Basswood
23.5 x 49 x 37 in
59.7 x 124.5 x 94.0 cm
2008
Richard Humann • Electric Bumper Cars • Basswood • 23.5 x 49 x 37 in • 2008
In Electric Bumper Cars, Richard Humann replaces the familiar vehicles of a carnival bumper car ride with electric chairs, transforming an attraction built around playful collisions into a darkly comic vision of capital punishment. The basswood sculpture belongs to his series You Must Be This Tall, in which classic amusement park rides are combined with devices associated with historical methods of execution and torture. The substitution turns the ride’s central premise on its head: instead of steering cars into one another for amusement, the viewer encounters the machinery of death occupying the very space designed for carefree recreation.
The humor lies in the blunt absurdity of the transformation. Bumper cars invite riders to collide, swerve, and laugh at the harmless chaos of simulated accidents. Electric chairs, by contrast, evoke the deliberate and irreversible violence of state execution. By placing these chairs within the familiar framework of a carnival ride, Humann creates a grotesque parody of amusement, as though the ride’s promise of a shocking encounter has been taken to its most literal and horrifying extreme. The visual joke depends on the recognition of both objects and the disturbing gap between their purposes.
Beneath this playful incongruity, Electric Bumper Cars examines the relationship between public pleasure and institutional violence. The bumper car ride turns collision into a shared social experience, while the electric chair represents punishment administered under governmental authority, even when the condemned person’s suffering remains hidden from public view. Humann’s dark humor exposes how the same culture that embraces staged danger for entertainment can also maintain systems in which suffering is authorized as retribution. The sculpture invites an initial smile, then complicates it, asking where amusement ends and cruelty begins—and what it means when the machinery of entertainment becomes indistinguishable from the machinery of death.
Richard Humann • Electric Bumper Cars • Basswood • 23.5 x 49 x 37 in • 2008
Richard Humann • Electric Bumper Cars • Basswood • 23.5 x 49 x 37 in • 2008
Photo credits: Joseph Silva / Richard Humann Studio