Carla Klein
Monday, 25 January 2010
Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything is to be obliterated. Admittedly, there is the primal shock of the deserts and the dazzle of California, but when this is gone the secondary brilliance of the journey begins, that of the excessive, pitiless distance, the infinity of anonymous faces and distances, or of certain miraculous geological formations, which ultimately testify to no human will, while keeping intact an image of upheaval.
…This sort of travel creates its own peculiar type of event and innervation, so it also has its own special form of fatigue. … The defibrillation of the body overloaded with empty signs, functional gestures, the blinding brilliance of the sky, and somnambulistic distances, is a very slow process. Things suddenly become lighter, as culture, our culture, becomes more rarified. The only question in this journey is: how far can we go in the extermination of meaning? …This moment of vertigo is also the moment of potential collapse. Not so much from the tiredness generated by the distance and the heat, as from the irreversible advance into the desert of time.
Quotes sourced from America, by Jean Baudrillard. View more of Klein’s work at her site.