Propaganda and Hogarth's Line of Beauty in the First World War by Georgina Williams

Author:Georgina Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

Mechanomorphic

As already alluded to, Braun maintains it was Marey’s imagery that turned out to be the ‘key visual source’ for the aesthetic side of Modernism,64 including—and despite Bragaglia’s recorded thoughts on the subject—the Futurist and Vorticist artists. Of further note is Braun’s assertion that Marey’s technical experimentation with movement left an indelible impression on fine art almost certainly more important from a scientific standpoint than anything ‘since the discovery of perspective in the Renaissance’,65 although as already acknowledged there is evidence of this influence in other genres contained within the visual culture field. Braun declares that Marey’s ‘scientific chronophotography provided a fertile vocabulary for the expressive language of abstraction’: chronophotographic influence motivated Giacomo Balla to create Girl Running on a Balcony 66 for example, as well as informing Dadaist Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase,67 both circa 1912. Duchamp’s artwork speaks of machinic replication, and the correlation with the mechanistic subsequently feeds into a description of Fuller as being a meld of human and machine, thereby perfectly paralleling the innovatively indistinct borders that aesthetically existed at the time.68 This assists in further expounding why performing artists such as Fuller—who literally became a fusion of flesh and machine in order to create her dances—held such allure for the Futurist movement. The link with the concept of the human figure assimilated into the prosthesis is similarly reflected in Carlo Carrà’s artwork Horse and Rider (circa 1912), and as an exemplar of circular cause and consequence is in fact cited by Braun as an example of Marey’s specific influence on Futurist artists.69 This composition, as with Boccioni’s Charge of the Lancers, comprises a combination of chronophotographic inspiration and Futurist photodynamic-influenced mechanistic Abstraction that includes serpentine curvature, all of which facilitates in aptly illustrating a fast-moving horse and rider subsumed into the war machine. These observations again demonstrate how each link in the chain impacts upon the next and how aiming to focus solely on only one of these links in formulating a viable discourse is not merely unhelpful but unworkable. As examination of the line of beauty as a visible continuum has shown so far in this text, its importance lies as much in its genealogical heritage as it does in its physical manifestation in artworks and what its presence once part of the construction serves to represent. This specific visual trope is one that survives transfer, ultimately operating as shorthand for the pictorial representation of movement as it relates to both literal and metaphorical means.

An example of this interaction between the links in the chain exists in Boccioni’s aesthetic vision of the conflict of the First World War as an opportunity for ‘breaking down the image’ whilst at the same time maintaining ‘a connection to his figurative past’.70 This is recognition of the association that Lewis at least believed would always remain between the figurative and Abstraction,71 and furthermore is another productive analogy for the melding of the soldier and the technological machine. With these observations in mind it is significant to

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