Machine Art

マシン・アート / 1934 / Style / Modern Design Movements

The name of an exhibition the Museum of Modern Art held in New York from March to April 1934. Springs, pots and pans and scientific instruments, all factory made and all utilitarian, were placed on pedestals and treated as sculpture. Philip Johnson screened the walls and ceilings of the museum's nineteenth century brownstone to hide its mouldings, so that undecorated objects could be seen against nothing.

Utilitarian factory parts set out one to a pedestal, spaced apart / Mouldings on walls and ceilings screened over, leaving a background with no pattern in it / The objects are springs, pans and instruments, things never made to be looked at / Manufacturers' names standing where an artist's name would normally go

Images at the source page

Dictionary entry

Best used for: Shooting a set of parts or tools by stripping every pattern out of the background and the fixtures and giving each object its own plinth · Selling an undecorated product on a page that leads with the form alone and holds the feature copy back
Type: Only the object's name and its maker, small, in one undecorated face. No adjectives.
Composition: One plinth per object, evenly spaced, with nothing added to the background plane. Cover over any trim or moulding rather than working around it.
Material: Metal, glass and porcelain as they come from the factory. No paint and no pattern, so that tooling marks and sheen are all there is to see.
Caution: Assuming the work is done once the objects are undecorated leaves the room and the fixtures decorated, and the forms lose to the pattern around them.
Further study: how the height of the pedestals and the spacing between objects were decided, in the 1934 installation photographs / what is recorded as authorship in the 132 page catalogue and the 16 page checklist / the terms in which the beauty contest judged by Amelia Earhart and John Dewey was discussed

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