TRUCK BABIES

CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND

Recently, I spent a lot of time in a car in America driving up the country on the enormous 'Interstates'. As we drove, the most amazing, most beautiful, thundering beings glided past me all the time. They were so shiny, so big, so beautifully coloured. I feared death when they were close to me but I still wanted to get closer to them; to the gargantuan trucks - trucks as big as whales. I wondered where they came from, where they were going, and especially the relationship between the families of trucks that travelled together.

Slowly I started to wonder where their young 'uns were. How did they grow up? "Where are the truck babies?", I asked myself.

Why would someone like me see a truck as they would see a whale. (In fact, where would someone like me see a whale?) I am really interested in a fundamental shift of association that has occurred between beasts and machines. History recalls a time when the train was an 'iron horse' and margarine was artificial butter, now however we are more likely to consider a horse an organic car or a cow a 'milk machine'. Biotechnology and factory farming takes this one step further, inserting animals as organic components into larger essentially mechanical processes. When a Baboon becomes a spare heart producer, beast and machines become more than confused; they become interchangeable - equivalent elements in a larger technology and always 'in the service of humanity'. It is at this point that the anthropomorphisation (animal-pomorphisation) has proceeded so far that truck babies become conceptually possible.

There will be a lot of joy to be had out of these gleaming new truck babies that I will create out of plastic, duco and spare parts. They will be seamless and very glossy, moving around on the floor with their fledgling wheels. The show will come across as part car-show part freak show. I hope it will be adorable; lots of shiny cute baby trucks making rumbling noises. My truck babies will be embryonic '18 Wheelers'. Like most new-born they will be both cute and repulsive, resembling their parents from under a thick slime of packing-grease. I'm very interested in plastic and the new love for seamless surfaces which is rising in the contemporary aesthetic inclination of consumer society. What Japanese industrial designers call 'biomorphism', which is symptomatic of the same transfer of associations from animal to machine. I am extremely excited about Truck Babies , it continues my interest in the changing nature of the natural in 'high-tech' society which I have been working with in my LUMP series but taking it one step further; combining in equal parts spectacle, humour, conceptual seriousness and technological innovation.

Patricia Piccinini 1998