STEPHEN BAYLEY

THE AESTHETE

Should Toyota worry that ISIS prefers the Hilux?

‘JAMES DEAN IDENTIFIED PORSCHE AS A CAR EXPRESSIVE OF HIS DISTURBED CHARACTER, AND DULY DIED IN A 550 SPYDER’

THERE IS NO better evidence that marketing is an imprecise science than the Toyota Hilux. Who has not been impressed by news pictures of 43 white pick-ups in a murderous congaline on the Syria-Iraq border? It’s fascinating that ISIS takes such pride in ownership, pride that would not be out of place in Westchester or Surbiton, where radical Islam does not flourish.

Even more fascinating is that someone is art-directing these propaganda images with all the skill of an infidel adman more used to organising car shoots on the Grande Corniche or that famous wiggly road in Tuscany they all like to use.

I was so fascinated and disturbed by ISIS’s choice of vehicle that I asked Toyota for a reaction. Are you at all worried, I said, that prehistoric psychopaths identify with your product? Is it damaging your brand values?

These questions were boldly fielded by Toyota. While disdaining associations with bigotry and savagery, the company can take pride in the fact that its reputation for reliability is appreciated by customers everywhere. Even those who want to retro-fit a Soviet-era DShK heavy machinegun onto the flat-bed.

Indeed, interrogated on the matter of utility and robustness by a reporter from The New York Times, a US Army Ranger said the civilian Toyota ‘sure kicks the hell out of a Humvee’ (referring to the Army’s clumsy AM General High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle). It was presumably this same fabled ability to kick the hell out of things that endeared the saintly Pope Francis to the Hilux used on his recent South American tour. The Hilux congregation is a broad church.

As I say, when it comes to understanding the appeal that certain products have to specific groups of people, conventional marketing has little of value to teach us. You’d be better off reading Sir James Frazer, the pioneer anthropologist whose 1890 masterpiece The Golden Bough is one of the richest sources of deconstructed magic and myth. Frazer gives us the concept of ‘Sympathetic Magic’, which is based on notions of similarity and contagion or, as he put it: ‘like produces like… an effect resembles its cause.’ Or put it this way: you are your car.

One of the richest subtexts in the narrative of the automobile is how certain cars became identified with certain people. In this process, each reinforces each other’s brand values in a reciprocal arrangement as efficient and inevitable as a spinning cranksha*. Take, for example, Facel Vega. This company had no real credentials. Facel is an acronym for Forges et Ateliers de Constructions d’Eure et Loir, a metal-bashing business that made money from stamping fridge components. How sensible, then, to recruit both Stirling Moss and Pablo Picasso as what we would today call ‘brand ambassadors’. A stylish and brave racer and a prodigally talented artist, successful with women! Who would not want to share that warm bath of positive attributes?

Or there was James Dean and his glamour of delinquency. He identified Porsche as a car expressive of his beautifully disturbed character, and duly died in a 550 Spyder when it hit a Ford Tudor sedan in the California desert. Porsche has ever since not entirely been able to shrug off a reputation for both speed and danger.

But BMW’s Art Car programme was the best annexation of human talent to machinery. It began in 1975, commissioning Roy Lichtenstein, Alexander Calder, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol to paint 6 Series coupés: Sympathetic Magic of a high order. Suddenly, a German car acquired Manhattan art gallery values. Customers could suspend covert anxieties about compression ratios and instead imagine that their choice of car bought them entry to the private-view world of warm white wine and exhausted chatter.

Never mind that, at the same time, Germany’s Red Army Faction was using BMWs as getaway cars a*er bloody heists. Indeed, there was amused talk that BMW might actually stand for ‘Baader-Meinhof Wagen’, the name of The Red Army Faction’s celebrity gang. Like ISIS and the Pope with their Toyota trucks, the art world and terrorist each identified with BMW cars. Was it art or violence that added more to the popular BMW perception?

This is one of the great imponderables of aesthetics. Do the people make the car or does the car make the people?

I wrote that line, got into the car, pressed the button and was immediately stalled in traffic. The dream they sold me was a lie. But lies are soon forgotten and dreams last forever.

STEPHEN BAYLEY Author, critic, consultant, broadcaster and curator, Stephen co-created the Boilerhouse Project at the V&A, and was chief exec of The Design Museum. His latest book Death Drive – There Are No Accidents will be published by Circa Press/Thames & Hudson on 1 March 2016.