About the Event
In 1898, the French cartoonist Marius Rossillon showed a rejected study he originally did for a German brewery to the brothers Andre and Edouard Michelin, owners of what was then a fledgling bicycle tire company. The sketch featured a rotund man offering a toast whilst quoting from Horace’s Odes. “Nunc est bibendum,” the man proclaimed. Now is the time to drink. The Michelin brothers loved the bravado and celebratory tenor of the work but asked that Rosillon instead draw a figure that resembled a pile of tires. Thus was born the Michelin Man, also known as Bibendum, which has become one of the world’s most recognizable trademarks. Today, the Michelin tire company produces tires for all forms of transport, from bikes to heavy equipment, aircrafts and space shuttles.
In Lost Highway, Mariano Ching resurrects Bibendum as a mashed-up version of the Ghostbusters’ Marshmallow Man and The Walking Dead and situates him in a phantasmagorical landscape of apocalyptic significations. Here, Ching assembles in his trademark whimsy a medley of objects and icons that reference mobilities and its complex of anxieties. Burnt cars appear to miraculously balance a load of carefully constructed thingamajigs, road signs lead to nowhere and package designs from a bygone era are reappropriated as visions of doom in some parallel wasteland that is at once familiar and strange. It’s unsettling like MRT stopping between stations or like Uber without Waze on a rainy, payday megasale weekend.
The artist, who grew up amidst the urban chaos of Binondo in Manila, decided several years ago to move to the fairly-uncongested environs of Cavite with his wife, Yasmin Sison-Ching, to raise their son Haraya. But urban chaos has inevitably caught up with the Chings, and the city with all its attendant excesses has encroached upon their refuge. This, then, is Ching’s attempt to make sense of all the comings and goings of our time, its paradoxes and guilty pleasures. “Modern conveniences brought by technology move us forward,“ he reflects, “ and I cannot imagine not having a car or the internet, but progress also destroys the environment and the world around us.”
There are, too, more insidious mobilities that require interrogation in Ching’s imagination. He is wary of supposed upward mobilities peddled as the promise of change. Has change truly come? His imagined wasteland thus also serves as a metaphor for lawlessness, the disregard for lessons learned from the past, and what he sees as misplaced notions of courage, heroism and nobility.
For more than a century the Michelin Man has been hailed as a triumph in branding and design. For some, though, Bibendum is no more than a running joke. Alcohol and mobility is a sure recipe for disaster and being on the road is never a good time for a drink. Ching’s Lost Highway is a road map of sorts away from the error of our intoxications. It is a meaningful and provocative cautionary tale in these times of endless wanderings.
Now is NOT the time to drink. Buckle up, folks. All eyes on the road.