The Bonnie and Clyde Death Car as Futurist Masterpiece

The name Jackson Pollock is synonymous with drip painting, a technique that involves flinging and dripping thinned enamel paint onto an outstretched canvas laid on the floor of a studio. His body of work is less about the ultimate product than it is about the process. Number 17A is the record of a performance. This was a revelation for the coastal gallerists of 1950-whatever. Number 17A was art as artifact: it was bold; it was daring; it was, they thought, new. But, as is often the case, roadside hucksters were ahead of the art world by a good ten or fifteen years.

Number 17A

On May 23, 1934, a cadre of brave policemen ambushed Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and Clyde Chestnut Barrow as the couple drove down a back road somewhere in rural Louisiana. Bonnie was eating a sandwich in the passenger seat when a Texan rifleman appeared and shot Clyde in the head. Clyde’s mind was blown into the back seat. He died instantly. Bonnie had just enough time to get off one last bone-chilling scream before another four officers jumped out of the bushes and let loose with their tommy guns. One hundred and thirty rounds were fired in under a minute.
 
“It’s death for Bonnie and Clyde”

On May 24, 1934, an enterprising businessman named Joshua Lamb bought the perforated Ford V8 off the police impound lot and for the next thirty years the newly re-christened Death Car toured the United States, appearing behind a velvet rope at carnivals and county fairs across the America. He charged twenty five cents to finger a bullet hole; a dollar to sit behind the wheel. It was a hit with the kids.

The Death Car on display

Futurism may have been conceived in Italy, but it was born in America. Both the Death Car and Number 17A arose from an excess of action. Both pieces are remainders--what was left over after the dust settled and everybody’s ears finally stopped ringing. Just as each line, spatter, and drop on Pollock’s canvas records one of the man’s movements, so too does every bullet hole and bloodstain on Clyde’s V8 mark one of the couple’s death throes.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Represent and Stake: Vampirism and the American Race Novel

Image
Both Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels (and the adaptations thereof) use vampires as a stand-in for marginalized and/or oppressed groups. In I Am Legend , the vampires are the proletariat; in the Stackhouse books they are variously homosexuals, the X-Men, people of color, et cetera. But where in Matheson’s novella the vampires employ violent means to achieve their Revolutionary ends, Harris’ bloodsuckers take a somewhat subtler approach; opting instead to ingratiate themselves to mortals by appearing opposite Bill Maher on Real Time and opening integrated bars where the undead can mix and mingle with the living. Bill Maher, circa 2008   This evolution in vampiric praxis reflects a sea-change in American politics. When Matheson published I Am Legend in 1954, it likely seemed as if the only way any subversive ideology could gain a foothold in the United States was through violence. Thus, They came at sunset, muttering, snarling, screaming… H
Read more

The Big Bang Theory Theory

Image
  The Anxiety of Influence In the preface to the second edition of The Anxiety of Influence , Bloom uses Shakespeare’s artistic struggle against Marlowe to explain the Bard’s development as a playwright and poet. Of particular interest is his comparison of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta . Marlowe’s Barabas is an outright caricature; an unrepentantly evil figure cobbled together from centuries of anti-Semitic propaganda. Shakespeare’s Shylock, meanwhile, is presented as a complicated man who nonetheless falls into the same behaviors as his antecedent. Shylock is not so easily dismissed as Barabas, Bloom argues, and it is for this reason he is a more pernicious character. Shylock at once confirms the audience’s anti-Semitic prejudices while also allowing them to feel as though they’ve given him a fair shake and still found him wanting.   "One by one, they all just fade away..." A similar dynamic has played out between Chuck Lorre and Dan Ha
Read more

Conan the Barbarian and Schwarzenegger's Pecs as Visual Metaphor

Image
In an effort to make my corpus more legible to future biographers, I’ve decided to distill/recycle some of my Twitter threads into long(er) form blog posts. What follows is an attempt to do just that. Here’s hoping I was successful. Robert E. Howard’s Conan cycle is fantasy as only an American--and more specifically, a Texan --could conceive of it. Here are tales of degenerate wizards and brave warriors; of monsters and other, less nameable, things lurking in dank dungeons. The crenellated walls of Castle Camelot are as far from the decadent cities of Hyboria as the verdant forests of Wales are from the desolate oil fields of Texas, as are Arthur’s high minded notions of noble chivalry and Christian honor from the titular barbarian’s ethos of rugged individuality and brute strength. Indeed, Howard inaugurated an entirely new sub-genre with the Conan stories; Sword and Sorcery. Robert E. Howard Described by Fritz Leiber in the late 1960s as “an earthier sort of fantasy,” Sword and Sorce
Read more