Today, we visit an art show. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
The Museum of Art in
Katonah, New York, mounted an important exhibit in
1990. They called it The Technological Muse. The
subtitle warns us what's coming: Affirmation and
Ambivalence in American Machine Imagery, 1840-1990.
Art and technology forge an uneasy alliance. The
Greeks used the same word, techni, to
describe both. Techni means art and
skill in making things. We've let the two pursuits
separate themselves in our minds. Yet they cannot
be separated.
Driving to work the other day, I heard Buxtehude's
music played on a fine Danish-built organ. It was
superb, but I came away perplexed. Where did genius
lie -- in Buxtehude, in the player, or in the man
who created the organ? For that matter, which of
the three would you call a technologist? Which
would you call an artist? The fact is, they cannot
be separated.
So we walk through the exhibit. How do artists cope
with the man-made material world when they're part
of it? Here are two paintings of the same scene by
an English landscape painter. The first, done in
1837, shows a lake, trees, mountains, and a woman
playing with her child. Six years later we see
smoke from a train in the background. The woman is
gone -- replaced with a man clearing the land.
Thus, the museum tells us, modern technology
entered the artist's mind on little cat feet. The
first fruit of the industrial revolution tiptoes
into paintings, transforming them subtly and
profoundly. Photography follows with its eerie
ability to heighten reality.
In the 20th century art has become a Greek chorus
behind the engines of industrial change. Artists
look at gears for their intrinsic beauty. They
celebrate automobiles and dynamos. They lament the
destruction of the land.
They poke fun at bad technology. Here's something
called an Arms Chair. It's an easy chair trimmed
with 50 pistols. There is a seven-foot man, made of
TV sets. Through it all rises the artist's agony
over so much technology that is no longer
techni.
In the end, these artists struggle with their own
alter ego. Here's a wonderful picture of a
machinist inside a Westinghouse turbine. He's
adjusting the stator blades with a hammer. His face
has the same quiet rapt intensity that the artist
knows so well.
So we're back to the exhibit title, The
Technological Muse. I don't really believe the
machine is a muse at all. For the artist,
technology is really what he sees when he glimpses
a mirror -- suddenly -- out of the corner of his
eye.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
