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The car is always bound to make a difficult subject for the artist. It is arguably the uber-sign of the twentieth century- personal liberty, national identity, even our habitats themselves are defined and inspired by the necessities of car travel.
The car inspires a devotion which outstrips that of any other consumer item and as a motif has been indispensable to twentieth century Australian culture, signifying the new-found affluence of the postwar period and embodying the pioneering conflict of civilisation against nature. However, as the tradition of auto-films and advertising demonstrates, this symbolic potency is an explicitly gendered one- the car is not simply civilisation's proxy an intrinsic masculine agent. To be without a car- to be a pedestrian- is to be without phallic clout.
It is precisely the car's potency- its pervasiveness, its symbolic gravity- that makes it such a troublesome subject matter for an artwork. How can an artist manipulate such a ubiquitous icon in an interesting fashion, without surrendering to populism?
Prudence Cumes, in her work George, has been able to transcend such anxiety and present us with a work which both scrutinises the image of the car in our culture and confounds the gender assumptions implicit within it. In what was essentially a curatorial role, Cumes extended an invitation to three artist friends (Jeremy Hynes, Rachel Perrett and Adam Stephens) to photograph the interior of 'George', her tired and cluttered Datsun Stanza. In a one-night-only event each artist's selection of images were then projected from the roof of the same car onto the large brick wall which frames the backyard of Bellas Gallery in Brisbane.
The projections have a distinctly voyeuristic appeal as documents of