STEPHEN BAYLEY

The Aesthete

Iimagine at the particle physics conferences where they meet, believers in retrocausality are asked to sit in a separate group so that their foaming mouths, eye-rolling and terrible twitches do not distract the other delegates. While the maths make it theoretically possible, retrocausality is not taken entirely seriously by orthodox scientists. It posits a belief that the future can influence the present and that the present can distort the past.

But this is not entirely mad. It’s what car designers do all the time. Your sparkling new car is often two product cycles out of date: the designers have already designed the successor to its successor. They live in the future and work backwards to the present.

Those mid-term face-lifts are not really updates; rather a calculated plan to align an already imagined future closer to the present-day. That fabulous old white-shoed huckster Raymond Loewy established the principle of MAYA: ‘Most Advanced Yet Acceptable’. Namely, let your imagination soar, then haul it back to the point where the consumer can tolerate it. Or buy its products.

But I sense things are changing. We are coming to a point where neither physics nor history seem linear or progressive. Or have you not seen the ads for the Fiat 124 Spider? They make explicit reference to its 50-year-old predecessor, whose shape it apes. The new car is, however, based on the Mazda MX-5, which itself was modelled on the 1963 Lotus Elan. Meanwhile, the new Land Rover Defender will, aesethtically, resemble its 70-year-old grandad.

Everything returns: length of skirts, width of trousers, presence of facial hair, television series. When, in 2014, Qantas took delivery of its first new Boeing 737-800, it had it painted in the old livery with Gert Selheim’s 1947 flying kanga on the tail. Of course, everyone loved it, even if the stewardesses were not in the period-correct, matching-numbers, gorgeous Emilio Pucci frocks.

This is what’s lazily called ‘retro’, but the very word deserves a little analysis. It is a coinage of the troubled ’70s and we have the French to blame. A retroviseur ,of course, means rear-view mirror, but our term probably comes from retrospectif, a review of an artist’s career. But retro also has a relationship to kitsch. And kitsch is best defined as the corpse that’s left when anger leaves art.

Still, we can now see that a group of ‘retro’ cars that began with Nissan’s 1987 Be-1 take on the Mini, continued with the 1989 S-Cargo, a Post-Modern 2CV, developed through the BMW Z8 of 2000 and is still with us now in the Mini, Fiat 500 and Ford Mustang, actually forms a coherent body of work with a language and vocabulary all its own.

Yet it is not mere copyism because who can say what exactly has been copied? The concept? Not really. The general arrangement? Hardly ever. The details? Actually, no. The character. C’mon! In most senses, these retro cars are, in fact, highly original. I mean, the sensibility that inspired the superb Citroën 2CV AZU fourgonnette was really not at all the same thing as the sensibility inspiring the silly Nissan S-Cargo.

Although there are Japanese precedents, it was J Mays’ Audi Avus concept which appeared at the 1991 Tokyo Motor Show that is the key work in this movement. With clear references to pre-war Auto Union racers, the Avus seeded the Audi TT and perhaps helped Mays persuade VW to manufacture Concept One, which in 1997 turned into the reborn Beetle, whose historic Porsche source was possibly inspired by Josef Ganz’s Maikaefer (Maybug).

But other retro cars have been less popular. With the revived Ford Thunderbird, J Mays’ normally very sure hand lost its cunning. My wife saw a red one on King’s Road. When I answered her question, she said ‘No! Thunderbirds shouldn’t be polite.’ If you’re going to mess with history, do as Hunter S Thompson said: ‘Buy the ticket, take the ride’. To avoid kitsch, forget politeness: you need to be angry. Or, at least, energetic.

Perhaps it’s the idea of progress and novelty that’s weirdly isolated in history. What a vain delusion it was that we might be able to continuously create newness. That was a Modern idea. Post-Modernism revised that. And now we are post-Post-Modern and in a terrible muddle. Again, I cite the Fiat 124 Spider.

In 1952, musician John Cage ‘wrote’ a famous piece called 4’33”. The notation refers to the length of silence he recorded. You can listen to it any way you want. You can do that with history too. Cage later mused: ‘The past must be invented/The future must be revised.’ As I say, that’s what designers do. It’s just that some get more angry than others.

‘YOUR NEW CAR IS OFTEN TWO PRODUCT CYCLES OUT OF DATE: ITS DESIGNERS LIVE IN THE FUTURE AND WORK BACK’