On decorating a car: Pistoletto, Portoghesi, Ferrè, Dorfles and the others

Gianfranco Ferrè, Alessandro Mendini, Mario Merz, Ugo Nespolo, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Paolo Portoghesi, Ettore Sottsass, Franco Maria Ricci; one car each, designed by Marcello Gandini – the name behind the Miura and the Countach – and in this case a car for everyday life, a restyled Renault 5; nitro paints and total carte blanche to intervene on the bodywork; Gillo Dorfles and Germano Celant distilling from all this two sharp reflections on the relationship between decoration, image and technique in postmodern times.  This might sound like a prompt for a design science fiction scenario to be generated by an AI: it is instead what Domus published in April 1985, on issue 660.  Stretched between an increasingly camouflaged functionality and a hedonism of image that, as Celant says, has increasingly transformed its habitat in postwar years, the automobile becomes, in relation to decoration, a matter of art vs. technique – as for BMW Art Cars or the Movimento Arte Concreta decorations evoked in the essay – but also of mass vs. individual, where one-off customization makes the everyday unique. Something that goes beyond the mere labeling of cars by fashion brands (as it had happened at the time with Gucci limited edition Cadillacs).

Eight unmistakably “artistic” bodywork finishes for the new Renault Supercinque: a great step forward in automobile design from traditional uses of colour. As we all know, car colouring has psychological and functional justifications beyond its merely aesthetic rationale: visibility, and connotations of speed, elegance, and youthful energy all change with colour. Here, however, the terms of reference are quite different. A group of painters (Nespolo, Pistoletto, Merz), architects (Mendini, Sottsass, Portoghesi), a couturier (Ferré) and a graphic designer/publisher (Ricci) have “illuminated” the bodywork of a car with the clear aim of adding an element of aesthetic pleasure (originality or prestige) to the other characteristics of the vehicle. The idea is not a new one. In the far-off days of 1952, M.A.C, (the Movement for Concrete Art) in Milan had a similar idea and exhibited a series of models of motorbikes and motor-scooters painted by artists and designers such as Iliprandi, Asti, Regina, Di Salvatore, Munari, Viganò. Quite a bold undertaking in that period of dominant rationalism and anti-decorativism, and proof of the future potential of certain theoretical principles of Movement for Concrete Art. Nor is the M.A.C, show the sole anticipation of the present idea.

Anyone who has been in North or South America, especially the latter (for example Colombia), will have noted with amused surprise the incredible multicoloured decorations of many of the local buses, in particular those offering a private shuttle service between the centre and the outlying tugurios and barriadas. But many cars belonging to the non-dominant classes here are also most colourfully decorated. So, how are we to judge this present example of “designer bodywork “ on Renault Supercinque? Not certainly as a project for potential mass-production, but as an interesting idea for the possible creation of a “differentiated series” of highly personalized bodyworks for each model, for possible purchase by anyone, artist or not. At the risk of the buyer, however. The risk of finding non-designer additions made overnight by some disrespectful passer-by.

Gillo Dorfles

In the West the idea of using the forms and colours of car bodywork as expression of narcissism and means to seduction has only recently received attention. The discovery of this potential, from the 1950s onwards, originally caused something of a stir, car bodywork being considered a rigid and mechanical form with minimal potentialities for covering or camouflage. In time, however, automobile apparel has flourished. The car has acquired masks and veils, jewels and ornaments according to the image desired by its wearer/driver. It has gradually begun to reflect the type of activity it is associated with. Through the dynamics of the bodywork the car has succeeded in giving a definition to ideologies and cultural groups: gay, soldier, protester, policeman, voyeur, lover of privacy, hippy or office clerk. As far as Europe is concerned, there is a tradition of car as clothing going back to the Futurist decorated waistcoat by Depero and Marinetti carried forward in the 1930s with Delaunay's decorated furniture and cars. America, on the other hand, is the land of tattooing and bodybuilding, which shape and alter not only the skin-surface but the whole form of limbs and muscles. Hence the difference between the sculptural tendency in the States and the pictorial tendency in Europe. These alterations of the car's aspect have not, however, reached the limit of their possibilities. 

Certainly, over the years the car has changed from status symbol to plaything, from means of transport to a means of being; yet the boldest operations of ludic graphic or muscular alteration have so far never allowed a car to blush or make the chromatic adaptation of a chameleon. A driver may blink with his headlights or gesture with his side-lights, but it is still impossible to communicate any really subtle psychic change by means of the car's exterior. The car cannot go red with shame, or white with anger. It has a low range of adaptability to different contexts. The narcissistic expression of the exterior is fixed at the moment of purchase, unchangeable as an artificial limb or an eye of glass. But it might be interesting to think of this exterior more as a sensitive membrane: affected by light, tastes, winds, rain, by the movements and eye-movements of others.

Germano Celant