PPT

The plot so far …

Marshall Bermann ‘All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity’ 1983 Modernisation:

The processes of scientific, technological, industrial, economic and political innovation that also become

urban, social and artistic in their impact

Marshall Bermann ‘All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity’ 1983

Modernity: The way that modernisation infiltrates everyday life and permeates sensibilities

Marshall Bermann ‘All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity’ 1983 Modernism:

The wave of artistic movements that, from the early twentieth century onwards, in some way responded to, or presented, these

changes

Lecture 2 Modernity and the Machine Age

Theo van Doesburg Since it is correct to say that culture [modernity] in its widest sense means independence of Nature, then we must not wonder that the machine stands in the forefront of our cultural willto-style… The new possibilities of the machine have created an aesthetic expressive of our time, that I once called the Machine Aesthetic. Simultaneous Counter Composition 1929/30

The Machine Aesthetic 1910s/1920s: Purism in France DeStijl in Holland Suprematism / Productivism in Russia Constructivism at the Bauhaus (Germany) Precisionism in North America Futurism in Italy

Non-Geometrical abstract art ……versus Geometrical abstract art

Expressionism

Wassily Kandinsky, Two Ovals, 1919

Constructivism Piet Mondrian, Two Composition, 1929

Fernand Léger The Machine Aesthetic I have more faith in it [the machine] than the longhaired gentleman

with a floppy cravat intoxicated with his own personality and his own imagination

Fernand Léger, Propellers, 1918

Art is dead Long live Tatlin’s new machine art

International Dada Fair, Berlin, 1920

Jacques Henri Lartigue Grand Prix France, 1912

Giacomo Balla Speed of an Automobile, 1913

Aleksandr Rodchenko Russia 1923-30

‘Kingi’ (books) Window Poster, 1925

‘Mess Mend’ book series 1924

Gino Severini, Machinery 1922 The method used for constructing a machine is similar to that for constructing a work of art

Charles Sheeler, Ballet Mechanic, 1931

Machine Art exhibition at Museum of Modern Art in New York 1934

‘The beauty of machine art is in part the abstract beauty of straight lines and circles made into actual tangible surfaces and solids by means of lathes, rulers and squares’

Lewis W Hine Mechanic and

Steam Pump 1921

The Bauhaus Dessau 1925

Hans Roericht, Stacking service, 1959

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy Light Space Modulator

1923-30

Mechanthropomorphism (hybrid of machine and human)

Oskar Schlemmer - Triadic Ballet 1926

Mechanthropomorphism

‘No age, I believe, has been more imbecile than ours’

Francis Picabia, Parade Amoureuse, 1917

Mechanthropomorph as

Mechanoid Monster?

Jacob Epstein, Rock Drill, 1913-14

A house has to fulfill two purposes. First it is a machine for living in, that is, a machine to provide us with efficient help for speed and accuracy in our work, a diligent and helpful machine which should satisfy all our physical needs: comfort. But it should also be a place conducive to meditation, and

Le Corbusier Cook House, Paris, 1926

lastly, a beautiful place, bringing much needed tranquility to the mind. 1923

Le Corbusier Villa Savoye 1928-31

Marseilles, 1947-52

Le Corbusier Unité d’Habitation,

Utopia / Dystopia Things to Come 1936 Things to Come William Cameron Menzies 1936

Fritz Lang Metropolis 1927

Fritz Lang Metropolis 1927

Utopia / Dystopia Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times, 1936

Mechanthropomorph to Cyborg

Stanley Kubrick 2001 A Space Odyssey, 1969

The Machine Aesthetic The machine is as old as the wheel, the wings of Icarus or the Trojan horse. But it is only in our

century that it has transcended its utilitarian functions and acquired a variety of meanings,

esthetic and philosophical, which are only distantly related to its practical use.

John Baur 1963