‘‘Cult of the Machine’’ (de Young Museum, San Francisco)
artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/cultofthemachine/ SAKiFGx3mTcKKQ
SAN FRANCISCO’S de Young Museum is — with the aid of Google — presenting an interesting exhibition on the rise of industry, and particularly the machine, as a subject of art.
Concentrating largely on the rise of precisionist art in the early to mid 20th century, the exhibition does not limit itself to these works, but includes historical backgrounding, photography, sculpture and cinematography.
Charles Sheeler’s strong, but ultimately cold images of factories make up a significant part of the exhibition. There is a stateliness to the work that grants the images an almost religious feel, but simultaneously implies the inhuman nature of the plants. One work on display, by Charles Demuth, is even titled Incense of a New Church, its tendrils of smoke coiling around 20thcentury dark satanic mills. This dichotomy is one which pervades much of the art related to machinery: the concept of something which is worthy of pride and respect, but is simultaneously ‘‘other’’ and potentially threatening.
Questions of technology as masterpiece or nightmare return in a poignant juxtaposition of images from the 2015 science fiction film Ex Machina and Charlie Chaplin’s classic 1936 comedy Modern Times. These leave us to ponder whether machines support us or we support them, and exactly where the ethical line is drawn between human and machine.