Frieda Toranzo Jaeger

Auto Control as a Form of Landscape

2017

Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Auto Control as a Form of Landscape, 2017

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This triptych is based on a Tesla whose interior the artist customized on the Tesla website. The width of the work when the panels are closed is the exact width of a Tesla, thus one designed to hold two bodies side by side. In Mexico City the car is used as a social space and, for young people, one not controlled by parents. In Jaeger’s red interior the satellite navigation is replaced by an abstract painting, the last vestiges of a masculine presence. The rear of the car, shown when the doors are shut, are embroidered with braids and pigtails that trail along the floor. The car has been completely feminized. The doors may be shown in multiple positions closed, partially open or completely open. The Tesla is one of the most advanced objects of desire in the motoring world as the car industry moves to more environmentally friendly production. The internal space of the car is conceived as a negative space to the body, at once a hollowed out shell to contain it and a metaphor for the capitalist space that dominates humanity. But Jaeger adds another dimension, depicting it as sensual and enveloping, like a womb the intense red suggesting the interior of the body. The car becomes a shrine, and like the triptych altarpiece, a moveable work of art.

Many of Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s works take the triptych format, employed by artists over many centuries to represent religious devotion. The triptych altarpiece allowed for multiple views and in the case of smaller works, the option to transport them while travelling. Jaeger thus inserts her work into a long-standing tradition of essentially male art. Many of her works investigate car interiors, traditionally viewed as a masculine domain. Driving is associated typically with male control while the celebrated novelist J G Ballard remarked that were he to condense the twentieth century onto one image it would be of a man driving along a concrete highway to an unknown destination. Jaeger takes these interiors and regenders them as feminine, combining the tools of male gestural abstraction with the longstanding art of embroidery traditionally carried out by women. The cars are always of the future; driverless, electric, and without people. They become emblems of passivity and suggest, perhaps, a loss of agency.

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Frieda Toranzo Jaeger Auto Control as a Form of Landscape

Frieda Toranzo Jaeger

Auto Control as a Form of Landscape