Rear View Mirror: The car in contemporary art and its relationship to personal and collective identity in China and the UK

Cars are living things that engage the senses and reflect the ‘paradox of everyday life – it is boredom but also phantasmagoria.’ (Highmore 2002). Beginning with a presentation of my photographs of the redundant MG motor works in Birmingham, UK and the new factory in Nanjing, China, I will examine the use of photography in contemporary art as a tool for documenting everyday labour and its relationship to personal and collective identity.

The context of everyday Chinese life is pertinent when we think of the car. In Jun Zhang’s Driving toward Modernity: Cars and the Lives of the Middle Class in Contemporary China, Zhang visits his friend Mingli who had recently upgraded from a Chinese brand of cheap, small cars to a red Mini Cooper. As they struggle to navigate traffic Mingli laments:

‘We can afford a car now. Cars used to be for bragging rights. You used to dream about owning a car, thinking, ‘Then I could go anywhere.’ Now everybody owns a car. Here we are, in the middle of the road, stuck — life is like this too.’ (Zhang, 2019)

In the UK, cars have long been a pervasive feature of everyday life. In Jean Luc Godard’s 1969 film British Sounds (also known as See You at Mao), a camera tracks along the MG production line in Oxfordshire whilst Marx and Engels’ The Communist manifesto is recited. James Macbean writing in film quarterly drew comparisons between Godard’s use of film and Althusser’s theories of structural ideology. ‘as photographic media, they [film and video] lend themselves so well to the ruling class's need to present the status quo as if it were reality itself.’ (Macbean, 1971)

My paper will go on to discuss the tensions between photography’s ability to both reflect everyday life and shape the ideologies that sustain it.