Mona Lisa in metal

In 1951 Picasso saw the face of a baboon in an American toy car. He stuck two of them together, one upside down, and welded them to the bronze body of a baboon and its young he had created. The result is one of his most popular sculptures. At the Tate show in 1994 it always had crowds around it. in 1995 a motor car returned the compliment: the Vauxhall Tigra, designed by Hideo Kodama.
What has it got to do with Picasso's baboon, apart from the animal name? The Tigra is very animal like. It takes to the logical conclusion elements that have been around for a while: the tipped up bum, bulging wheel arches with pinched waist in between. But the Tigra has made even cars like the Lotus Elan and Toyota Celica look crude and unfinished. Our streets are littered with half-evolved Tigras, forlorn mutant creatures with one or other Tigra-like feature but no sense of the whole ensemble - Celicas, Accents, Preludes.
There is something childlike and bouncy about the car - it has a slight hint of the phone/cum car that bounces through the Direct Line motor insurance advertisements, but it is elegant and fierce-looking too. And of course, what is its behind but Picasso's baboon again, flaunting its genitals this time? A glance at a women's fashion magazine or the tabloid newspapers, let alone the newsagents top shelf, will tell you that we have become obsessed with bottoms recently. So the sexiest cars too have to tip up their arses. The profile of the car rises very steeply from the headlamps, with a straight line underlining the windows and continuing to that tipped up rear. The sculpted concave body panels between the wheel arches accentuate the haunches. Uniquely in recent cars, the door window curves back on itself, and it is this that defines the impression the car makes: a challenging raised eyebrows look, which for a while I couldn't quite place. Then I remembered the warning display of the Eyed hawkmoth. The Tigra and the hawkmoth are both creatures trying to look like more dangerous than they are, along the lines indicated in Chapter 6.(the Tigra's basic engineering is that of the tame little Corsa).
So that's the Tigra's secret: its physiognomy or animistic design. It looks like a new animal species arrived on the earth. Physiognomy is the science of expressiveness: it doesn't have to refer to faces as such although seeing 'faces' in objects is its essence. It began with Della Porta in the 16th century who showed that 'likeness' - what we recognise in a face - does not depend on the faithful replication of minute detail, for some faces a likeness can be got by comparing it to certain animals.

First published in The Independent, 9 October 1995

PS. Since this article was written, the number of cars featuring similar design has increased dramatically, and the proportion of lumpish slabs on our roads correspondingly diminshed. The best examples are the Ford Ka and the new Volkwagen Beetle. Strangely, the Renault Pingo - another car with a human face - has never been marketed outside France. All of these cars make faces at us.

Although there is a general everyday understanding that things make faces, attempts to refine our understanding of physiognomy have always been controversial. In the 18th century Johan Caspar Lavater produced physiognomic descriptions and was ridiculed for his pains by the physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who parodied Lavater's approach thus: you might see the following in a dog's tail: '...All is manliness, forward urge, a high sublime sweep and a thrust, calm, pensive, charged with dynamic power.' Or you might not. But Sir Ernst Gombrich, reviewing this work, in his essay 'On Physiognomic Perception', says: ''clearly there is some residue of sense in his [Lavater's] commentaries...For there is indeed such a thing as "physiognomic perception" which carries strong and immediate conviction'. We all experience this immediacy when we look into a human face. We see its cheerfulness or gloom, its kindliness or harshness, without being aware of reading "signs".' Gombrich goes on to say how we extend this basic reading of faces into all our visual interrogation of the world. In no field - to bring us back to the Tigra - is this more obvious than in design and advertising. If you can produce designs that make a definite primitive appeal to our tendency to read faces into objects you are onto a winner: in the words of that perceptive critic, the South London car dealer, they 'shift metal'. The most popular specimens of technology have always been those with the most charming faces, the Mona Lisas of metal: the Castle class locomotive, the Spitfire, the Hawker Hunter, the Mini.
Can animistic designs be produced to order? Is there a formula? Only the age-old formula of creativity: composers don't really know where tunes come from; they stay alert to the possibilities and train themselves to recognise one when they see it. A general rule involves the kind of curves used: D'Arcy Thompson's principles outlined in Chapter 6 (p??) certainly apply. It is obvious that the most appealing shapes of living creatures involve curves that are far more subtle than the obvious geometric shapes. In designed objects, curves can be mixed successfully with straight lines - as in the perfect straight along the window line of the Tigra, but these must play off against the curves. In the 80s wedges and brutal shark patterns predominated, but it is time for a new physiognomy. In a century that has made alienation its watchword, perhaps it is time to relearn how to make things smile at us.