Arts Slave to the Image
Few images have impacted my imagination more than this one:
At dusk, the massive, robotic head of Grace Jones rises from the desert floor, turns to the side, opens its metal mouth, and shoots out a silver CX GTi Turbo.
Dreamed up by Jean-Paul Goude (Jones’s husband at the time—1984) for France’s most recognizable automobile corporation, Citroën, the image transports me from any point in real time to a fantastic world where Jones is the entire economic base, the whole productive force, the source and sole generator of labor power. In the pyramids of ancient Egypt we see masses of hardened human energy, human misery; in this giant head of Grace Jones, we do not see the expenditure of a society of slaves organized by the will of a master, but, instead, the economy of just one, the production of a single slave who works for no master, who works simply because there’s work to be done. The image is of a slave utopia.
Ah, Grace Jones and Jean-Paul Goude... the Bjork and Matthew Barney of the mid-80s.