In my catalogue notes I wrote: “The marriage of reason and nightmare which dominates the 1960s has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape stride the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an uneasy realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. The death of feeling and emotion has at last left us free to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game … ‘Crashed Cars’ illustrates the pandemic cataclysm that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year and injures millions, but is a source of endless entertainment on our film and television screens.”

Contrary to expectations, setting up the exhibition presented few problems. The automobile graveyards of north London were a treasure house of exhibits, the outdoor storerooms of a technological Louvre. In a Hackney breaker’s yard we selected a telescoped Peugeot and a Mini that had rolled down a motorway embankment, whose grass was still growing in its roof sills.

By chance, we found a Lincoln Continental that closely resembled the open-topped limousine in which President Kennedy had met his death. This huge American car had been involved in a massive front-end collision that had driven the radiator grille deep into the engine compartment while leaving the remainder of the car in virtually pristine condition.

Without doubt it was this crushed Lincoln that excited the strongest reactions. The immense black car sat under the clear gallery lights, surrounded by the barest white walls. Although none of the cars would have prompted the slightest concern had they been parked in the street outside, or a moment’s grief over the tragic fate of the occupants, within the gallery they became the focus for nervous laughter and angry comment. Visitors who wandered into the gallery and found the cars unexpectedly in front of them began to titter to themselves or swear at the vehicles.

These responses confirmed all my suspicions of everything that an aberrant technology was threading through our lives. Further testing the audience, I hired a topless young woman to interview the guests at the opening party on closed-circuit television. She had originally agreed to appear naked with her microphone, but on seeing the cars decided that she would only bare her breasts—an interesting response in its own right.

Needless to say, all this provoked the guests beyond endurance. No gallery opening in my experience had ever degenerated so quickly into a drunken brawl. Egged on by Sally and David Hunter, the guests poured wine over the cars, tore off the wing mirrors, and began to break the few intact windows. David leapt around the gallery, supervising the mayhem in high good humour. His restless hands hardly left the damaged cars, as if he had at last found his natural habitat.