Peter Anderson
As if to emphasise to even the most casual visitor that they had entered a sacred space dedicated to the worship of fast machines, the air in the gallery was heavy with the smell of rubber given off by the massive rear tyre of a Top Fuel dragster. Almost a metre wide and treadless to ensure maximum grip, the nicks, dents and flecks of embedded shale in its smooth surface indicated that it had been recently used to 'rotate the earth' in some act of monstrous acceleration.
Photographer Peter Anderson's debut exhibition was a passionate exploration of the world of high-performance cars in which landscapes, individuals and vehicles were joined in religious ecstasy. Presented as a sequence of photo-graphic prints individually mounted on metal-flake boxes and arranged in abstract cruciform groups, 'Car' transcended the surface allure of Kustom Kar Kulture to capture the human lust for speed itself.
In its purest form, speed is represented by the dragster, a supercharged piece of extreme engineering designed to do one thing: take its driver from a standstill to beyond 500 kph in under five seconds. Paradoxically, Anderson eschewed the tired Futurism of bodies blurred in motion, choosing instead to capture the inherent dynamism of these extraordinary cars while at rest through detailed close-ups, acutely angled shots and stark perspectives. Streamliner (1998), for example, is an elegant geometric take on the rear fin of a car, transforming it into a mysterious, sensual assemblage of rivets, studs and coils of wire. Shoot (1998) documents the complex symmetries of a dragster's parachute in its folded state, while Jet Hot (1998), Camarro Tattoo (1996) and Terminator (1997) revel in the flame jobs, bared flesh and Gothic script of the hot rodder's world.
However, it is in the almost mystical stillness of the photographs taken at a race meeting on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah that revealed the show's real strengths. A place so featureless, white and empty that it's possible to discern the curvature of the Earth, the light at Bonneville envelopes everything in its isolating glare, throwing the minutest details of car and driver into sharp focus. After Burn (1998) depicts an exhausted racer slumped in the cockpit of his dragster, the windshield dappled with salt crystals thrown up from the run. A similar salt patina covers the customised red and orange paint job on a driver's helmet in Hot Head (1996) a bright, physical manifestation of the intense light, the empty space and the speed at which it is covered. In Apostles (1998) a group of Bonneville enthusiasts, their features hidden behind Ray-bans and baseball caps, stand gazing fervently towards some distant, unseen revelation; a huge white cross painted across a dragster's front assembly fills the foreground of Danny Boy (1998). A video monitor plays back Anderson's short film On the Road (1999), documenting a journey past junk yards, factories and railroad tracks, towards the pure abstraction of the Bonneville salt flats, where a simple black line and a patch of pink scrim designate the drag strip.
The powerful inner workings of the cars are also exposed, especially in a series of photographs taken in various workshops and pit areas at night: men in stained overalls, faces sternly illuminated from below by inspection lamps, pore over stripped drive chains and exhaust pipes. In Funny Car (1992) the image is framed and cropped to offer a dizzying perspective on the fibreglass shell of a Top Fuel car raised from its chassis to reveal the driver sitting, suited and helmeted, within. This sacrificial violation of forms is further echoed in Anderson's photographs depicting trashed and abandoned muscle cars, monster trucks and related automotive scrap. Hood Ornament (1999) offers an extreme close up of a Mercedes covered with chunks of shattered safety glass in desolate, glittering parody of Bonneville's salt crystals. Tail lights are smashed open, windshields punctured. In '57 Special (1990) a car's body has been scoured and blasted ready for respraying. From veneration to sacrifice and brutal degradation, 'Car' organised and presented its images of men and machines as if they were votive offerings to a barely acknowledged religion.
