by Alex Wells
The first beautiful image of the year has been produced, that was unusually fast. Even more surprising, it is a piece of political art—the photograph of the burnt-out shell of a Tesla sitting amid the aftermath of a local post-apocalypse it has created in front of the Trump Tower in Las Vegas.
I am not speaking of the act itself: people died, I don’t know who they were, and it would be callous as to say they died for art. But the image—like the nightmare images out of Abu Ghraib of tortured soldiers in cultish hoods—is undeniably powerful and is likely to haunt us. It has shades of Alex Schaefer’s much-less-subtle plein-air paintings of banks on fire and the futurist streetscapes of Syd Mead, the “visual futurist” who designed the look of Blade Runner and whose Credit Subscription Commuter Cars, developed for Philips in the 1970s, were an obvious visual influence on the cybertruck.
The photo or video-still—thus far uncredited—draws the viewer toward its core over a shattered-plate landscape in a smokily-suppressed palette reflecting flames of nearly undifferentiated orange, pixellated and geometricized at the edge like a bad reproduction or a deliberate modernist painting tactic. The damaged car hulks glosslessly with a grey military bulk that transitions to the rigidly similar color of the tower behind and the hopeless would-be-gold of the Towers’ tasteless doors.
Will 2025 be this on-the-nose? Will the art of 2025 be this on-the-nose? Will there feel like there is much point to it if it isn’t? This is an image that describes a world, begs questions and seems magical while doing it. Who, if anyone, can seize its thrown gauntlet and compete?
Image: Uncredited