Wolfgang Vostell’s “Concrete Traffic” (1970) was made using the heft, weight and volumetric presence of concrete as a metaphor for questioning the ideals of permanence and efficiencies of violence that came to define the state-sponsored war-making of the 1960s and 1970s. Permanently installed in a parking garage adjacent to the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, Vostell’s encased Cadillac in its square, blocky concrete form harnesses the automobile and its singular symbology of the freedom of the American individual to question what uses that freedom is put to.
