3 posts from February 2008

Aeronoise (1923) by Giacomo Balla

With the fast moving technology of today, we become impatient at anything that doesn’t move as fast as we can think. If a program takes longer than we expect to execute a command, we’re either shouting at the computer or are generally irritated. Technology is part of daily life and has increasingly been since the Industrial Revolution of the mid-1700s, but our acceptance of this fact has resulted in a loss of wonderment.
    In the early twentieth century several art movements which also incorporated political and social changes at the time, embraced the machine as something powerful and beneficial to the common man. Electricity was in its infancy and so was the cinema. Art, architecture, literature, science were all moving out of the constrictions of centuries of a class structure that saw the very few and very rich as being in control of new developments through their patronage.
    Futurism was an Italian movement that saw the aeroplane as a free and independent spirit of the age. Mechanical machines that could defy the natural pull of gravity and fly above towns and countryside at ever increasing speeds and with amazing dexterity. On the ground cars and trains were achieving similar feats. Ultimately the raw power of these new machines were reflected in the manipulated power of politics. Thus illustrating that no one person can be left in charge of such power without some curb being put into effect. This is more true today than perhaps even then, for we know—or should know—the consequences of absolute power.
    Giacomo Balla was a founding member of the Futurist movement and like a number of Expressionist artists of the time, his paintings are dramatic interpretations of the effects of power. In the one above he describes the whirring noise of an aeroplane as art on a canvas—turning a 2D image into an impression of sound. Futurism lead to associated movements in England, as Vorticism and Russia as Constructivism. These movements took the machine image further still with their display of angular lines imitating the elements of modern construction. In the painting below C.W.Nevinson illustrates through a series of juxtaposition, the industry of a major seaport with its ships, tugs, buildings and workings.

The Arrival (at Dunkirk) 1914 by C.W.Nevinson