The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes

Documentaries - BBC Four - The New Shock of the New






Introduction
1. The Mechanical Paradise - about the blossoming of a sense of modernity in European Culture - roughly 1880 to 1914 - in which the myth of the Future was born in the atmosphere of millenarian optimism that surrounded the high machine age, as the nineteenth century clicked over into the twentieth century.
Visual essays on the relationship of painting, and to a lesser degree sculpture and architecture, to some of the great cultural issues of the last hundred years.
2. The Faces of Power - How has art created images of dissent, propaganda, and political coercion?
3. The Landscape of Pleasure - How has it defined the world of pleasure, of sensuous communion with worldly delights?
4. Trouble in Utopia - How has it tried to bring about Utopia?
5. The Threshold of Liberty - What has been its relation to the irrational and the unconscious?
6. The View from the Edge - How has it dealt with the great inherited themes of Romanticism, the sense of the world as a theatre of despair or religious exaltation?
7. Culture as Nature - And what changes were forced on art by the example and pressure of mass media, which displaced painting and sculpture from their old centrality as public speech?
8. The Future That Was - how art gradually lost that sense of newness and possibility, as the idea of the avant-garde petered out in the institutionalized culture of late modernism.

Obviously, these are only some of the themes of modern art.

The Mechanical Paradise
These are personal notes and written at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As I read these chapters about artists times and places away from me, I want to try to relate it all to my time and my place. One way to do that is to relate it to my family.


Between 1880 and 1930, one of the supreme cultural experiments in the history of the world was enacted in Europe and America.

the change

... the condition of Western capitalist society: its idea of itself, its sense of history, its beliefs, pieties, and modes of production - and its art.

The visual arts had a kind of social importance they can no longer claim today, and they seemed to be in a state of utter convulsion.

avant-garde - Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radially changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.

For the French, and for Europeans in general, the great metaphor of this sense of change - its master-image, the one structure that seemed to gather all the meanings of modernity together - was the Eiffel Tower. The Tower was finished in 1889, as the focal point of the Paris World's Fair. The date of the Fair was symbolic. It was the centenary of the French Revolution. The holding of World's Fairs, those festivals of high machine-age capitalism in which nation after nation showed off its industrial strength and the breadth of its colonial resources, was not, of course, new.

















The Crystal Palace











The planners of the Paris World's Fair wanted something even more spectacular than the Crystal Palace. ...decided to go up: to build a tower that would be the tallest man made object on earth,...
Tower of Babel
But the tower embodied other and socially deeper metaphors. The theme of the Fair was manufacture and transformation, the dynamics of capital rather than simple ownership. It was meant to illustrate the triumph of the present over the past, the victory of industrial over landed wealth that represented the essential economic difference between the Third Republic and the Ancien Regime.
Anyone could buy land, but only la France moderne could undertake the conquest of the air.
The Fair's commissioners turned to an engineer, not an architect, to design the Tower. This decision was in itself symbolic, and it went against the prestige of Baux-Arts architects as the official voice of the State; but Gustave Eiffel,..., managed to infuse his structure with what now seems to be a singular richness of meaning.
reference to the human figure
to Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona in Rome - a spike balance over a void defined by four arches and (like the Fair itself) was an image of ecumenical domination of the four quarters of the world.













the one structure that could and still can be seen from every point in the city
had a mass audience, not the thousands who went to the salons and galleries to look a works of art, were touched by the feeling of a new age...
It was herald of a millennium... And its height, its structural daring, its then-radical use of industrial materials for the commemorative purposes of the State, it summed up what the ruling classes of Europe conceived the promise of technology to be:... the promise of unlimited power over the world and its wealth.
very few visitors to the World's Fair in 1889 had much experience of the mass squalor and voiceless suffering that William Blake had railed against and Friedrich Engels described. In the past the machine had been represented and caricatured as an ogre, a behemoth, or - due to the ready analogy between furnaces, steam, smoke, and Hell - as Satan himself. But by 1889 its "otherness" had waned, and the World's Fair audience tended to think of the machine an unqualifiedly good, strong, stupid, and obedient.
...controlled by Reason in a world of infinite resources.
The machine meant the conquest of process,...
...for them, the "romance" of technology seemed far more diffused and optimistic, acting publicly on a wider range of objects, than it is today. Perhaps this had happened because more and more people were living in a machine-formed environment: the city. The vast industrial growth of European cities was new. In 1850, Europe had still been overwhelmingly rural. Most Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans, let alone Italians, Poles or Spaniards, lived in the country or in small villages. Forty years later the machine, with its imperative centralizing of process and product, had tipped the balance of population towards the towns.
The master-image of painting was no longer landscape (Monet and Renoir) but the metropolis.
But the essence of manufacture, of the city, is process, and this could only be expressed by metaphors of linkage, relativity, interconnectedness.
These metaphors were not ready to hand. Science and technology had outstripped them, and the rate of change was so fast that it left art stranded, at least for a time, in its pastoral conventions. Perhaps no painting of a railway station, not even Monet's Gare Saint-Lazare, could possibly have the aesthetic brilliance and clarity of the great Victorian railroad station themselves- Euston, St. Pancras, Penn Station, those true cathedrals of the nineteenth century. And certainly no painting of a conventional sort could deal with the public experience of the late nineteenth century, fast travel in a machine on wheels. For the machine meant the conquest of horizontal space. It also meant a sense of that space which few people had experienced before - the succession and superimposition of views, the unfolding of landscape in flickering surfaces as one was carried swiftly past it, and the exaggerated feeling of relative motion (the poplars nearby seeming to move faster than the church spire across the field) due to parallax. The view from the train was not the view from the horse. It compressed more motifs into the same time. Conversely, it left less time in which to dwell on any one thing.




















At first, only a few people could have this curiously altered experience of the visual world without taking a train;...

...the great road race of 1895, from Paris to Bordeaux and back
won by an engineer name Emile Levassor in the car he designed and built himself
...Levassor's victory was of great social consequence, and worth a memorial, since it persuaded Europeans - manufacturers and public alike - that the future of road transport lay with the internal combustion engine and not with its competitors, electricity or steam.
















The first American automobile 1893

Yet the cultural conditions of seeing were starting to change, and the Eiffel Tower stood for that too. The most spectacular thing about it in the 1890s was not the view of the Tower from the ground. It was seeing the ground from the Tower.


















nearly a million rode its lifts

As Paris turned its once invisible roofs and the now clear labyrinth of its alleys and streets towards the tourist's eye becoming a map of itself, a new type of landscape began to seep into popular awareness. It was based on frontality and pattern, rather than on perspective recession and depth.

This way of seeing was one of the pivots in human consciousness.
NASA photograph of the earth














The characteristic flat, patterned space of modern art - Gaughin, Maurice Denis, Seurat - was already under development before the Tower was built. It was based on other art-historical sources: on the flatness of "primitive" Italian frescoes, on Japanese woodblock prints, on the coiling and distinct patterns of cloisonne enamel. When Gauguin's friend Maurice Denis wrote his manifesto The Definition of Neo-Traditionalism in the summer of 1890, it began with one of the canonical phrases of modernism: that "a picture - before being a warhorse, a nude woman, or some sort of anecdote - is essentially a surface covered with colours arranged in a certain order." Denis was invoking this principle in order to bring painting back to a kind of heraldic flatness, the flatness of banners and crusaders' tombslabs and the Bayeux Tapestry, in which his ambition to cover the new churches of France with Christian frescoes might prosper. The Eiffel Tower had nothing to do with his interests; but the idea of space that it provoked, a flatness that contained ideas of dynamism, movement, and the quality of abstraction inherent in structures and maps, was also the space in which a lot of the most advanced European art done between 1907 and 1920 would unfold.












The speed at which culture reinvented itself through technology...
1877 phonograph
1879 incandescent lightbulb
1882 recoil-operated machine gun
1883 synthetic fiber
1884 Parsons steam turbine
1885 coated photographic paper
1888 Tesla electric motor, Kodak box camera, Dunlop pneumatic tyre
1889 cordite
1892 diesel engine
1893 Ford car
1894 cinematograph and the gramophone disc
1895 Roetgen discoverd x-ray, Marconi invented radio telegraphy, Lumiere brothers developed the movie camera, Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky first enunciated the principle of rocket drive, and Freud pulblished his fundamental studies on hysteria.

And so it went: the discovery of radium, the magnetic recording of sound, the first voice radio transmission, the Wright brothers' first powered flight (1903), and the annus mirabilis of theoretical physics, 1905, in which Albert Einstein formulated the Special Theory of Relativity, the photon theory of light, and ushered in the nuclear age with the climactic formula of his law of mass-energy equivalence, e=mc^2. One did not need to be a scientist to sense the magnitude of such changes. They amounted to the greatest alteration in man's view of the univers since Isaac Newton.

The feeling that this was so was widespread. For the essence of the early modernist experience, between 1880 and 1914, was not the specific inventions - nobody was much affected by Einstein until Hiroshima; a prototype in a lab or an equation on a blackboard could not, as such, bear on the man in the street. But what did emerge from the growth of scientific and technical discovery, as the age of steam passed into the age of electricity, was the sense of an accelerated rate of change in all areas of human discourse, including art. From now on the rules would quaver, the fixed canons of knowledge fail, under the pressure of new experience and the demand for new forms to contain it. Without this heroic sense of cultural possibility, Arthur Rimbaud's injuction to be absolument moderne would have made no sense. With it, however, one could feel present at the end of one kind of history and the start of another, whose emblem was the Machine, many-armed and infinitely various, dancing like Shiva the creator in the midst of the longest continuous peace that European civilization would ever know.

In 1909, a French aviator named Louis Bleriot flew the English Channel, from Calais to Dover.
















Such was the early apotheosis of the Machine. But the existence of a cult does not mean that images appropriate to it automatically follow. The changes in capitalist man's view of himself and the world between 1880 and 1914 were so far-reaching that they produced as many problems for artists as they did stimuli. For instance, how could you make paintings that might reflect the immense shifts in consciousness that this altering technological landscape implied? How could you produce a parallel dynamism to the machine age without falling into the elementary trap of just becoming a machine illustrator? And above all: how, by shoving sticky stuff like paint around of the surface of a canvas, could you produce a convincing record of process and transformation?

The first artists to sketch an answer to all this were the Cubists.

Brief Timeline of American Literature and Events
1880-1889

Brief Timeline of American Literature and Events
1890-1899


The Norton Anthology of World Literature