Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century by Mark Dery

Author:Mark Dery [Dery, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Sociology, Art
ISBN: 080213520X
Google: gJ0IMQWMVpYC
Amazon: 080213520X
Goodreads: 228443
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 1996-01-01T11:00:00+00:00

almost childish drawing of a fanciful gadget. An inscription reads: "[a] small MACHINE . . . CONSTRUCTED FOR FEARLESS POLLINATION"-a marital aid, perhaps, for petite bourgeoisie who find the thought of gooey fluids distasteful.

It is profoundly significant that the French dadaist Marcel Du-champ's seminal painting, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-1923) is, to put it bluntly, a Rube Goldbergian fucking machine. Robert Lebel called it an exercise in "onanism for two": The Bride Motor, an internal combustion engine that runs on "love gasoline" hangs stripped yet maddeningly unravishable in the picture's upper half, forever out of reach of the Bachelor Machine below, which grinds ceaselessly in frustration.'^ The Bride-at once the apotheosis of virgin and whore, the object of male adoration and the source of an inscrutable, vaguely malicious female desire-hangs poised between desire and possession for all time.'^

Duchamp's close friend Picabia employed mechanomorphic imagery in the service of auto eroticism, in the literal sense. A passionate collector and skilled driver of powerful cars, Picabia celebrated the intoxicating effects of the open throttle and the smell of gasoline even as he satirized human sexuality in the age of mechanical reproduction. Stephen Bayley sees a riot of sexual imagery in Flamenca, Picabia's 1917 rendering of an internal combustion valve and its guide. "|T]he reciprocating valve resembles in its action the rhythms of sex," writes Bayley, "the valve itself the penis, the guide the female sheath."'^ To Bayley, the Italian sportscar designer Enzo Ferrari's conjecture that "between man and machine there exists a perfect equation: fifty per cent machine and fifty per cent man" suggests that "the idea of mechanical intercourse, that parody of the act of love, lies only a little beneath the surface of people who are fascinated with fast cars."'^

The very notion of "auto eroticism," in the punning sense, has been so exhausted by pop psychologists that all who treat it run the risk of producing unintentional kitsch. The linkage of the pneumatic contours of the pinup goddess with the morphological oddities that characterized automobile design in its golden age, the 1950s-a veritable fantasia of protrusions and orifices, of bumpers shaped like bulging crotches or jutting breasts-is well documented.

Even so, auto eroticism is sufficiently rich that it resists flip dismissal. The car, second only to the gun, is the quintessential piece of American hardware, fraught with notions of rugged individualism, endless

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