If you thought art was about elegance, finesse and maybe paintings hanging in living rooms lighted by candles, Wolf Vostell would reply with a thunderous “Nein!” 
At the Contemporanea exhibition in Rome in 1973, Wolf Vostell prepared one of his most bizarre and symbolic performances, Energia. At the center of the action, an old Cadillac Fleetwood was juxtaposed against a trench of strands of bread, each rolled in old copies of L'Unità. It was a surreal image that blended the idea of wealth and power (the Cadillac) with everyday fragility (the bread), all mixed with clear political symbolism (the L'Unità newspaper). The car, thus adorned and connected to this unlikely “bunker” of bread and printed paper, represented the social and political energy of the time: an accumulation of tensions between consumerism, class struggles, and clashing ideologies. With this performance, Vostell transformed consumerism into trenches, opulence into decadence, emphasizing how energy was not just that of engines or machines, but an explosive and conflicting force that permeated society itself. 
In 1973, with Auto-Fieber (Car Fever), Wolf Vostell perfectly captured society's spreading obsession with the automobile and the wild consumerism that accompanied it. The work is a performance/installation in which a car, the ultimate symbol of progress and economic prosperity, becomes a metaphor for collective delirium. Vostell covered the automobile with chaotic materials, conveying a sense of saturation and suffocation, almost as if it were a feverish body overwhelmed by an overdose of technology and industrialization. With Auto-Fieber, Vostell denounced the collective “fever” that had infected humanity, an obsession with speed, mobility and material possession that, instead of liberating, imprisons us. The car, from an instrument of freedom, becomes a symbol of alienation, almost a stationary vehicle in an existential traffic jam. Like many of Vostell's other works, Auto-Fieber forces us to reconsider our relationship with the objects we idolize, revealing the disturbing fragility hidden beneath the surface of modernity. 
A similar concept in his Car-TV Sculpture “The Winds” (1981), here Wolf Vostell draws us into a real vortex of technology and alienation. In this work, Vostell combines two powerful symbols of modernity: the automobile and television, fusing them into a sculpture that seems to capture the essence of media chaos. The automobile, in this case, becomes a kind of frame for a series of television monitors, which transmit distorted and fragmented images. The overall effect is that of a car whipped around by the “winds” of mass communication, unable to move forward coherently in a world overloaded with information. With The Winds, Vostell critiques the invasion of technology into daily life and the paralyzing impact of media, where speed and visual noise overwhelm us and make us passive. The car, from a symbol of freedom and movement, becomes a stationary vehicle trapped in a media storm, evoking the helplessness of the individual in a world dominated by technological excess. 
Among other things, this eccentric genius of Fluxus, the art movement that made Dadaists look like quiet retirees standing in line at the supermarket, had the audacity to take a Cadillac and turn it into a concrete sculpture, Cadillac 500 (1983). Nothing could be more natural, right?Wolf Vostell was a master at molding everyday objects into monoliths of pure nonsense. Take for example his Cadillac, an icon of American opulence, which under his “artistic care” became a concrete block.A car that cannot be driven or even moved, but sure weighs as much as the ego of a billionaire in middle-age crisis.Maybe Vostell was trying to tell us something about the immobility of consumer society. Or perhaps he was simply trying to understand how much cement was needed to turn a piece of American pop culture into a useless boulder.
However, Vostell's artwork is not limited to the cemented Cadillac. The artist has an impressive CV of works on wheels (theoretically moving), but which seem to be made to go nowhere. Vostell loved cars, but he clearly did not view them as transportation. He saw them as metaphors for alienation, consumerism or simply as good pretexts for spilling heavy materials on them.In Concrete Traffic (1970), for example, he covered an entire Pontiac with concrete, yes more concrete, creating a sculpture permanently parked in the nonsense. An homage to modern life? Maybe. Or more simply, a way of conveying the concept of permanent traffic jams, a situation well known to anyone who has ever spent an hour on the interstate.
Never have works from forty and fifty years ago seemed so contemporary.It is easy to smile at Vostell's eccentricities, but in the end his art production brings up questions that are not trivial. What is the role of mobility in our lives? What if instead of glorifying the automobile as a symbol of freedom, we saw it as an outdated object, immobile in its own heaviness?In an age when we are obsessed with constant motion, fast travel and innovation, Vostell shoves in our faces the paradox of progress that is no longer so new. With his sculptures, the car becomes a plastered carcass, a symbol of a stationary humanity, stuck in its own contradictions.Wolf Vostell has forced us to stop, planting ourselves in the ground, even as the world around us speeds up. So what do we do with a Cadillac if we cannot drive it? Maybe we keep it that way, nice and still, as a reminder not to always take everything too seriously. Then again, the real journey, perhaps Vostell would say, is not moving forward, but understanding why we stopped.
