Krzysztof Wodiczko, Vehicle, 1973

photograph, 62 x 87.5 cm, signed and signed on the reverse: 2/10 / Krzysztof Wodiczko; sticker from the auction house Cornette de Saint Cyr, Paris; sticker Galerie Gabrielle Maubrie, Paris

provenance: private collection, Lodz; Cornette de Saint Cyr, Paris; Galerie Gabrielle Maubrie, Paris

Krzysztof Wodiczko (1943, Warsaw) - graduated from the Faculty of Industrial Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1968). He worked as a designer at UNITRA industrial plant in Warsaw and Polskie Zakłady Optyczne in Warsaw. Since 1977, he has lived and worked outside Poland. After a two-year stay in Canada, where he worked at the University of Guelph, he began a series of lectures at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. From 1977 to 1981 he worked concurrently at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. In 1983, he moved to the US. For the first eight years of his stay in the US, he lived in New York. In 1991 he began lecturing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Boston) where since 1994 he held the position of director at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. He currently teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

The work "Vehicle" presented at the auction is part of a major project by the artist, the impetus for which came from a bicycle design competition announced by a Japanese company. In the course of working on the project, which was carried out jointly with Krzysztof Meissner, Wodiczko is said to have said, "Krzysztof, I withdraw, for the reason that this vehicle, which comes to my mind, has some other dimension."
<< Wodiczko's "vehicle" is a several-meter-long platform on four wheels. The vehicle moves in a rectilinear, uniform motion and only forwards. The author walking back and forth on the tilted platform causes it to move, which, through a system of gears and cables, causes the wheels to turn and drive forward.
The unusual vehicle worked slowly - to move it ten meters, one had to walk twenty meters on the platform. Regardless of the direction of pedestrian movement, like an economy in the language of propaganda, the "Vehicle" could only move in the "right" direction, that is, "forward".>>.
The vehicle, according to the assumption, was to serve only the artist. In 1973, Wodiczko "drove" his Vehicle through the streets of Saska Kepa and around Skaryszewski Park. During these erudite "journeys" the artist transformed himself into a thinker who contemplates the reality he finds. The Vehicle itself became an ironic metaphor for the Gierek era. The vehicle, which by definition refers to movement and acceleration in Wodiczko's work slows down, thus becoming the antithesis of the propaganda vision of Poland in the 1970s.