Board of Trustees opf the Leland Stanford Junior University: Design for Nuclear Research An Exhibition of components from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Stanford Art Book 5.

1966, 20 Seiten mit 20 Bildern. Broschur, Heft.

Machine & Style Why exhibit machines in a museum? Simply to expose them to scrutiny and reflection, by bringing them from their normal habitat into the quiet and neutrality of what amounts to a visual laboratory, to be seen in complete detachment, like insect wings under a magnifying glass. The present exhibition of components of the Stanford Linear Accelerator at the Museum is not intended to explain the workings of the enormous device, nor does it claim for it the status of a work of art.But whether we like it or not, the machine is important to art. The age of humanism derived its notions of beauty from the shape and proportions of the human body; the age of technology in which we live has found a new resource in crankshafts and flywheels. Through Cubism, Futurism, Dada, and Bauhaus, machine forms have entered art as welcome alternatives to the forms of nature. But the influence of art on the modern sense of beauty has been small, compared to the impact of the ubiquitous machines themselves. The automobile alone, to name only the most important of them, has worked a more thorough revolution of popular aesthetics than all the movements of art combined. For every man who finds beauty in the museum, there must be ten who find it in the garage. The Victorians were the first to sense that the machine posed an aesthetic problem. With characteristic enterprise, they tried to civilize or moralize the naked engine by covering it with classical friezes or Gothic fretwork, just as they dressed chair legs in pantaloons. In our time, the relationship between the tine and the mechanical arts has become reversed: the order and discipline of engineering now seem to promise a remedy for the painful violence of art. Machines, mounted on museum pedestals, are offered to us as a connoisseur's treat. But machines are not sculpture.