KRZYSZTOF WODICZKO – VEHICLE I, 1973 (1-13/13)
An action on the streets of Warsaw. Foksal Gallery 1973.
The artist, walking here and there on a tilting platform, causes its oscillatory movement. This movement, due to a system of ropes and gears, impacts the turning of the wheels and makes the vehicle move forward. The vehicle moves in an even, straight movement only in one direction.
The vehicle only moves forward and is designed for exclusive use of the author.
Krzysztof Wodiczko
[Krzysztof Wodiczko. On Behalf of the Public Domain. Łódż. 2015]
Krzysztof Wodiczko left an illusively safe/protected gallery space behind, coming out into uncertain space of the city. In 1973 the artist walked along the streets of the right-bank Warsaw (Saska Kępa and the park named after Skaryszewski), using his first vehicle for this aim, comprising „more from the Letalin’s dream than from glittering surfaces and aerodynamic shapes of modern race cars”, as said by Andrzej Turowski. The vehicle, only moving forward with an „even straight movement”, can be easily perceived as an allegory of a specific vision of history and piece of work. History in this case is the Marxist and Hegelian utopia of linear progress, driven by dialectic movement of class conflict. The piece of work, on its turn, similarly to the „Vehicle I”, in materialistic philosophy of history is a smart gear system: of the context of pieces of artistic and social determinants and cultural structures. The object description suggests, however, that its allegorical nature also refers to an ambivalent situation of a Neo-Avant-guard artist, creating somewhat inside the logics of dialectic materialism. „The artist, walking here and there on the tilting platform, causes its oscillatory movement. This movement, due to a system of ropes and gears, impacts the turning of the wheels and makes the vehicle move forward”. The history machine, gears of the Avant-guard work function in the result of actions of an artist and intellectual, (literally) torn from the ground, whose peripatetic movement drives the vehicle. In the „Vehicle I” Wodiczko allegorically shows that creativity can only seem to distance itself from the reality, as the mottos of autonomy, creativity based on tautology (circular movement driving the vehicle), fit in dialectic logics of Marxist historicism, making an element of binary oppositions, making the base for construction of dialectic thinking. In case of Wodiczko’s „Vehicle I”, it is not its exhibition in the gallery that is important, but its use in public space. The use of allegory of a vehicle moving only in one direction as a specific, imposed vision of history at a certain place and time, was pointing out on history happening now, everywhere and in in everyone, as well as on the possibility of refusing of this determinate vision – through getting off the vehicle.
[L. Nader, Conceptualism in the Peoples Republic of Poland, Publishing House of the Warsaw University, Warsaw 2009, p. 288]
