In 'Tender Buttons' (1914) Gertrude Stein has a section entitled 'Objects'. In this she writes on a number of objects such as Glazed Glitter, A Piece of Coffee, A Red Stamp, a Blue Coat, A Mounted Umbrella, Careless Water and Malachite. My favourite is Glazed Glitter:

'Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover.

The change in that is that red weakens an hour. The change has come. There is no search. But there is, there is that hope and that interpretation and sometime, surely any is unwelcome, sometime there is breath and there will be a sinecure and charming very charming is that clean and cleansing. Certainly glittering is handsome and convincing.

There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine. There can be breakages in Japanese. That is no programme. That is no color chosen. It was chosen yesterday, that showed spitting and perhaps washing and polishing. It certainly showed no obligation and perhaps if borrowing is not natural there is some use in giving.'

Stein is famous for her Automatic Writing, which draws on Cubism's abstraction and disruption of perspective, and uses repetitive patterns with vernacular speech. The writing is produced without reference to the conscious thoughts of the writer, so in effect the hand takes over from the brain. This suggests to me a trance-like state, as the writer achieves his work [ideally] without conscious self-censorship. The Self becomes automatic.

En route to the bus one passes the Jeremy Bentham pub. On this plaque it describes how Bentham named what would become a mummified version of some of his remains, as his Auto-Icon (see images). This use of "auto" is a tenuous link to the toy car under consideration through this project as an automobile. The toy car is a auto-icon, albeit a miniature version of a real car, the Ford Sunliner.

Bentham is famous for his writings around Utilitarianism, which is the principle of `the greatest happiness of the greatest number'. This contributed to his critique of society, which aimed to test the usefulness of existing institutions, practices and beliefs against an objective evaluative standard. Can this be linked to the project in relation to the curatorial decisions taken, and the decision to display an object that has no obvious worth in a place that is obviously not your standard museum? Again tenuous.

I'll end with a random fact about Bentham's head:
The real embalmed head was placed on the floor between Bentham’s legs, where it resided until 1975, when it was kidnapped by a group of students demanding £100 for charity. The university paid £10, and the head of the great moral philosopher was returned.