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In an age where cars are fetishised objects to many, it's understandable that a road traffic accident could be a highly significant event that could inspire a work of art. Even so, it's incredible to discover that one such work of art could resonate so strongly as to become one of the biggest art world sales of the millennium so far.
This is Andy Warhol's Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I), from his Death and Disaster series. The predicted sale price for this piece, when it went under the hammer in 2007, was between 25 and 35 million dollars; it went for more than $70m.
Unlike Warhol's more famous work, taking publicity stills and corporate liveries as its inspiration, this piece takes an image from Newsweek that showed the results of a fatal car crash as its starting point. The image is reproduced and repeated across the canvas as if tiled, cast in a sepulchral green that leaves the highest and brightest point of the overturned car, its burning tyre, gleaming like a night-vision will-o'-the-wisp.
The destruction of the vehicle and the implied personal injury to the driver is put into a typical suburban American street environment, giving a jarring effect through juxtaposition that is absent in, say, the famous Marilyn Monroe prints, although the tiling of the image harks back to these. It is a striking piece of work, more than 2m in each direction, but is this enough to explain its amazing final price?
Other works by Warhol were sold the same night, a lemon Marilyn print and a self-portrait, fetching a 'mere' $28m and $8.2m; so it seems that there must have been something specific about this particular Warhol that spoke to the bidders, and it's possible that it's the car crash imagery that does so.
It's not the only work featuring a road traffic accident to pop up in the news that year; around the same time, an artist began producing 'bonsai crash' sculptures, in which Matchbox-style die-cast cars were adapted to appear as if they had been in a crash, then lovingly attached to the base of a bonsai tree.
With prices starting at $50, these seemed more possible to a compensation claim copy-writer's salary, but began to throw up more questions - for example, as this isn't a pre-existing car accident, does buying one involve the purchaser in glamorising car crashes? Would it push the world slightly toward the dystopian mindset that the characters in J G Ballard's Crash have? And should we read these questions back into the Warhol print?
Thinking back a few years, it's possible to find an artwork related to a road traffic accident that, in turn, seems to act as a critical force as well as an aesthetic one; this is 'Post-Traumatic Origami' by the Australian artist Danius Kesminas. From a series of works titled 'Hughbris', this work is made from the crushed wreckage of a car in which the art critic Robert Hughes narrowly survived a serious car accident.
The artist has drawn attention to the way that the cubic nature of the crushed remains is perfectly apposite for a work that is influenced by the life of a pro-modernism critic. And by bringing in ephemera of the writer's life - books and materials such as fishing rods that are associated with his public image - a viewer is invited to imagine the writer as intimately related with the wreckage, and perhaps how remarkable it is that he survived the personal injury suffered.
The critic has said, ''I haven't seen it. I don't want to see it. In a sense, I was it. I cannot comment as a critic on an art exhibit I have not seen [but] of course, I take a lighthearted view of the matter.''
While the circling nature of a critic commenting on work that an artist has created out of that same critic's actions has a seductive appeal, it is the work that must stand for itself. And unlike the Warhol and the bonsai crash, the fact that this is not a representation of a collision so much as a result of one gives it a remarkable animism. There is, at least to me, a suggestion under the Cubism joke that the reality of the crash must be insisted upon.
It's possible to see the folds of its compression as almost soft, like fabric, yet as recognisably metallic from its edges, its paintwork and the protruding numberplate; if the biographical ephemera is supposed to have us project the what-if of the writer being still in that car, it becomes an accidental shroud and casket at the same time.
This 'real' connection is something that separates it from the other road traffic accident artworks discussed here; perhaps in intent rather than quality, but it is a definite separation.
