Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
from their sociocultural implications - formally obscuring their relation-
ship to any past or present landscape, industrial or otherwise. As shown
in Figure 20 they are sometimes photographed from above, but, more
commonly from below, a 'worms-eye' perspective that can make the
viewer of the photograph feel slightly off-kilter and reverentially endows
the plants with a beauty not found in the chemical plant landscapes we
have just discussed.
17
With these changes in perspective also comes an alteration in the art
historical associations of the images, albeit one with a more positive va-
lence. Thus, instead of being aligned with the fakery of uroscopy or the
kitschyness of the overwrought sublime landscape, these images partici-
pate in the 'high-art' aesthetics of early twentieth-century modernism. In
particular, the myriad of ordered yet entangled tubes in these images re-
call the art of the Machine Age, which exalted the rise of industrial cul-
ture as a symbol of rationality and hope after World War I. A proto-
Machine Art had emerged in the years just prior to World War I when
the epic-cubists, futurists, and constructivists (Herbert 1997) embraced
the machine as a subject material for serious abstract art.
18
By the 1920s
a 'machine aesthetic' had developed that employed the geometric forms
of abstract art but was essentially representational. Early in this time pe-
riod the shift towards the representational is perhaps best exemplified by
Fernand Léger, whose paintings often situated cartoonishly rendered
people within backgrounds composed of mechanized and industrial ele-
ments (Figure 21a). By the 1930's many Weimar artists had assumed a
philosophy of Neue Sachlichkeit that was reflected in a style of detached
realism compared to the high emotionality of classic German expression-
ism (Guenther 1995, pp. 35-36). Most notable among these for our pur-
poses is Carl Grossberg who painted colorful, often whimsical images of
industrial sites including
Kessel in Einer Raffinerie
and
Der Gelbe Kessel
17
In the introduction to
High Techne
Rutsky writes that “The aesthetic impulse in mod-
ernism continually returns to romantic notions of the aesthetic - or of beauty, at least
- as an eternal or spiritual realm, unchanging and whole […] To this end, it often
connects the spiritual and the technological, attempting to impart a sense of whole-
ness and the eternal to technological forms” (Rutsky 1999, p. 9).
18
For example see Luigi Russolo's
Dynamism of an Automobile
(1913), Musée Na-
tional d'Art Moderne, Paris (www.futurism.org.uk/russolo/rus_im20.htm)
