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Skull & Ghost Car
Caisse des Depot et Consignations, Paris, 1998
Skull
Neon in white and blue
110 x 110 cm
Note: The skull motif derives from a desktop icon representing cracked software. The same motif was later used in Death Flag-a flag commissioned by Palais de Tokyo in Paris, to hang outside the exhibition space.
Ghost Car
Cadillac limousine, chauffeur, CD
Note: A black Cadillac with skull flags attached to the bonnet provided a Limo service in Paris over a period of six days. The soundtrack on the stereo was Malcolm McClaren’s album Paris. I had three exhibitions on in Paris at the time. The Cadillac provided viewers with a free shuttle service between the exhibitions. The four circuits a day projected the whole line of exhibitions onto the streets of Paris. The fascination of cars and especially the connection between cars and death has intrigued me since my childhood when I first saw film maker Carl Th. Dreyer’s They Caught the Ferryfrom1948. The short film was commissioned by The Danish Road Safety Council and featured an in-love young couple hurtling along on a motorbike because racing against a kind of ghost car, personifying Death himself. The ghost car in Paris can be perceived as a contemporary version of this film. Paris is the city of death, as most recently attested to by the car accident involving Princess Diana in the tunnel by Pont d’Alma where the Cadillac also passed. Obviously, the Parisianassociation with death is due to its status as the capital par excellence of the 19th century, a metropolis of the past. However, the Ghost Carhad little to do with speed limits, but only with death and facing a vanished époque.
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