‘IS THAT A REAL DA VINCI ON YOUR T SHIRT?’
Long ‘a thing’, 2018 was the year the restomod went supernova, as design critic Stephen Bayley explains
IT’S THE IDEA THAT’S IMPORTANT, NOT THE GREASY ORIGINAL MECHANICALS
THE PHILOSOPHER John Locke had interesting things to say about hosiery. Considering a favourite pair of socks, he wondered: if you darned them once, then twice, and then darned them again and again so that eventually none of the original existed, would it still be your favourite pair of socks? This is a classical paradox.
And this is the territory the restomod movement nudges us into.
A friend in New York acquired an unloved Porsche
912. And what he has done to it goes far, far beyond the concept of mere ‘restoration’. He has re-made a 912 to more demanding standards than the manufacturer ever attempted. The plastic moulding on top of the instruments has, for instance, been replaced by a tailor-milled piece of Masonite. British aircraft seatbelts have appeared where none existed before. And my friend is not a wingnut garagefreak: he learnt architecture and design at the feet of the great Charles Eames in California.
Throughout the last century, the car trespassed into the traditional territory of art. In 1936 Walter Benjamin published
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Essentially, he asked the question: if a (priceless) work of art is truly beautiful, can that beauty be captured and multiplied by an inexpensive photograph? Where does the real value of, say, the Mona Lisa lie? Is it in the crumbling and cracked oil painting in the Louvre, or in the billion images of Leonardo’s enigmatic masterpiece captured on CMOS sensors?
Is that a real Da Vinci I see on your T-shirt? Is my friend’s comprehensively re-imagined 912 still a Porsche? And, perhaps even more importantly, does it matter? Do we need to trouble about distinctions between reproduction, forgery and facsimile? No we do not, according to Gilbert Simondon, an inluential French philosopher who once congratulated the National Coal Board on its painstaking restoration of a Newcomen engine. ‘There is,’ Simondon said, ‘something eternal in a technical schema.’
That’s to say: it’s the enduring idea of Newcomen or Porsche that’s most important… not the greasy original mechanicals. Jaguar would agree: possession of the original designs allows it to re-manufacture – very proitably, one imagines – a ‘continuation’ XKSS. Would the resulting car be even more authentic if Jaguar could locate and use billets of steel cast in 1957?
In the fake-news era, it’s philosophically signiicant that the restomod movement makes prodigal e¦orts to achieve purity and authenticity… even if that authenticity involves a degree of fantasy and invention: Rob Dickinson of Singer boldly says he can actually improve on the proportions of an original 911. And so he does. The result is a fascinating liaison between veneration and licence. Like Viollet-le-Duc and his mad restorations of medieval buildings, Dickinson imagines a 911 as it should have been. Not as it was.
But what restomod proves, in these days when traditional values are fragile and precarious, is that real pleasure of a spiritually satisfying sort exists in the idea and example of a ine machine. As the old professor said: ‘Cars are our cathedrals’.
Cathedrals? They restore them, too.