“It evokes nothing from the past; instead, it aims to belong exclusively to the present.”
By NIKLAS MAAK

At first glance, what you see in Thomas Demand’s triptych appears abstract and cubistic. Only those in the know are aware that the surfaces and lines running up against each other are details of a sports car, the Lamborghini Gallardo. The form of the vehicle, which owes more than a little to an artistic movement, Cubism, is catapulted back to art via an aesthetic feedback loop. Demand reverses the development of a car, which begins with two-dimensional drawings, becomes a model and then a real automobile. He reinterprets the car as a three-dimensional paper model and this model is then photographed.

Pressing the reverse button distills the secrets of the form. Thomas Demand’s examination of the form of the Lamborghini for 032c is a literal deconstruction. The paper model is an attempt at comprehending the organization of surfaces and lines, the character of an object whose form bears, unlike nearly all other cars, no reference to classical forms: The Lamborghini is the least sentimental of all sports cars right now. It evokes nothing from the past; instead, it aims to belong exclusively to the present, which in turn, is a Lamborghini tradition. As opposed to Ferrari, already a legend in the ’60s, the tractor maker Ferruccio Lamborghini was a newcomer to the automobile industry and, because he hadn’t yet made a name for himself, had no choice but to bet on the radical modernity of his product; thus the shock of the utterly unknown, the never-before-seen, became the best selling point. The UFO-like Lamborghini Miura, with its twelve-cylinder engine set at an angle in front of the rear axle, was the sales pitch. If Ferrari was the Renaissance, Lamborghini was Mannerism; if Ferrari aimed to embody almost timeless elegance, Lamborghini angled for shudder-inducing monstrosity.

Lamborghini does not try now, either, to quote its own history, and if there is any reference to anything preexisting at all, then it is not formal, but structural. The Gallardo is a car made in the spirit of Cubism. If it makes any reference at all to current design, then it is to the Stealth Bomber. Of course, the polyfocal, crystalline, fractured form of the bomber is meant first and foremost to avoid being seen, which certainly can’t be said of the Lamborghini. Even so, both are assaults on the optic nerve, just as Cubism was in its day. The extreme degree to which seeing has been altered by contemporary automobiles was also made plain by Lamborghini a few years ago when the rearview mirror in some cars was replaced by a camera. Whatever was behind you was immediately transformed into a fiction. The radicalization of the fictional view of the outside world can be seen now not only in Lamborghinis but also in the luxury cars whose top-of-the-line models come equipped with a so-called night vision system. An infrared camera takes in the street and spots people and objects up ahead long before the driver can with his own eyes. This infrared image is mirrored up under the windshield. The driver then has a choice: either he looks out to reality with his own eyes – or he watches the film in the display which shows a more real reality than he can see himself. If you want to spot something, you can’t look at it directly, but rather, at the infrared film, its electronic shadow. The view through the windshield, then, becomes simultaneously fictional and hyper-real: the film of the reality is truer than the image a human eye can produce. So there’s a generation of drivers that has grown up with video games now sitting in front of a screen again as they actually drive – and here, switching your view from the screen to reality is ultimately a letdown – it’s as if you’ve suddenly taken off your glasses. The design of the automobiles, particularly the Lamborghini Gallardo, responds with an aesthetic imbued with cubistically juxtaposed volumes and cross-fading lines – with forms that appear as if reality, too, was undergoing a visual interference.