May 17th, 2019: Trans Am Totem

[xoxoxoBruce]

Marcus Bowcott is a Canadian, a painter, a sculptor, London art school grad, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, is against cars.
He did another of these totems in Germany called, “An Apparatus for Divining Capital”. See, I told you he has a bad attitude.

Marcus Bowcott’s “Trans Am Totem,” which stands amid the traffic in Vancouver. As you see, five cars are stacked (four of them crushed) on top of a base made from a single tree trunk. What you cannot see is that the Cedar trunk is signed by a Native First Nations Carver who carved a Bear Paw & Claws symbol into the foot of the trunk.

Bowcott is reported to have said that “Trans Am Totem” is a sculptural response to the urban site where it was initially installed in 2015 during the Vancouver Biennale, and that it is as much a “celebration” of mobility and technology as it is a critique of “throwaway consumer culture.” I don’t get the celebration, especially given the Native American signature (which Bowcott arranged). For me the sculpture brings to mind—exclusively—Heathcote Williams’s 1991 chapbook Autogeddon, a narrative poem that is unvarnished in its appraisal of the automobile’s cost in human destruction. Here’s the way it begins:

The poem ends this way, however:
If you're conceived in a car as many are.
If you first fucked in a car as many have.
If you go to work in a car,
And if you derive most of your pleasure, food and sustenance via cars,
You're going to defend them to the death.

Damn straight Skippy!

link

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Sacrilege.