Any Colour You Want (2000)

This piece Any Colour You Want was created specifically for the exhibition Defining The Times at the Milton Keynes Gallery, May -June 2000, which comprised of one hundred works of art, one for each year of the 20th century*. The year represented by Any Colour You Want is 1908; the piece consists of eight black Model T Ford toy cars individually wrapped in cellophane. 1908 was the year that the Model T appeared. This was the first car to be made using the innovative assembly line production methods, and thus heralded the age of mass-production, the division of labour meaning that the cars could be made more quickly and cheaply, and, according to a Marxist analysis, further increasing the alienation between the worker and the product, as the workers no longer saw any thing they produced through from start to finish, thus being denied the satisfaction of the craftsperson.

1908 was also the year in which cellophane was patented, an invention which enabled the introduction of consumerist concepts such as 'factory fresh': the product could arrive at the consumer hermetically sealed and therefore sterile and pristine, apparently yet to be touched by human hands.

The title, of course, comes from Henry Ford's famous dictum that one could have the Model T any colour one wanted- as long as it was black. In retrospect, this seems to be a satirical comment on the notion of consumer choice, the arena of choice being largely determined top-down, lowest common denominator-led.

*It did in fact have one hundred and one pieces- covering the years from 1900 to 2000

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