Destruction Rites

Ephemerality and Demolition in Postwar Visual Culture

Mona Hadler

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781784533403
• eBook ISBN: 9781786721594
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

In the early sixties, crowds gathered to watch rites of destruction - from the demolition derby where makeshift cars crashed into each other for sport, to concerts where musicians destroyed their instruments, to performances of self-destructing machines staged by contemporary artists. Destruction, in both its playful and fearsome aspects, was ubiquitous in the new Atomic Age. This complicated subjectivity was not just a way for people to find catharsis amid the fears of annihilation and postwar trauma, but also a complex instantiation of ideological crisis in a time with some seriously conflicted political myths. Destruction Rites explores the ephemeral visual culture of destruction in the postwar era and its links to contemporary art. It examines the demolition derby; games and toys based on warfare; playgrounds situated in bomb sites; and the rise of garage sales, where goods designed for obsolescence and destined for the garbage heap are reclaimed and repurposed by local communities. Mona Hadler looks at artists such as Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle, Martha Rosler and Vito Acconci to expose how the 1960s saw destruction, construction and the everyday collide as never before. During the Atomic age, whether in the public sphere or art museums, destruction could be transformed into a constructive force and art objects and performances often oscillated between the two.

1

The Demolition Derby

When 11,000 people filled the stands at Islip Speedway outside of New York City in 1963 to view the Demolition Derby, they stood, sang the national anthem with hands to heart and, as the press reported, “fortified themselves with soda, popcorn, pizza, cotton candy and ice cream. They grew restless. They stamped their feet. They began shouting: ‘Bring ‘em on!’¹ Cars altered for safety lined up, waited for the signal and crashed into each other. In popular venues such as public raceways and county fairs, surrounded by fast food vendors and 4-H exhibits, a startling rite of destruction captivated the American public in the early sixties, was aired on network television, and staged throughout the country and abroad.² On one September day in 1966 at Islip, for example, 200 cars crashed to the cheers of 14,000 enthusiasts.³ In a celebratory, patriotic ambience, the games allowed for the geopolitics of consumption, obsolescence and warfare to be played out in a physical arena. Seen from above in the bleachers, they mimicked the endless maps that mediatized the march of consumerism and communism – cars, like dominoes, falling in a charged spatial arena.

On a March evening in 1960 in New York City, an audience including art-world scions such as Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III gathered in The Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden for a comparable event – the much anticipated performance of Swiss artist Jean Tinguely’s self-destructing machine, Homage to New York. The over 27-foot-long junk sculpture, comprising an assortment of recycled scraps – from bicycle wheels to a baby bassinet – met its demise through a variety of operations that ended with a piano in flames and the audience enveloped in smoke.⁴ This experiment in artistic destruction did not stand alone in the early sixties. The Korean Fluxus artist Nam June Paik smashed his violin at the Dada music festival in Düsseldorf in 1962, and two years later The Who’s Pete Townshend first demolished his guitar before a crowd of cheering music fans – a practice he would repeat for years thereafter. Destruction in both its humorous and fearsome aspects was a ubiquitous theme in the art of the early sixties, but it marked the mass visual culture as well.

Why did crowds whose composition ranged from America’s capitalist elite to young rock fans, to working class families at popular raceways and county fairs all frequent and lionize rites of destruction? Are these aggressive practices simulations of the era’s ubiquitous war games, networks of antidiscipline, subcultural acts of protest, anti-capitalist and antiproductive critiques, anarchist gestures, rituals of carnivalesque inversion where the disenfranchised possess and destroy the goods of the franchised, potlatch ceremonies of allocation where items are symbolically offered to the public as play, iconoclashes, or complex mediations that in some manner share all of the above? This book will engage these various positions and contextualize them to the early sixties as a problematic and transitional moment wedged between the fifties and the generation of revolt. One could posit that these rituals of destruction are in fact among the earliest manifestations of that impending insurgency. It is not surprising, in this context, that Vietnam War demonstrators chose to burn their draft cards and American flags in protest. And specifically in regard to the demolition derby, destroying the automobile at the height of postwar U.S. corporate capitalism and in advance of late sixties critiques was a loaded act to be sure. If cars in the fifties were the “exact equivalent of the great Gothic Cathedrals,” as Roland Barthes contends in Mythologies,⁵ then destroying them was arguably a form of iconoclasm or, closer yet, an “iconoclash,” an act that oscillates between construction and destruction, and elicited both levity and fright.

Background, History, Rules of the Game

Soon after Larry Mendelsohn staged his first demolition derby at Islip in the late fifties, the sport gained momentum. By the spring of 1963, when cultural critic Tom Wolfe chronicled the event in his article for the Herald Tribune, “Clean Fun at Riverhead,” the raceway had hosted 154 derbies in two years and had drawn over a million spectators.⁶ By 1966, Mendelsohn bragged to a reporter that since 1961 they had wrecked 74,000 cars in 108 different locations across the United States.⁷ Indeed, the derbies became so popular that ABC’s Wide World of Sports began to televise them, bringing the matches into the homes of people who had never experienced one in person. One New York Times columnist alleged that soon after the show began in 1961, ABC bought the rights to the derby for $2,000 and aired the events repeatedly until selling the rights for $750,000 a decade later.⁸ “‘Why do people come to auto races?,’” Mendelsohn asked a journalist, and then answered himself: “Crashes. They come here to see cars crash, so I figured why not have a race where all the cars do is crash. The crowds are large, they sit on the edge of their seats and why not? We sell danger.”⁹ But the newspaper reporter hastened to add that the spirit of the event was one of a carnival.

The date of the exact origin of the sport is difficult to pin down. Itai Vardi contends that automobile crashes as entertainment began in the twenties and thirties (even at times called demolition or destruction derbies), generally as part of stunt shows or auto thrill shows, and were tied to issues of planned obsolescence that originated at that time. The stunt drivers apparently were spokesmen funded by the industry and in that sense helped to validate the car companies’ use of destruction as a marketing tool.¹⁰ Automotive sports dwindled as a practice during the war years as tires and gas were rationed, and blossomed again in the postwar era, which saw the birth of the demolition derby as we know it today. Parting ways with both stunt shows and other forms of automobile racing, it became institutionalized as its own sport,¹¹ with its own rules, nationwide venues, nonprofessional local contestants forming a unique subculture, and extensive television coverage.

Although Mendelsohn is often claimed as having invented the sport, derbies were held many times during the late forties and fifties across the United States, judging from the trade publication Billboard and documented by authors such as Vardi and Bill Lowenburg.¹² And since Miriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary dates the term as ca. 1953, the sport was clearly well known by then.¹³ What Mendelsohn did, however, was to spectacularly publicize and promote it in a way that captured and expressed public enthusiasms. Indeed, Marty Himes, the founder of the Himes Museum of Motor Racing Nostalgia (located not far from the Islip raceway) credits Mendelsohn with putting the demolition derby on the map as a crowd pleaser, crashing 500 cars at a time.¹⁴

Originating in the United States, the sport speaks to America’s relationship to technology and waste, and it was just this aspect of the culture that struck the painter Fernand Léger when he came to the United States in the early forties. As historian Martin James recalled about his meeting with the artist in 1945, Léger marveled at the quantity of goods that rural Americans relegated to the junk heap, musing, “In France, the paysan carefully picks up each nail, every stick. They patch and repatch a garment until hardly a shred remains of the original fabric.”¹⁵ What Léger observed was minor in comparison to postwar excesses, when planned obsolescence was corporate America’s key marketing strategy. In the late fifties, in a similar vein to Léger, the British architects Alison and Peter Smithson noted, “The things a European most values from American culture are the throw-away objects, such as the magnificent magazines, advertising and packages.”¹⁶ Eventually, postwar Europe also moved in this direction. In France, for example, where working class salaries doubled between 1948 and 1970, people acquired the dubious luxury of being able to throw things away.¹⁷

It was the automotive industry that was well known for this practice of planned obsolescence. General Motors’ prewar policy of yearly changes to each model’s detailing to stimulate consumption is legendary. The Art and Color section of GM, headed by designer Harley Earl, became known for introducing a new model annually in the spirit of “dynamic obsolescence.” Alfred Sloan, GM’s chief executive officer, promoted this policy – a reflection of the company’s realization during WWII that consumers ranked styling as their primary consideration in purchasing cars.¹⁸ Historians have outlined the key role played by the colorful artists,¹⁹ who ultimately designed the lavish fifties automobiles with soaring tailfins and enough chrome “brightwork,” or metal ornamentation, for designer Raymond Loewy to deem them “jukeboxes on wheels,”²⁰ and for the Germans to call them “Detroit Macchiavellismus.”²¹ Each new model clearly rendered earlier designs obsolete – aesthetically if not mechanically. Such excess culminated in the demolition derby where these extravagant machines were pulverized in stadiums to cheering crowds. One 1966 article stipulates that most cars were “vintage” 1955 and 1956 models.²² The “planning” of planned obsolescence had been liberated, one could argue, changing hands from the CEO to the garage mechanic.²³

Derby contestants today, for all their sense of jubilant freedom, follow clearly designated regulations (with variations from venue to venue). The automobiles must be altered for safety, with stipulations including removing glass, replacing the gas tanks with a small fuel supply located behind the driver, and securing (possibly welding shut) the trunk, hood and doors.²⁴ Competitors must hit a car that is still in action for a set time, such as every sixty seconds. “Sandbagging,” which involves initiating the fewest possible hits or braking before contact, is derided.²⁵ Extremities must remain within the car, and head-on collisions are forbidden, as are attacks upon the driver-side door. Similarly, even in the sixties there were rules stipulating “a firewall between the engine and the driver, no ‘deliberate’ head-on crashes” and a yellow light warning that a car needs to beef up its activity.²⁶ Still today, many elements of chance remain, but winning drivers are well versed in certain strategies: hit opponents with the back of your car to damage their motor and cooling system while keeping yours intact; damage their steering by an angled attack on their front wheel; flatten a tire with your bumper; try to keep your own car free from entanglements and coincide your attack with another driver’s so you double-team the offense.²⁷

The rules render the sport relatively safe, and news reports from the sixties boast that no one had ever seen a driver killed or even gravely injured. As one journalist writes in 1964, “… at Islip, the danger of death is not in the air, only the excitement of a carnival. No one remembers a driver being seriously hurt.”²⁸ All regulations, however, were not always in effect or closely followed, leading one driver to brag, “I enjoy the head-ons. I like to see the other guy go jumping in the air.”²⁹ When vehicles pile up, as often occurs, there is a sense of potential danger, which, as in so many extreme sports, adds an element of transgressive humor to the proceedings. Or as Jeffrey Schnapp argues in the context of a discussion of Futurism, the lure of speed with its ubiquitous crashes produces an intensified form of “trauma thrill.”³⁰ At the raceway, as they did at the MoMA during Tinguely’s performance, fire trucks and emergency personnel hover about ominously. Each heat (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author Bio
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Demolition Derby
• 2 Military Games of Destruction
• 3 Mid-century Hobbies and Toys of Destruction
• 4 Ephemerality and Creative Destruction in the Public Space
• 5 Garage Sales and Planned Obsolescence
• Conclusion
• Notes