The Machine as Art (in the 20th Century): An Introduction Juliette Bessette To cite this version: Juliette Bessette. The Machine as Art (in the 20th Century): An Introduction. Arts, United Theo- logical Seminary, 2018, The Machine as Art (in the 20th Century), 7 (1), pp.4. 10.3390/arts7010004. halshs-01990522 HAL Id: halshs-01990522 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01990522 Submitted on 23 Jan 2019 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. arts Essay The Machine as Art (in the 20th Century): An Introduction † Juliette Bessette ID Centre André Chastel, Université Paris-Sorbonne, Galerie Colbert, 2 rue Vivienne, 75002 Paris, France; [email protected] † Inasmuch as Paris was the epicenter of much of the history reviewed herein—as noted in the text, for example, the two leading machine sculptors of the 20th century, Jean Tinguely and Nicolas Schöffer, had moved there from, respectively, Switzerland and Hungary to launch their careers—Arts is pleased, via the link following, to make available as Supplementary Material the original French version of this essay: www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/7/1/4/s1. Received: 2 November 2017; Accepted: 6 December 2017; Published: 23 January 2018 Abstract: The machine, over the course of the 20th century, progressively integrated itself into all fields of human activity, including artistic creation; and indeed, with the first decades of that century having established a surprisingly vital and wide-ranging series of perspectives on the relationship between art and the machine, certain artists in the wake of the Second World War no longer felt compelled to treat the machine as a mere theme or source of inspiration: the machine itself becomes art—unless it is art which seeks to become mechanical? The artist mutates into “artist-engineer”; and this transition, resonating within a specific historical context, leads not only to a questioning of the nature of the work itself, but also to a broader questioning which places us within the realm of anthropology: what is this art telling us about the actual conditions of contemporary human society, and what is it telling us about the future to which we aspire? It is the goal of this special issue of Arts to stimulate an historically conscious, protean, and global (re)thinking of the cultural relationship between man and machine; and to this end, we welcome contributions falling anywhere within the nearly infinite spectrum represented by the prismatic period during the middle of the last century in which the machine became a legitimate artistic medium. Keywords: art; machine; science; technology; machine aesthetics; systems aesthetics; 20th century art history As humankind finds itself afloat in a sea of technology, it is with newly attentive eyes that we look back to the pioneer machine artists of the middle of the last century—and we do so both to understand their vision, and to wonder what has become of it. What does the machine mean after the Second World War? The drama of the conflict, in which the machine was a central element, put an end to the techno-scientific utopianism that had been dominant in the Western world for several decades. Yet to this trauma is opposed a contrary force—that of the astonishing hope of reconciliation between man and machine; and it is amidst this tension that the proposition of “the machine as art” comes to occupy us here. If the current sense of the machine, that is, its association with modern technique, and indeed technology (as in speaking of the cybernetic machine), appears rather late, the word is originally derived from the Latin machina, which means an invention but which is also used in the sense of “work made with art”1. In the post-war period, this link with artistic creation is more ardent 1 The technical meaning of the word “machine” is attested from the 16th century. It is then associated with the mechanism, and subsequently with automation. (Rey 1992). Arts 2018, 7, 4; doi:10.3390/arts7010004 www.mdpi.com/journal/arts Arts 2018, 7, 4 2 of 8 than ever, when, despite the troubled relationship between man and machine, there has also emerged in the midst of its scientific and technological discoveries a huge expansion of the creative sphere. This path was opened at the beginning of the century, and then unceasingly appropriated by later artists. John McHale, himself an artist, theorist and researcher, highlighted in the 1960s the artistic frontier so revealed: ... reacting more swiftly and intuitively to changes in his immediate environ, and being less hampered by academic specialization and professional commitment, [the artist] has been more attuned to new forms and technological potentials of our period. If Dadaism, Surrealism, Constructivism, and their later variants have sensitized the contemporary vision to the metamorphosis of cultural values, often through a savage and corrosive irony, they have also provided a usable mythology of the machine and an insight into its creative potentialities. (McHale 1969, p. 38) The reflections developed during the interwar period by the Bauhaus, and as part of a larger formal inquiry corresponding to an epoch defined by the machine, find clear expression in the agenda that Walter Gropius described, in the mid-1920s, in these words: “Believing the machine to be our modern medium of design, we sought to come to terms with it” (Gropius [1925] 1965). The pivotal period of the 1950s tinged these reflections with a new color. It is clear that, in retrospect, this was a period of transition between a vision of the machine as an element external to man (the machine, or the representation of the machine, may well then exert an influence on the creative process—but from the outside—and thus giving rise to a discrete machine aesthetic), and our contemporary period, in which humankind, surrounded on all sides by technology, has established with it an unprecedented conceptual relationship. This transition is clearly illustrated in the London of post-war reconstruction where, for example, the 1954 exhibition Artist versus Machines, organized by the group of English Constructivists,2 “was important because it explored, in a vey positive way, the possible uses of machine-made materials and industrial techniques by abstract artists” (Grieve 2005). The British critic and historian of architecture Reyner Banham nevertheless delivers an acerbic comment3, blaming them for remaining restricted to a formal approach with the machine, which is not approriate anymore to the contemporary period Banham designates, at this time, as a “Second Machine Age”4—a second industrial era in which the machine is, this time, fully integrated into the domestic sphere, and thus becoming omnipresent. The relationship between society and the machine takes on a new form: inviting us to plunge into the atmosphere of the time, and as always in his colorful and picturesque style, Banham remembers that “what appeared to be a second machine age as glorious as the first beckoned us into the ‘Fabulous Sixties’—miniaturization, transistorization, jet and rocket travel, wonder drugs and new domestic chemistries, television and the computer seemed to offer more of the same, only better” (Banham 1980). A number of artists, through initiatives sometimes individual, sometimes collective, give birth to a broad trend, protean in nature, and with Paris as the epicenter: the two big names of machine art, Swiss-born Jean Tinguely and Hungarian-born Nicolas Schöffer, had moved there to launch their careers, and it is in Paris as well that the early and important exhibitions of their work are held. But initiatives are also being launched from other artistic centers and will develop rapidly in the 1950s 2 Artist versus Machine. Building Center, Store Street, London, 19 May–9 June 1954. Exhibition organized by Victor Pasmore, Kenneth Martin, Robert Adams and John Weeks. John McHale also presents works. Re this exhibition, see Alastair Grieve’s comprehensive article, (Griev 1990). One might also mention the important Paris exhibition, one year later, dedicated to kinetic art: Le Mouvement, Galerie Denise René, Paris, April 1955. 3 (Banham 1954), cited in Alastair Grieve, Constructed abstract art in England, op. cit., pp. 29–30. He writes: “ ... the welcome insistence on the virtue of new materials is sterilized and compromised by an all-too-frequent reliance on Simple-Simon geometrics which the Abstract Art of the twenties inherited from nineteenth century academic theory . ”. 4 (Banham [1960[ 1967). He writes: “ ... we have already entered the Second Machine Age, the age of domestic electronics and synthetic chemistry, and can look back on the First, the age of power from the mains and the reduction of machines to human scale, as a period of the past.” (introduction to the edition of 1967, New York, Praeger, p. 10). Arts 2018, 7, 4 3 of 8 art, Swiss-born Jean Tinguely and Hungarian-born Nicolas Schöffer, had moved there to launch theirArts 2018 careers,, 7, 4 and it is in Paris as well that the early and important exhibitions of their work are held.3 of 8 But initiatives are also being launched from other artistic centers and will develop rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s. It is precisely the various trajectories of this “machinic” renaissance of the middle of theand century 1960s. Itthat is preciselythis special the issue various of Arts trajectories proposes of to this explore.