Re-Reading the Machine Age: The ‘Audacious Modernity’ of the Techno-Bathetic Avant-Gardes

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-117
Author(s):  
Eric B. White
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Mina Loy ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Alfred Stieglitz ◽  
New York Dada ◽  
Technological Sublime ◽  
Lewis Mumford ◽  
First Time

Chapter 2 explores how the proto-Dada artists of New York City proposed new ways of reading Machine Age America. Rather than invoking the power and efficiency of its machines and infrastructure, it argues that these vanguardists emphasised their delicacy, intricacy and fragility. Sections one and two detail the divergent aesthetics of two key modernist formations: the technological sublime of Alfred Stieglitz and his ‘Young American’ literary acolytes (including Waldo Frank and Lewis Mumford); and the techno-bathetic proto-Dadaists of the magazine 291, exemplified by Francis Picabia. The third section analyses the techno-bathetic practices of Marcel Duchamp in his New York Dada phase, as well as crucial responses to that work by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams. The fourth section focuses on the work of the Baroness, who interrogated the implications of socio-technics for problems of sex, gender and nationality. Finally, section five focuses on Loy’s poetry, fashion designs, inventions, and technicities; for the first time, it unveils her invention ‘verrovoile’, a translucent thermoplastic she profiled in a previously unknown 1929 newspaper article. The chapter argues that, through her poetry and inventions, Loy helped introduce the concept of the artist-engineer to transatlantic discourse in the mid-1920s.

Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric B. White
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Information Age ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Mina Loy ◽  
Cultural Narrative ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Technological Sublime

Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic provides a new account of aesthetic and technological innovation, from the Machine Age to the Information Age. Drawing on a wealth of archival discoveries, it argues that modernist avant-gardes used technology not only as a means of analysing culture, but as a way of feeding back into it. As well as uncovering a new invention by Mina Loy, the untold story of Bob Brown’s ‘reading machine’ and the radical technicities of African American experimentalists including Gwendolyn Bennett, Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes, the book places avant-gardes at the centre of innovation across a variety of fields. From dazzle camouflage to microfilm, and from rail networks to broadcast systems, White explores how vanguardists harnessed socio-technics to provoke social change. Reading Machines argues that transatlantic avant-gardes deployed ‘techno-bathetic’ strategies to contest the dominance of the technological sublime. This major but hidden cultural narrative engaged with the messy particulars and unintended consequences of technology’s transduction in society. Techno-bathetic vanguardists including Futurists, Vorticists, Dadaists, post-Harlem Renaissance radicals and American Super-realists proposed new, non-servile ways of reading and doing technology. The books reveals how these formations contested the entrenched hierarchies of both the transatlantic Machine Age and technological sublime.

Ghosts in the Machine Age: Rose and Bob Brown’s Reading Machines and the Socio-Technics of Social Change

2020 ◽  
pp. 162-213
Author(s):  
Eric B. White
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Ivory Tower ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
The Great Depression

Chapter 4 begins at the point at which the Bob and Rose Brown’s ‘readies’ project supposedly failed: after the Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine anthology was published in 1931. Featuring experimental texts by Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams and many others, the readies project has hitherto been considered one of many modernist casualties of the Great Depression. This chapter finally reveals its full story, and details how Rose Brown led the development of a new working reading machine in the 1930s and beyond. Anthology contributors including James T. Farrell, Norman MacLeod and the Browns had begun to chart a course beyond the binary orbits of dour social realism and ‘ivory-tower’ aestheticism. The chapter combines new readings of these American super-realist writers with extensive archival research using a meta-formational approach, which relies on (rather than is undermined by) different disciplinary approaches to cultural production. Reconstructing the Browns’ journey from the rural labour institute Commonwealth College to the Polytechnic Museums of Russia – from the burgeoning microfilm industry in New York City to their plantation in Brazil – it reveals how the Browns’ proletarian class politics and Veblenist technicities articulate a sustained and dialogic engagement between modernist vanguards and mass culture.

Arensberg, Walter (1878–1954)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Archino
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Early American ◽  
Large Glass ◽  
New York Dada ◽  
Constantin Brancusi

Walter Arensberg (April 4, 1878 to January 29, 1954) and his wife, Louise Stevens Arensberg (1879–1953), were influential patrons of the avant-garde, building a collection that included modernist art, early American Shaker furniture, and non-Western objects, primarily of African and pre-Columbian origin. They collected modern art by American and European artists, with a special concentration in work by Marcel Duchamp (who also served as their art advisor) and Constantin Brancusi. Their New York apartment, at 33 West 67th Street, hosted a frequent salon of artists, writers, and intellectuals from 1915–1921. These gatherings were a focal point for the activities and antics of New York Dada. Among Arensberg’s many friendships with artists and writers, his long association with Marcel Duchamp was perhaps most influential. When Duchamp arrived in New York in 1915, Walter Pach met him at the pier and brought him directly to the Arensberg’s apartment, where Duchamp lived during the summer of 1915. Later, Arensberg paid the rent for Duchamp’s studio, located in the same building. The Arensberg Collection would amass nearly forty works by Duchamp, including The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1921). When Arensberg was unable to purchase the artist’s infamous Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912), he commissioned a duplicate and eventually acquired the original as well.

Wood, Beatrice (1893–1998)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thelma Rohrer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
York City ◽  
Smithsonian Institution ◽  
Native State ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
American Artist ◽  
New York Dada

An American potter known for luster-glaze chalices and whimsical ceramic figures, Beatrice Wood was once named the "Mama of Dada." Born on 3 March 1893 into a wealthy family in San Francisco, California, raised in New York City, and a student at the Académie Julian in Paris, Wood rebelled from her traditional upbringing by 1912. Seeking a more bohemian life, she joined avant-garde art circles, became friends with Marcel Duchamp and Henri-Pierre Roché, and was influential in the New York Dada movement. During the 1930s, her early successes in ceramics provided independent income and, by 1948, she settled in Ojai, California, to continue her interest in theosophy. She established a studio developing embedded luster glazes with radiant colors and continued this work for over thirty years. Wood was recognized as a "California Living Treasure" by her native state, named an "Esteemed American Artist" by the Smithsonian Institution, and partly inspired the character "Rose" in the 1997 film Titanic. She died on 12 March 1998 at the age of 105.

Picabia, Francis (1879–1953)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Chadwick
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Visual Vocabulary ◽  
New York Dada ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Machine Parts ◽  
Francis Picabia ◽  
Blind Faith ◽  
Armory Show

A cavalier individualist, Francis Picabia became an internationally renowned avant-garde artist, spearheading Paris and New York Dada with his friend Marcel Duchamp and also contributing to Dada in Zurich and Barcelona. Picabia was a car enthusiast who embraced modernity, viewing the machine as a form expressive of the modern spirit from which he drew a new and revolutionary artistic idiom. Picabia also drew upon the tenets of the Puteaux Group and, upon arriving in New York to exhibit at the Armory Show in 1913, was lauded as a leading Cubist. He worked for a time in Orphic Cubism, a blend of Cubist, Futurist, and Fauvist themes and techniques to which he added ‘‘abstracted’’ industrial and biomorphic forms. Although he maintained an interest in the figure, Picabia is known primarily for his early dialogue with abstraction and his development of a quasi-machine aesthetic. He looked to industrial diagrams for artistic inspiration and, upon returning to New York in 1915, during a period of involvement with photographer and modern arts patron Alfred Stieglitz’s famous 291 Gallery and journal, produced the famous Mechanomorph series. Depicting Stieglitz and his entourage as bizarre, seemingly dysfunctional, industrial forms, Picabia’s Mechanomorphs shaped the visual vocabulary of New York, and later Paris, Dada. Picabia’s ironic stance in relation to art and culture has prompted scholars to interpret his conflation of human and machine parts as also playful punning of morality, sexuality, and blind faith in technology.

Man Ray (1890-1976)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hazel Donkin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Critical Success ◽  
Fashion Photography ◽  
New York Dada ◽  
Man Ray ◽  
Artistic Career ◽  
Second World

Born Emmanuel Radnitzky, Man Ray was one of the key innovators in modernist photography, film, and object making. He began his artistic career as a painter, and while his interest in the medium endured, it was photography that brought him financial and critical success. In New York, Man Ray was introduced to the avant-garde while visiting Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery and the Armory Show (1913). He met Marcel Duchamp in 1915 and, along with Picabia, the three men founded New York Dada. In 1921 Man Ray moved to Paris where he continued to produce experimental and provocative works, and was associated with the Paris dada group. Man Ray developed a lucrative portrait and fashion photography business, photographing cultural giants such as James Joyce and Pablo Picasso, earning him commissions from magazines such as Vogue. From 1924 photographic images became central in surrealist publications, and Man Ray’s intensely innovative approach was highly regarded by the founder of the group, André Breton. Man Ray developed a poetic that demonstrated the union of reality and imagination; he used found images, documentary images, film stills, and straight and experimental photography, including solarisation (a process he developed with Lee Miller). The Second World War forced him to leave Paris for the US, but he returned in 1951, where he resided until his death.

Levy, Julien (1906–1981)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel Stein
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Salvador Dali ◽  
Frida Kahlo ◽  
Alfred Stieglitz ◽  
Man Ray ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Joseph Cornell

New York-based art collector and gallerist, Julien Levy, was an important advocate for photography as a modern art medium in the 1930s and 1940s, and was instrumental in introducing the surrealist movement to New York. Levy studied at Harvard University in the mid-1920s, where his teachers included future tastemakers A. Everett ("Chick") Austin and Alfred Barr Jr. In 1926, Levy befriended Marcel Duchamp, with whom he traveled to Europe, circulating among the artistic avant-garde. Relationships with Man Ray, Mina Loy, Berenice Abbott, and others encouraged Levy’s activities as a collector and shaped the experimental spirit of the Julien Levy Gallery, which opened in New York in 1931. In the decade prior to the founding of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, Levy mounted exhibitions addressing the history of the medium and arguing for the avant-garde photography of the moment, much as Alfred Stieglitz had done in the 1910s and 1920s. More broadly, the Levy Gallery was an important—in some cases first—American venue for Surrealist-influenced artists including Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Max Ernst, Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dalí, Arshile Gorky, Clarence John Laughlin, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Joseph Cornell.

Economic and Social Council

1962 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 835-844
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Socialist Country ◽  
Vice President ◽  
Social Council ◽  
First Time

The 33rd session of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), comprising the 1187th through 1208th meetings, was held in New York from April 3 through April 18, 1962. At the 1187th meeting Mr. Jerzy Michalowski (Poland) was elected President of the Council, Mr. Alfonso Patifio Rosselli (Colombia) was elected First Vice-President, and Mr. Muhammed el-Farra (Jordan) was elected Second Vice-President. Mr. Michalowski noted that this was the first time that the representative of a socialist country had been elected President of the Economic and Social Council, and he hoped this was an augury of sincere cooperation between states which alone would enable the Council to succeed in its task.

Telluride and After

2021 ◽  
Vol 75 (2) ◽  
pp. 102-108
Author(s):  
B. Ruby Rich
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
Center Stage ◽  
Kenneth Branagh ◽  
Todd Haynes ◽  
Telluride Film ◽  
Velvet Underground ◽  
The Many ◽  
First Time

FQ editor-in-chief B. Ruby Rich reports from the 48th edition of the Telluride Film Festival. Unlike most of its peer festivals, Telluride opted not to hold a virtual edition in 2020, a decision entirely in keeping with its emphasis on the tactile and experiential aspects of cinema, and which made its return in 2021 all the more giddy for first-time attendees and long-term devotees alike. Rich reviews the many festival highlights, from Jane Campion’s reinvention of the Western in The Power of the Dog to Todd Haynes’ archival documentary The Velvet Underground. Childhood takes center stage in new films from Céline Sciamma and Kenneth Branagh while misunderstood masculinity emerges as a theme in Michael Pearce’s Encounter, Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero, and Mike Mills’s C’mon C’mon. Including a coda on the New York Film Festival, Rich concludes that the masterful riches of the two festivals augur well for the fall 2021 season.

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