- Body and Machine... Contemporary Art Practice in Context Lecture by Juliet McDonald

(...And with a sub-title of)

 "The hopes and fears of 20th-century technology".

In our current culture, there is an increasing fear of the vision of wars being conducted in future through automatons, - for example the unmanned drones currently being used in the 'war against terrorism' by the American Air Force services...

However this use of machines in wartime activity has been apparent (in different forms) since the middle of the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, even the famous social commentator, philosopher, artist and art-critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) felt that we were 'losing our lives' to technology. Later in the same century, William Morris (1834-1896) who was much influenced by Ruskin, founded the arts and crafts movement; It's principles essentially being a backlash to this industrialisation, and promoting the resurgence of hand crafted forms of production and socialism.  (It was during this period of massive social change in the United Kingdom that Karl Marx and Joseph Engles wrote "The Condition of the Working Class in England", (1845) Leipzig, The English edition (authorised by Engels) was published in 1887 in New York and in London in 1891; - Refeerence Source: Panther Edition, 1969, from text provided by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, Moscow;(Reference; http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/index.htm).

Our progress during the last 10 weeks of lectures, has witnessed the journey of art through the 19th and 20th centuries, charting the changes in approach, appreciation and patronage of art, through to the advent of photography and then cinematic films.  If we now look particularly to representation of "mechanistic movement", that was key to influencing the genre initially through the more traditional forms of art in painting, such as the works of Pablo Picasso (1881 to 1973) and George Braque (1882-1963) in their development of Cubism. We can also trace the emergence of such further influence of "mechanistic movement" a little later, through the works of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), which is exemplified in his work entitled "Nude descending a staircase number two" (, which can be directly linked to the experiments conducted with cinematic film and the works of Edweard Muybridge - during the late 1890s.

So we now stand at the cross-roads of the 19th & 20th Century.  In the early part of the 20th-century, the world was still changing at an extremely, even alarming, rate.  Revolution was almost the 'order of the day', and the common man was keen to have his voice heard.  This led to one of the first 'movements' of the various artistic groups, to create their own 'manifesto', that being Futurism in 1909. Previously, 'Manifestos' had almost been entirely been the outcome of political theories (for example, the Comunist Manifesto, by Marx & Engles, cited earlier).  The main protagonist of this art movement called "Futurism" was one Phillipo Tomaso Emilio Marinetti (1876-1944), a particularly hot headed Italian leader of this new radical movement, - who is noted as saying that "war is part of the human spirit"; (Ref; .  It was the fashionable talk like this, that fired up the passions of the common man on mainland Europe.  So, with feelings as charged as they were, it therefore seems as though war might have been inevitable in that socio-political environment.

Meanwhile, pursuing our look into the development of mechanistic movement in the art world, in 1913, another Italian, a designer, artist and sculptor, Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916), created a "Synthesis of Human Dynamism with unique forms of Continuity in Space" (1913)...

( See photograph on right; - Unfortunately, this piece was later destroyed, possibly by the 3rd Riech, during the 2nd World War, its' location remains unknown).

  Thinking of these early artists, who were prepared to experiment with the connection between traditional human objects and the new vibrant technology of the emerging 20th-century, contemporary society created an environment for another arts movement, equally interested in machines to be formed, but this time, instead of being in mainland Europe, it was formed in Britain.  In 1915 the "Vorticism" movement produced their first magazine entitled "Blast" in the United Kingdom.  This group was predominantly made up from English contemporary artists, and an example of the kind of work created through them is that of Sir Jacob Epstein KBE (1880 – 1959), who was an American-born British sculptor.(ref; http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/190536/Sir-Jacob-Epstein).

  In his piece entitled "Rock drill" (1913 to 1914).  Together with the work he quoted;  "“I made and mounted a machine-like robot, visored, menacing, and carrying within itself its progeny, protectively ensconced. Here is the armed, sinister figure of today and tomorrow. No humanity, only the terrible Frankenstein’s monster we have made ourselves into…".  (Ref; Tate Meuseum, http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/blogs/story-jacob-epsteins-rock-drill).

And so, with all this fiery passion existign at this time, perhaps greater that any other time untill 1914, then,  sure enough the inevitable did happen.... In 1914 through to 1918 with the advent of the first world war also known as the GreatWar, (Virtually started as an accident through the misfortune of the Prince Duke Ferdinand of Austria, and his cavalcade, who  took an alternative  / unexpected route, which just happened to be on a journey that would take him past a radical Serbian, who rcognised the Duke and shot him at close rainge.

World War One began.

World War I the most vicious and callous events of the beginning of the 20th-century from 1914 to 1918 almost 1,000,000 soldiers lost their lives.  The Ministry of defence and the War office realised the potential of visual image for the purposes of propaganda.  They therefore implied a number of war artists such as Paul Nash and Charles Johnson.  Some of Paul Nashes artwork can be seen in the Leeds Gallery and I am glad to have witnessed one of those paintings called "world War one-the aftermath" by Paul Nash 1980 and "we are making a new world".

(Despite serving in World War I, and after having witnessed a number of awful atrocities, Paul Nash returned to the Army to become a war artist for the Second World War, and completed such works like "Dead Sea").

At the entry of the early battles of World War I, we were still quite primitive in our use of technology or walk purposes and we were still using the for example, horses, carrier pigeons and camels in the desert; used extensively by warrants of Arabia and other soldiers.  Around the same time, wireless telegraphy was being perfected by Marconi.  The telephone invented by Alexander Graham Bell had existed for some time, but it wasn't until the escalation of the need to communicate quickly during wartime, on the battle fronts in particular, that after the war the telephone became ubiquitous.

Earlier in the first decade of the 20th century, Orville Wright and his brother invented the aircraft.  By the time of the commencement of World War I in 1914 the early aeroplanes had been significantly developed initially as a useful tool for surveillance, but then quickly modified as a carrier for bombs and small grenades.

The march of technology soon replaced the horse, with a new creature of war, that being the motorised tank.  Tanks were first used at the Battle of Cambrai.  The image of the tank was an extremely powerful device used in propaganda posters such as those by LeToures.  The military benefit of the tank was to get heavy firepower into particular positions very quickly.  Horses required men to drive them into position, and the weight of the large cannons together with the difficult terrain that the horses and drivers needed to negotiate, made them easy targets for opposing forces.  The tank allowed the use of large cannons or guns to be manoeuvred into position under a heavy cloak of armour.  Together with their development, the armaments of the tanks were all so changing, as the guns were getting bigger and bigger.

Once the world war was over, there continued to be pockets of pessimism in society about the future.  Fritz Lang in his 1927 film Metropolis, posited a future vision of dystopia where everyone in the city would be working for a very few select elite, and instead of machines being the slaves of humans, it would be the human population as a workforce becoming slaves to those machines and the ultimate ruling elite.  In the film Metropolis, the plot is rather simple.  The rulers' son falls in love with a woman from the working class (called Maria).  Meanwhile an eccentric professor invents a robotic wife, but wants to make look more human and chooses the image of Maria in order to discredit her, as the Prof is frightened that she is a radicalist of the working class.  So emerges a robot Maria.  The audience at the time may have found this most disturbing.

Fritz Lang was influenced by art deco, the emerging city of New York and the Gothic architecture which seemed to be becoming so vast and tall but to human scale had become minutiae.  This theme was exacerbated in the film Metropolis and together with the mechanical woman but was half human and half robot the early view of the dystopia and the negative influence of technology upon our world was broadcast to the masses.

In an attempt to subvert the march of technology and progress another artistic movement arose after World War I which was the "Dada" movement in 1918.  An artist called Richard Huelsenbeck wrote the Dada manifesto although its popularity quickly became present throughout Europe and the West.

Examples of Dada work would be Hannah Hoch's painting "cut with the Dada kitchen knife, in 1919 and the work of role house and in 1923 1924 and his ABCD self-portrait.  And in 1920 "mechanical head" the spirit of our time.

Whilst there was some limited postwar optimism after the First World War there was also a time of great depression.  The postwar optimism after the Second World War seemed to last much longer and the "Festival of Britain 1951" propagated the underlying feeling of rebuilding civilisation after the destruction of the two world wars.  Some of this sentiment can be seen in the symbol of the Festival of Britain, which was the Festival star logo designed by Abraham grey.  Within this logo there are symbols of war, that these are surrounded with images of the future.  A good source reference would be the exhibition at the Victoria and Albert or the VADS, like the Skylon built on London's South bank.  (See also Jacob Epstein).

Contemporary art during those first 50 years of the 20th-century and developed by now very significantly.  Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth were creating sculptures of people (such as those in Harlow new town near London), that say 100 years earlier, were unlikely to be have been comprehended by the general public.  That period of the early 1950s around the time of the Festival of Britain saw a much greater emergence of new graphic art.

So the notion of man and machine continued to develop in popular culture as the robot.  However by the time that we reach 1978 which was the year that "machine man" was first shown in a Marvel comic, the fear of technology post the 1960s and the American and Russian space race, and turned of the complexion completely around.  Machine man now fought to defend himself and garnered audience sympathy in a world that feared the machine.  (Jack Kirby was the artist who designed the front cover of the Marvel comic, but depicted machine man.  More can be seen at www.comicVine.com).

If we now jump forward to 2014, we are now seeing in terms of artistic interpretation, the second generation of machines.  An example of this would be the US air forces un-manned drone aircraft.  The first generation drone was called the predator.  The second generation drone is the Reaper which is now being used regularly or sorties over Afghanistan and Iraq.  (See the website www.droneWars.net).

Artists have already started to exploit the concept of these second-generation unmanned drones.  The art by James Brindle entitled "drone shadows" places images on the ground on pavements to create a radical interpretation of his message, which is that we have no sense of where "the battlefield" actually is, as the new theatre of war is very much remote from our daily lives, particularly in our Western culture.  We see images piped to us through television, but we are not in contact with the real danger, fear or threat.  James Brindle wants to get the message that people need to understand these new technologies otherwise they will remain disengaged.  Artists have a duty to communicate the issues of the day in order for civilisation to progress.

Another artist who is working within this sphere is Mahawish Christy who has created a number of "decorative" drones.

Anders I back or has created dystopian images panned together but in his case he has built his own drones in order to create a disembodied non-narrative survey that videos of the city.  This can joins the intrigue of the new technology, with the danger of the technology of the new world.  Together this creates something compelling, with opportunities and possibilities, but also with danger and uncomfortable realism, critical of the lack of engagement.