123. CARTIER: A SPACE BETWEEN HOROLOGY AND HYPNAGOGIA.

CARTIER, Victoria and
Albert Museum - LONDON.

Crash wristwatch, Cartier London, 1967. Yellow and rosegold, saphire and leather straps; 4.25 × 2.5 cm. Cartier Collection. Image: M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN).

‘Is Crash a work of anti-jewellery? Questioning the very status and foundations of the society and clientele to whom Cartier sought to entice?’ M-A

Presented within the Victoria and Albert Museums’ exhibition of Cartier's most iconic pieces, Crash wristwatch appears more as a piece of evidence than an item of haute horology. The timepiece is radical for reasons not due to its scale or use of precious materials, its provenance or owner, but because of its startling use of conceptual thought. Possibly the most radical element of its realisation is what this tiny creation of jewellery proposes, not what it physically is. 

Crash explores the immediacy of surrealism with a trick of the eye, the design utilises the Cartier iconography of fine jewellery, subverted with a technique which assumes a position of surprise, even shock; the punk notion of destruction, presented as perfect. This oxymoronic notion, which contradicts expectations, immediately throws what is considered to be normal into question, and so Cartier's bold move, created within the tiny proportions of a wristwatch, has gone on to perplex and seduce for nearly 60 years since its first release. 

A sense of perversion is scintillating within the design of Crash, the timepiece must have unerved and excited the bourgeois who relied upon the storied maison to invest and adorn their lives, continuing to set an aspirational tone which suddenly involved a sense of contraction. The tension sensed within Luis Buñuel's erotic cinematic masterwork Belle de Jour, starring Catherine Deneuve, which was also presented in 1967, supported a cultural shift towards the deconstruction of social hierarchies. The film was considered outrageous because it explored taboo themes such as sexual deviancy. Depicting a wealthy woman indulging in sexual fantasies that were both sordid and surreal, challenging the hypocritical sexual double standards of the era.

Surely informed by the surrealist movements’ symbolic depictions of reality, directly linking back to the DADA concept of anti-art, the new surrealism of the nineteen sixties seems to expand this idea beyond the avant-garde of the gallery walls and into the cabinets of products and the lives of the general public. Is Crash a work of anti-jewellery? Questioning the very status and foundations of the society and clientele to whom Cartier sought to entice?

Is Crash also a collision, not between objects but a space outside of them - a rupture of time. The watchface appears to be stretched wide, breaking every rule for a timepiece previously created by the Maison - A timepiece whose face, a challenge to read, yet immediately understood as being for those who do not follow rules set by the past, rather seeing time as a fluid notion. 

A typeface of empire - The designs' roman numerals appear to sink with gravity, stretching downwards as to melt like the camembert, which supposedly inspired Salvador Dali's 1931 painting 'Persistence of Memory', where a series of clockfaces melt within a landscape, a form seemingly mirrored within Cartier's wrist watch design. 

Memories do persist within the storied Maison and Crash arrives at a jarring ripple on a surface historically maintained as calm control. The tenets of Cartier are recognisable and intact, the use of precious metals, the refined detailing of craft and precision all present and yet appear ruptured to unnerve with exhilarating effect - out of control, out of time, and yet perfectly aligned to its moment of creation. 

It is only in London, from Cartier's trio of bases, that could produce such a symbol of change, such a talisman of revolt. Created from the workroom of a city in flux - an identity forged from the very tension between following and breaking rules. Too audacious for New York and unthinkable for Paris, Crash remains true to a London style, forever belonging to a youthful resistance to time. 

CARTIER - Victoria and Albert Museum - LONDON. Until 16 November 2025.

With thanks to Tallulah Timoko.