Gottfried Bechtold

by Robert Fleck, Dirk Baecker

Sculptor and conceptual artist Gottfried Bechtold works in text, performance, audio, video and Porsche. In 1971, he presented his first concrete car, a casting of his own. His 2006 work, "Eleven Eleven," included here, casts 11 cloth-covered models of a current 911 Porsche prototype. His Travel Pictures series spans the same interval and meditates not just on the vehicle's iconic image and its speed in opposition to the work's sculptural stasis, but its comparative agelessness--in 1971, Bechtold posed with his car in front of a series of homes and gas stations, snapshots from a simulated road trip looping around his hometown of Vorarlberg. In 2001, he took his new car to the same sites, many significantly changed, and the artist himself significantly changed, to repeat the series, creating a cycle of paired time-lapse portraits. In documenting that work here, along with a crushed prototype of the original vehicle cast in 1971, which he put through a baling press, Bechtold has also declared its end. Also included here are his new Ready Maids and other work, along with essays from physicists, sociologists, curators and critics.

160 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2007