Chris Bangle Answers TTAC's "Axis of White Power" Blog
BMW has responded to the furor surrounding Chris Bangle's inadvertently inappropriate "axis of white power" remark by yanking the original video (which is now on YouTube) and allowing the designer to answer charges of racial insensitivity on BMW-web-tv. Bangle warms-up by telling us how much he loves car design: "I believe design is about the human contribution to our culture" (as opposed to?). Next, Bangle has a message for those of us who share a distaste for his over-wrought designs: wake up! "When anyone… moves the whole design language forward and puts a cutting edge to what had maybe been a little bit of an industry asleep, then certainly there's going to be some controversy. Some people are not going to wake up maybe as gently as they would have liked to." Zzzzz. Huh? What? I LOVE IT! Anyway, the main event. Without repeating the remark (as if), the interviewer asks Bangle about the allegation that "your statement was very racial [sic]." "I was shocked," Bangle says, looking shocked. "Seriously shocked and extremely… disturbed by what was really a statement about some great cars at a car show… I made a statement about those cars [M-Power cars] with that color [white] and now I've seen that this has been taken into a complete political context. I would never support any type of political activism on that level and on that subversive bent." So, no idea of what the Hell he was talking about and no apology for his slip of the tongue or BMW's inability to foresee the offense his remark could cause, or has caused. Again, BMW clings to the belief that they never make mistakes (iDrive?), even when they do.
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cisperow, come on. Even a quick trip to Wikipedia will show you that (a) Boccioni died in 1916 and (b) politics of all kinds were associated with Futurism, and "collaboration" is a grotesque oversimplification. If you want to mock Bangle, mock him for being such a poseur that he needs to trot out these completely banal high-culture references to legitimize his car design (to the extent his inarticulate jabber is even comprehensible), not for being a crypto-fascist in any but the most Freudian-slippery way.
foobar boccioni died before the rise of facism but is nonetheless related to the futurists wich... but read for your self nah, i don't want to mock hard. it's just the co-incident that struck me... but more because of it's a german company.
I feel sorry for Bangle sometimes. Without bold moves, car styling won't change. The E46 is and remains an elegant shape but certainly looks dated beside the E90/91/92 machines even if not all like the modern look. I feel only the 7 series is a mis-step. With respect to his comments and apology, the usual storm in a tea cup