The Cars of Los Angeles
Bel Ami•Jul 18, 2026 — Sep 12, 2026
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In Nicole Antonia Spagnola‘s video Ragged Dick, set in the early twentieth century and imitating black-and-white silent cinema, intercut with archival footage, a child shoe shiner waits for a job to earn the two cents needed to go to the movies. Eventually, a customer comes by, flipping the coin into the child’s hand, who seals it with his eyes, then moves the brush across the bourgeois shoe as if it were a toy car and the shoe a highway. After leaving the movie theater, the montage suggests that he is run over by a horse-drawn carriage and dies. The video runs in an endless loop, accelerating, through the repetition of economic transcendence and death, toward the horsepower of the car, keeping pace with the speed of the (death) drive.
If, in the early days of automobilization, the shoe shiner was run over by a horse-drawn carriage, the horse, in turn, was run over by a car. By 1910, the city of New York was populated by more than 20,000 dead horses, which were carried away by cars…
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The Cars of Los Angeles
Bel Ami•Jul 18, 2026 — Sep 12, 2026
Press Release
In Nicole Antonia Spagnola‘s video Ragged Dick, set in the early twentieth century and imitating black-and-white silent cinema, intercut with archival footage, a child shoe shiner waits for a job to earn the two cents needed to go to the movies. Eventually, a customer comes by, flipping the coin into the child’s hand, who seals it with his eyes, then moves the brush across the bourgeois shoe as if it were a toy car and the shoe a highway. After leaving the movie theater, the montage suggests that he is run over by a horse-drawn carriage and dies. The video runs in an endless loop, accelerating, through the repetition of economic transcendence and death, toward the horsepower of the car, keeping pace with the speed of the (death) drive.
If, in the early days of automobilization, the shoe shiner was run over by a horse-drawn carriage, the horse, in turn, was run over by a car. By 1910, the city of New York was populated by more than 20,000 dead horses, which were carried away by cars…
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