Executive Editor
STEM and the humanities often seem to be at odds, which doesn’t bode well for either. Writing in The Conversation, Richard Lachman, an associate professor at Ryerson University, cites the physicist and novelist C.P. Snow, who in 1959 described a schism between scientists and artists. Lachman points to “…scientists proudly unable to quote a phrase of Shakespeare, and literary types untroubled by the second law of thermodynamics.” The divide seems more deeply entrenched than ever, Lachman writes, driven by populism and economic disparity in an increasingly technological world.
Rather than emphasizing a dichotomy between engineering and art, looking at synergies may be beneficial. An exploration of the interaction of art and technology was one goal of an exhibit at the de Young Museum in San Francisco titled ‘Cult of the Machine,’ which ran from March 24 through Aug. 12.
Machinery served as both inspiration for and subject matter for the art on display. “With the advent of the “Machine Age,” the de Young curators write, “…artists produced compositions with a ‘machined’ quality—incorporating smooth surfaces and geometric forms—which conveyed the beauty, coldness, and impersonality of this mechanized world.” These artists’ style took on the term “Precisionism.”
The works—paintings, photographs, artifacts, and films—span 1910 to 1950, but the curators have interspersed 21st century commentary to demonstrate ongoing interrelationships between technology and art. For example, in 1936, industrial designer Walter Dorwin Teague said, “We are coming to appreciate beauty as a revelation of problems rightly solved, a sign of success, a proof of value, a visible rightness.” In 2003, Steve Jobs offered his thoughts on design: “It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” Examples on display included Automobile Pistons (1924-1934) from the Aluminum Company of America and Gordon Buehrig’s 1937 Cord 812, one of the first American front-wheel-drive cars with independent front suspension.
Some of the paintings and photographs in the exhibit don’t depict machinery—just the “smooth surfaces and geometric forms”—Georgia O’Keeffe’s City Night (1926), an oil painting that depicts skyscrapers visible from her window, for example. But many do: Gerald Murphy’s Watch (1925), Elsie Driggs’s Aeroplane (1928), and Charles Sheeler’s Rolling Power (1939), for example.
Also depicted are the factories: Sheeler’s Classic Landscape (1931), based on photographs of a Ford plant, for example. Still other works illustrate the infrastructure of an increasingly technological country: Sheeler’s Conversation—Sky and Earth (1940), for example, which depicts power-transmission equipment against a background of sky, a mountain, and the Hoover Dam.
The Precisionists were not totally preoccupied with machines. The exhibit includes rural scenes such as George Copland Ault’s January Full Moon (1941). In also includes a 1937 painting by Sheeler of an antique-filled kitchen in Colonial Williamsburg. But Sheeler expressed some ambivalence. “I don’t like these things because they are old, but in spite of it,” he said in 1938. “I’d like them still better if they were made yesterday, because then they could afford proof that the same kind of creative power is continuing.”
The exhibit curators note that many of the ambivalent attitudes toward industrialization in the early 20th century reverberate today with the arrival of Industry 4.0 and the economic disparity Lachman mentioned.
Closing the exhibit were two word clouds that indicate shifting views of technology. One was drawn from American periodicals from the 1920s and 1930s, including The Atlantic Monthly, The Forum, and The Literary Digest. Predominant in the early 20th century version was the word “unemployment.” In a regularly updated contemporary version, the words “creative,” “innovative,” “revolutionary,” “progress,” and “exciting” stood out (at least on the day I visited)—as did the word “inevitable.”
