandemic that has put the desire for personal mobility front of mind, as well as the environmental repercussions of “gas-guzzling cars.”

Eby believes that cars have become so embedded in our identities that we have forgotten, or chosen to forget, their harmful side. “Because of these social and identity forces, we’re not conditioned to think of vehicles as 4,000-pound dangerous tools but rather, we see the freedom,” she says. “The irony of the pandemic is that people have turned to cars for health and safety, and that has long-term ramifications.”