In a recent lecture at the Barbican in London, American designer/artist James Wines declared that the Age of Industry, in which we were fascinated by machinery, is over and that we are now beginning an Age of Ecology, where we will rediscover our relationship with nature. It’s a widely held view that humanity lost touch with the natural environment during the 20th century, and that industrial development has damaged the planet almost to the point of no return.
Despite the politics of sustainability, the relationship of man and machine continues to fascinate designers, artists and architects as can be seen in a current flurry of activity on the international art and design scene. It might suggest that rather than de-humanising society, the exploration and fascination with machines, makes us more conscious of our humanity.
Current explorations of man and machine reveal nostalgia for the industrial economy, and point to disillusionment with financial services. Conrad Shawcross’s recent installation in the abandoned Kingsway tram subway (picture above) consisted of two rope machines that wove a thick hauser from 324 spools of coloured string. Exploiting the length of the sub way, the machines began back-to back in the centre of the space and gradually moved away from each other following the old tracks. The piece explored the passing of time, but also revealed a fascination with past industry and defunct systems.
In Liverpool the arts organization Metal, which was founded by Jude Kelly in 2002, shows a similar fascination for spaces and technologies of the past. Metal has turned the original engine room, boiler house and accumulator tower (constructed in 1836) on platforms one and two of Edge Hill Station, the UK’s first passenger station, into arts spaces. The exhibition, XXX: Get Off At Edge Hill, asked Liverpool artists to create work to reflect the way that new technology and the industrial revolution led to a new freedom of expression, and freed up ideas about the human body. According to Metal, ‘Barbarella’s Orgasmatron perhaps most clearly illustrates the comic aspects of experimentation with technology and the body’.
To be acceptable, technology must today be constrained and monitored for carbon emissions, yet in the early 20th century, artists celebrated industry as a victory over nature, which was regarded as a threat rather than vulnerable victim. In 1913 Russian constructivist El Lissitzky wrote and designed an opera, Victory Over the Sun, about the impact of electricity on society. For a later version he devised mechanical puppets to be made at a vast scale from industrial materials, although these were never constructed.
The Second World War brought a huge shift in attitude to technology, with the devastating impact of an industrial-scale war. In the post-war years the fascination with machines, while very much present during the 1960s and evident in the work of artist/designers like Eduardo Paolozzi, was always tinged with doubt.
Jean Tinguely’s 1954 work, Detached Element
Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely is the subject of a current show at Tate Liverpool, Joyous Machines. Tinguely began creating machines in the 1950s, as a way of bringing movement into art. His Meta-matics drawing machines overtly explored the notion that machines are superior to human beings, and can create better, more perfect outcomes, although the machines always required human intervention to make the drawing possible.
By 1960, Tinguely was making machines that were out of human control, the ultimate being an auto destructive work, Homage to New York. Having been granted permission to construct the work in the garden at the Museum of Modern Art, Tinguely assembled a huge pile of junk parts including bicycle and pram wheels, steel tubing, a meteorological balloon and a piano which were connected to form a sprawling interconnected, mechanical structure. Guests were invited to a ‘happening’, to witness the self-destruction of the machine, but things did no go according to plan and after a bucket of petrol caught fire the machine had to be destroyed by museum guards.
Joyous Machines explores Tinguely’s work through the eyesof contemporary artist Michael Landy, who himself has been fascinated by the outputs of machinery and by consumer society. In 1995, as a response to the Thatcher government and mass unemployment of the last recession, Landy created a machine work titled Scrap head Services as a comment on the decline of industry and the shift to a service economy.
The past decade has seen an explosion of interest among designers and artists in digital technology and in products that could only be designed along with computers: CNC (computer numerical controlled) cut patterns; models that are printed in 3D; mass-produced bespoke products, and digital customisation.
The area of digital crafts has rapidly expanded to explore the impact of new technology on traditional practices in textiles, jewellery-making and ceramics. The spread and cheapening of 3D-printing machines has also rekindled designers’ interest in a new machine aesthetic, and the relationship between handmade and industrial production. This year’s 90th anniversary of the Bauhaus (which Erik Spiekermann discusses here) is a good time to be launching a new, positive investigation of man and machine.
