“The Prisoners of the Passage”

“Unwrapping” the Notion of Identity Through Arts as A Form of Social Reform

In the communist manifesto, Marx and Eagles describe and challenge the emergence of a new industrial society and the unequal relationships between it’s different social classes.[i] According to them, that unequal relationship was the trigger that would spark hostility and rivalry between the two integral pillars of the known society. The ‘’means of production’’, the wealthy, and the proletarians, the working class.

That shift in power however, is not interpreted to everyone in the same way. In Morris’s mind for instance, it is not possible to disassociate art from morality, politics and religion.[ii] For him, art was the expression by man of his pleasure in labor.[iii] Real art must be ‘made by the people and for the people, as a happiness for the maker and the user.’[iv] That deviation in the way the society was ordered and constructed challenged the perception of some and hence split it in different groups.

The “machine” acted as a catalyst throughout this transition. For Wright, the machine could be an invaluable tool in the hand of the artist and free him from the laborious and expensive handiwork that was not relevant to the twentieth century.[v] Moris on the other hand, was the first artist to realize how precarious and decayed the social foundations of art had become during the centuries since the Renaissance and especially during the years of the industrial revolution.[vi] Reaching a point were nothing obtainable could possible satisfy him. For Moris, the machine was the arch-enemy: ‘As a conditions of life, production by machinery is altogether an evil.[vii]

According to Mc Engels, everything that arouses horror and indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch.[viii] Thus, the working class and not the artists were the ones that were in the grimy misery that lurks to the right and the left.[ix] Outgrowing more like “accidents”.[x] Maybe then, the machine generated for art the capacity to transform an existing past condition to something grater by reimagining it in a more up to date context,  were on the other hand, for the working classes failed to acknowledge, in their favor, the bigger picture.

Wright was always among the ones suggesting that the machine is a glorious future, the metamorphosis of ancient art and craft.[xi] Crane famously wrote, ‘We do not reject the machine’, we welcome it. But we desire to see it mastered.[xii] Even Morris in his late speeches stated that we ought to become ‘the masters of our machines’ and use them ‘as instruments for forcing on us better conditions of life.’[xiii] Notwithstanding the contradictory approaches, a majority of people involved in crafts and art, realized the capacity of machinery, not only in their field of interested but its overall contribution to the community. However, lined with Pevsner’s approach, there is still immense difference between this hesitating acknowledgement of machinery and the wholehearted welcome which it received in the writings of the next generation.[xiv] As Marx states, modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Yet, the machine these reformers protested, because the sort of luxury which is born of greed had usurped it and made of it a terrible engine of enslavement, deluging the civilized world with murderous ubiquity, which plainly enough was the damnation of their art and craft.[xv]

Every age has done its work, produced its art with the best tools or contrivances it knew, the tools most successful in saving the most precious thing in the world – human effort. Greece used the chattel slave as the essential tool of its art and civilization. This tool we have discarded, and we would refuse the return of the Greek art upon the terms of its restoration, because we insist now upon a basis of Democracy.[xvi] Yet, examining the idea of a machine integrated art production and the social impact it had on the world is something that can’t be conveniently resolved. Different people perceived things in their own way, mainly according to their needs and stimulations. For some the machine was a threat, for other a compromise or even an opportunity. However, looking the machine from its own prism is like articulating it to something more significant than what it really is (in terms of its significance in the hierarchy of the society). The machine was an inevitable transition that some embraced and others did not, raising the question why so few perceived this transition as a point of departure?

[i] http://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-3/karl-marx-and-fredrick-engels-on-industrial-capitalism

[ii] Nikolaus Pevsner, “Theories of Art from Morris to Gropius,” from Pioneers of Modern Design from William Morris to Walter Gropius (Penguin, 1974 [orig. 1936/1960]), p.22

[iii] Nikolaus Pevsner, “Theories of Art from Morris to Gropius,” from Pioneers of Modern Design from William Morris to Walter Gropius (Penguin, 1974 [orig. 1936/1960]), p.22

[iv] Nikolaus Pevsner, “Theories of Art from Morris to Gropius,” from Pioneers of Modern Design from William Morris to Walter Gropius (Penguin, 1974 [orig. 1936/1960]), p.23

[v] Frank Lloyd Wright, “The Art and Craft of the Machine” (1901), from Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (Rizzoli, 1992), p.58

[vi] Crane, Walter. The Claims of Decorative Art, London, 1892, p.75

[vii] Coll. Works, xxii, pp. 335-6

[viii] Friedrich Engels, “The Great Towns” (section on Manchester), from The Condition of the Working Class in England (Oxford, 1993 [orig. 1845/1887),p.65

[ix] Friedrich Engels, “The Great Towns” (section on Manchester), from The Condition of the Working Class in England (Oxford, 1993 [orig. 1845/1887), p.58

[x] Friedrich Engels, “The Great Towns” (section on Manchester), from The Condition of the Working Class in England (Oxford, 1993 [orig. 1845/1887), p.59

[xi] Frank Lloyd Wright, “The Art and Craft of the Machine” (1901), from Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (Rizzoli, 1992), p.59

[xii] Idem. An Endeavour towards the Teaching of J. Ruskin and W. Morris, London, 1901, p.47

[xiii] Nikolaus Pevsner, “Theories of Art from Morris to Gropius,” from Pioneers of Modern Design from William Morris to Walter Gropius (Penguin, 1974 [orig. 1936/1960]), p.25

[xiv] [xiv] Nikolaus Pevsner, “Theories of Art from Morris to Gropius,” from Pioneers of Modern Design from William Morris to Walter Gropius (Penguin, 1974 [orig. 1936/1960]), p.27

[xv] Frank Lloyd Wright, “The Art and Craft of the Machine” (1901), from Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (Rizzoli, 1992), p.59

[xvi] Frank Lloyd Wright, “The Art and Craft of the Machine” (1901), from Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (Rizzoli, 1992), p.61

Nikolaos Kalantzopoulos