On Art
MELLOW, JAMES R.
ON ART By James R. Mellow End of an Era Painting was never a satisfactory medium for dealing with the machine. Two-dimensional and static, it could only reproduce the significant forms of engines...
...In addition, the show features nine works from a recent competition sponsored by Experiments in Art and Technology (eat), a new organization formed to promote a working liaison between artists and professional engineers...
...A wide range of prints and cartoons define the public's attitude of wonder and exasperation toward such technological exploits as steam engines, photography and balloon flights...
...Theater was another art-form capable of dealing successfully with machine esthetics, particularly the vanguard Russian theater of the '20s that prefigured a good many of the multi-media experiments now so much in vogue...
...The ballet Parade for which Picasso designed the costumes had a decided machinist flavor, and an early slogan for aviation, "Our Future is in the Air," found its way into one or two of his Cubist compositions...
...But an exhibition devoted to the machine —or more precisely to esthetic attitudes toward the machine—would seem doomed from the outset...
...In 1913, Marcel Duchamp mounted a spinning bicycle wheel atop a kitchen stool, thereby introducing the principle of motion into modern sculpture...
...That event, held under the glittering span of Paxton's Crystal Palace, brought together the industrial products of nations from every corner of the world...
...Beyond that, Hulten seems to ignore the machinist implications in the work of contemporary minimal artists...
...Their justified exclusion from the Modern's show effectively marks the distance of their esthetic attitudes from all that is currently enthroned on West 53rd Street...
...It misses out on a few things...
...Sculpture, at least, could emphasize the three-dimensional bulk of machine forms and, by trading on the kinesthetic movement of the viewer around a piece, induce a feeling of mobility and sequential changes of form...
...After roughly a century and a half of the industrial revolution, we continue to operate with provisional solutions, a kind of sociological pay-as-you-go plan for each new technological advance...
...Fernand Leger's 1924 Ballet Mecanique interposed close-up shots of a woman's eyes and painted lips between kaleidoscopic views of gleaming machine parts to create a lyrical marriage between man and machine...
...Bound in tin-can steel, it, too, bears the imprint of the machine with a glossy Popcolored reproduction of the Modern's facade stamped on its metal cover...
...In this respect, the exhibition at the Modern may prove to be (for later generations) one of those convenient historic occasions that sum up...
...These are the conclusions one draws from the extensive exhibition of machinist paintings, mechanized sculptures and art-producing machines now installed at the Museum of Modern Art under the ominous title, "The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age...
...Thus the exhibition and Hulten's text give us the machine as myth and scapegoat...
...And, if the apocalyptic tide of Hulten's exhibition is correct—as one feels that it is—then we have come to the beginning of the end of the mechanical age with most of the social and political problems associated with machine technology remaining unresolved...
...During the '20s and '30s, Duchamp, Naum Gabo and Calder experimented with motor-driven sculptures, strengthening the alliance between art and the machine...
...Distributed by the New York Graphic Society, it is a good buy (216 pp...
...El Lissitzky, also a member of the Russian vanguard, envisioned something more drastic—a completely mechanized theater with robot actors presided over by a god-like engineer...
...Clearly the motion picture, a technological innovation in its own right, was far better equipped to deal with the machine pictorially than the stationary canvas...
...Who can forget the scene in which Charlie, strapped into the automatic feeding device (a mother-machine endearingly called "Beloved") is given the full slapstick repertoire from hot soup to steel nuts, with a cream pie thrown in for good measure, as the machine goes suddenly berserk...
...Obviously, it lacks the scope of the great Victorian exhibition...
...The Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo's pre-World War I noise-making machine would have made a significant addition to the mechanical lore otherwise documented...
...Two-dimensional and static, it could only reproduce the significant forms of engines and industrial equipment, then by splicing and repeating these images, as the Futurists did, suggest the exhilira-tion of speed and motion...
...These works —including a mysterious bubble of color that rises up out of its black box to lure the viewer to it and then descends, blushing red, into its shell, and a glass chamber full of dust erupting into patterns to the sound of recorded heartbeats—belong more to the current electronics revolution and the advancing space age than to the mechanical era that the Museum suggests is fading away with a dying whimper...
...The historical prologue for both the catalogue and the exhibition presents a number of early mechanisms and gadgets—models for Leonardo da Vinci's flying machines, for instance, and the lifelike automata (mechanical dolls that performed human tasks) which the 18th century regarded as marvelous toys...
...In its restricted way, it calls to mind the Great Exhibition of 1851, which took place in London during the early years of Victoria's reign...
...The principal emphasis of the exhibition is on the 20th century, but it is important to remember that a number of major 19th- and 20th-century artistic movements are not included in its roster of machine-oriented styles—for instance, Art Nouveau, Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism...
...6.95)—rather like a glorified Sears, Roebuck catalogue of the principal artists, major works, and important movements that have loved or belabored the machine...
...And it is not quite true, as Hulten claims, that Picasso has never shown in his work, the "slightest interest in machines and the mechanical world...
...Liubov Popova's set for The Magnificent Cockold (1922 ), and Aleksandr Vesnin's for The Man Who Was Thursday ( 1923), incorporated windmills, revolving discs, elevators, moving stairs and flashing electric lights as basic elements in the decor...
...A good many more of the eat competition projects (150 of them) are concurrently being put through their paces in the Brooklyn Museum's show, "Some More Beginnings...
...More important, the exhibition does document necessarily and well a history of attitudes toward the machine at the juncture industrial design jargon terms the man/machine interface—the crucial point at which man finally confronts the machines he has invented...
...This last style informs the work of the Italian Futurists and the paintings of artists like Leger and Robert Delaunay...
...While they have no interest in reproducing the forms of the machine, they send their work to the factory for production, just as one would a piece of industrial design...
...The grand opus of the genre, Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, took a more pessimistic view: It gave us the poor soul trapped in a world of monstrous gears and inexorable conveyor belts—a martyr in the drama of modern efficiency...
...The Museum probably strikes the right ironic note by producing as its chief symbol of the mechanical age, a splendid ivory-colored Bugat-ti Royale of 1930 vintage—an object unobtainable in its elegance, one of those dreams money no longer can buy...
...The only objects that stand in for the machines themselves are a few early cameras and several automobiles...
...These were the dominant and most influential movements in the history of modern art, however, and particularly in the history of modern painting...
...Exhibitions of specific styles and periods of art often enable the viewer to arrive at some evaluation of the subject...
...The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age" is a sadder and a wiser affair, commemorating the end of that century of progress the Victorians envisoned so hopefully...
...It signaled the high watermark of Victorian optimism, faith in the future and the age's belief in the inestimable benefits of the machine...
...Along with the members of other excluded movements, they took a position on the technological issue largely by ignoring it and going on about their own business...
...The number of such projects indicates the current interest in healing the breach between art and science...
...The exhibition is a gigantic warehouse display of 220 items (paintings, sculptures, constructions, film-clips) that range from Francis Picabia's Dadaist stage model for the ballet Reldche to Jean Tinguely's Meta-matic junk sculptures that scribble out Abstract Expressionist doodles...
...The catalogue for the Modern's show, written by K. G. Pontus Hulten, the director of both the exhibition and Stockholm's Moderna Museet, is an authoritative and necessary document...
...Ambivalence is the only conclusion...
...Nor would the development of Russian Constructivism or of Dadaist art-objects, which the exhibition ably documents, be explainable except for Cubism's prior innovation of the collage technique...
...Art Nouveau was a different case: It tried to ameliorate the industrial environment and the flood of machine-made products with a decorative overlay of extravagant organic forms...
...as much by their failures as their successes, the opinions and attitudes of an age...
...In general, though, the Cubists were little concerned with cozening up to the machine...
...The attempts of early motion pictures to deal with the theme were equally significant...
...For all the faults of the Modern's exhibition—its emphasis on gimmicks and gadgetry, its jumble of the valuable and the meretricious, its inconclusiveness, its inability to deal in any profound way with the sociological problems that the theme suggests—it is, I think, an historic show...
Vol. 51 • December 1968 • No. 25
