The Avant-Garde and Technology: Toward Technological Fundamentalism in Turn-of-the-Century Europe

Abstract

The ArgumentThe avant-garde's fascination with technology around 1900 grew out of several motivations: to shock the antitechnological bourgeois public; to experience a sense of mastery toward the material world, especially with cars, airplanes, and other machines; and to overcome the nineteenth-century separation of art and technology. The article highlights the radical shifts in the perception of technology that correspond with the emerging hands-on encounter with technological objects in homes, cities and at the workplace at the turn of the century. This technological fundamentalism differed sharply from the anxious and symbolically mediated approach to the “materialism” of the machine in the nineteenth century. It was accompanied by a concept of liberation through technological purity which is reflected by the fact that Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Corbusier did not just design functional objects but also made special efforts to accentuate their functionalism as part of the aesthetic experience of modernity. As French and Italian artists, especially the Futurists, incorporated speed, virility, and the experience of the elementary in the metaphoric construction of technology, they even expressed a kinship with those painters and sculptors who shifted their focus to the rediscovery of the “primitive” magic in the art works from Africa and Polynesia

Forgetting postmodernism? Recuperating a social history of local knowledge

“…Despite different national languages, they shared a joint vocabulary, spoke in common metaphors. Consider the modernist idea of the machine-age aesthetic (Trommler, 1995). The paradigmatic case is Le Corbusier's famous aphorism that 'a house is a machine for living in', but Charles Jencks has retrieved widespread disciplinary identification with the same metaphor in the 1920s, across a broad set of European artists.…”