Krzysztof Wodiczko - Vehicles

Vehicles

While the artist had produced his first vehicle in Poland with additional conceptual versions designed when he lived in Canada, it was with his Homeless Vehicle Project of 1987-89, that he redirected “attention from the work of art as dissent to the work of art as social action: in this case, the discussions and design collaboration with members of the homeless community to develop both a physical object and a conceptual design that would make their participation in the urban economy visible and self-directed.” The Homeless Vehicle Project was both symbolic and useful: the artist’s first work to use a collective process to legitimize the problems of a marginal community “without legitimating the crisis of homelessness.” While the public was cautious, the operators of the vehicles took the project seriously. According to Wodiczko, “You see this in certain gestures, certain ways of behaving, speaking, dialoguing, of building up stories, narratives: the homeless become actors, orators, workers, all things which they usually are not. The idea is to let them speak and tell their own stories, to let them be legitimate actors on the urban stage.” The attention to testimony as a transformative process while still tentative in the Homeless Vehicle Project became a significant performative process in the artist’s Instruments and eventually part of the his projections as well.

Wodiczko created Poliscar in 1991 as a kind of “command center” for communication and community activism – a vehicle equipped with first-aid supplies, video and radio transmission equipment, and tools for everyday survival, it could support legal, medical, and social crisis aid, the mobile units ranging from three to ten miles from a base station. Poliscar was a technological design for the disenfranchised public of the polis or public sphere. Later Wodiczko would merge his vehicles with his projections when working with war veterans (see “Recent Work”).