Gary Michael Dault Canadian Art

Vol.5 #4,Winter 198

During the summer, my wife and I were given a review copy of a new Citroën 2CV (Deux Chevaux) to drive around for a weekend and get to know (my wife owns a Citroën DS, is a member of the Citroën club and is a rabid conservationist of all things Citroënesque). Actually, what we were driving was a fully restored, 15-year-old 2CV, refurbished and sold by a team of Citroën enthusiasts incorporated as Escargot Motorcars. Factory-new 2CVs do not meet certain Transport Canada regulations and cannot therefore be sold here. Escargot's Citroëns are essentially new cars on 15-year-old frames.

The 2CV, designed in 1936 and released after World War II in France, has been changed very little in all of its 52 years as a populist automobile. It has two headlights now instead of one, an electric starter instead of a crank and the seats are benches and not, unfortunately, the original hammock-like lengths of fabric slung from the roof. The car is a rolling laboratory of neoprimitive satisfactions, the ur-car of the new, involving modernism. Except for a rather sophisticated suspension system, every function of this delightfully spartan motorcar is immediately understandable in its context, as is the role of the driver and passenger. The car is slow, high, full of light, made up of one-on-one operations and radically identifiable functions and operations. You want sun; you peel the top back like a banana. You want ventilation, you push aside a metal panel and create an aperture through which the wind can blow. Everything in the car is there for some simple and obvious and mechanically logical reason. By the time you've driven 10 kilometres, you have rediscovered transportation, the feel of mechanized motion, the sense of moving over the earth in a machine. The 2CV, like the Branzi bench, is violently what it is: an expressive intervention in a culture that is lethally divergent from the needs of the men and women who built it.

We parked the 2CV on a busy street one evening right beside a red Ferrari Testarossa. Passersby crowded around the 2CV. The Testarossa is a printout, an LED display, technology from Mars, an asymptotic approach to the techno-narcotic doze that leaves humanness in better hands. The 2CV is a gasoline-powered wakeup call, a somatic pinch, a smile on the face of the Buddha of the new modernist revolution. The 2CV is a machine for a society made up, as Andrea Branzi has put it, ‘of artificial and different 'normal' people’ – people with a ‘difficult normality, a normality that is in no way natural and spontaneous, but difficult to obtain. A sought-after normality, that will perhaps compel us to behave like the Incas of the plateaus, who kept a leaf of coca in the mouth, not to drug themselves but in order to work, to obtain normality at a high altitude.’