In Germany, the phenomenon of Geistfahrer (literally ‘ghost drivers’), those disenchanted citizens of our soulless consumer society who find a therapeutic outlet for their lack of mental equilibrium by driving at maximum velocity on the wrong side of the autobahn, thereby seeking to provoke devastating head-on collisions or simply scare the living daylights out of motorists travelling in the opposite direction, claimed another three victims in mysterious and somewhat atypical fashion late last year in Babelsburg when a bright-blue bubble-car, a droning insect scuttling along at its modest top speed of eighty-five kilometers per hour, both puny glow-worm headlights extinguished, strayed blithely into the flight path of a thundering Maserati Mistrale Spyder estimated to be travelling at three times the speed, thereby provoking a monstrous accident in which the quaint three-wheeler virtually disintegrated on impact, while the klaxonning Italian convertible left the road in a violent sideways skid that catapulted it into the scenery, instantly killing both the driver, identified from documents in the glove box (the remains of which concealed, just incidentally, €35,000 in hard currency and several grams of angel dust) as Bruno Kitzler, son of the Munich gallery owner Carlo Kitzler, nightclub denizen, and creative director of the avant-garde fashion brand UN|AVAILABLE, along with his glamorous passenger, actress Sylvie Lartigue, familiar to cinephiles as the deadpan erotic protagonist of such films as Nitroglycerine, Babyslitter, Sexy Safari, Comme Tu Me Veux and Arse Poetica, and more recently director herself of Near Misses, a wise, brave, funny, insightful and ultimately award-winning documentary about transsexuals in the final phase of gender reassignation that gave the lie to the cynics who said she was just another pretty face, an assertion they would hardly have dared to uphold in the aftermath of the accident, given that Mlle. Lartigue was unequivocally decapitated in the collision, an event whose consequences the artist has depicted with the same frigid and obsessive attention to detail perceptible in his rendering of the broken steering wheel against which Bruno Kitzler’s bloodstained forehead has come to rest (the trident motif of the Maserati marque can actually be deciphered—or perhaps intuited rather than deciphered), in the bloodstained chrome and leather of the gran turismo dashboard, in the ocelot-patterned fur coat that has slipped from Mlle. Lartigue’s headless shoulders to morbidly reveal the generous contours of what is or was quite possibly a surgically enhanced left breast, and last but not least, in the painter’s signature itself, the name ‘Victor Stamp’ being executed in a painstaking calligraphic style and artfully duplicated, signwriter-fashion, by its own drop shadow, a detail which lends it an illusory three-dimensionality and which provided Darby Brady, the Bystander art critic standing by me on the evening of the vernissage, with an occasion for much portentous and loud-voiced theorizing, conducted largely for the benefit of the tousle-haired, leather-clad ephebe accompanying him and subsiding only momentarily when he imperiously halted a white-jacketed waiter and scooped his umpteenth glass of mediocre chablis from a silver tray.
