He trained as an artist and has found inspiration in old master paintings in making some of British cinema’s most avant-garde films. Now the director Peter Greenaway is working on perhaps his most ambitious artwork so far – an actual racetrack as a vast outdoor art installation.
It will be a tribute to Jack Kerouac’s cult classic On the Road, the story of a hedonistic road trip across the US, as Greenaway seeks to recreate Kerouac’s sense of adventure for the 21st century, as well as raising questions about “the future of our roads and how we are going to use them”.
Greenaway plans to build the art installation across an acre-wide site. He envisages driverless and other “very contemporary” cars speeding over a race track, as well as in and out of life-size buildings.
“We’re not talking miniature models,” he said. “I was intrigued about taking the idea of adventures in a car, which you could describe as being essential to Kerouac’s novel, and taking it further. We’re now in the age of the electric car, and all sorts of experiments going on. I was intrigued about the possibility of making a presentation of the computer-driven, no-human-driver [car] as a work of art.”
Asked how the installation would pay tribute to Kerouac, he said: “The adventure of the car. There’s a feeling that the great 1950s, 1960s, 1970s excitement about the car is no longer quite with us … Driverless cars mean somehow a lack [of excitement]. Not that I’m a great car driver, [but] … the excitement is actually driving the goddamn car and not … behind a wheel of which you have no control.”
He wants the installation to raise questions about the way in which we are “covering the world with miles and miles of motorway”.
Greenaway is known for visually sumptuous and complex films that have pushed boundaries. His feature productions include The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, starring Helen Mirren, and Prospero’s Books with John Gielgud. In 2014, Bafta honoured him with its outstanding British contribution to cinema award, noting: “His critical breakthrough came in 1982 with 17th-century drama The Draughtsman’s Contract, establishing him as one of the most important filmmakers of his time”.
Now aged 76, he has never forgotten reading On the Road as a teenager. Kerouac’s name is synonymous with rebellion, after On the Road inspired a disaffected generation. The author typed it on a 120ft-long scroll in what he claimed was a three-week blast of creative energy in 1951, only to suffer rejection by publishers, despair and near-destitution, before it finally appeared in 1957.
Greenaway recently reread the novel, and his planned installation was mentioned in a recent book, titled Kerouac Beat Painting, featuring 80 paintings and drawings.
The On the Road installation is in the early stages of planning. Because of its scale and multimillion-pound cost, it may be built initially in Dubai, where there is already interest in funding it, before coming to Europe.
“These things take a lot of organisation and a lot of money,” Greenaway said. “It’ll be very expensive. That’s probably why the name ‘Dubai’ has arisen in the minds of all the producers who are interested in the project.” Potential funders there are fascinated by the project, he said.
He has produced a series of sketches, exploring ideas and showing cars speeding in and out of buildings. He expects the installation will involve film and computer-generated material, as well as “full-size, usable cars”.
He said: “It would be an acre-wide large installation … It could be a spectator sport, where you sit and watch what’s going on, or maybe it’s interactive and you can as it were computer-drive a car yourself. It could be a set piece where everything is preordained on some computer programme.”
On whether the race track could become a permanent attraction, he said: “Might be.” Referring to the Eiffel Tower, which was originally built as a temporary structure in 1889, he added: “It’s still there.”
