End of the Mechanical Age?

Of course not. As long as we want machines to serve our needs, and unless we become ethereal beings, there’ll be axles, gears, motors, and solenoids. There are reasons why the final level of software, the one that touches and moves physical reality, has metallic names like Rust or Apple’s Metal Language Extension. For generations, we’ve looked to a digital future. We’ve largely neglected the craft, the glamour, the beauty of centuries of mechanical engineering.

But it wasn't always so. In 1968 New York’s Museum of Modern Art opened an influential show provocatively called The Machine Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age. It was a pioneering look at the past, present, and anticipated future, bringing some highbrow appreciation of the human ingenuity displayed in a fine watch, an automatic transmission, an IBM Selectric typewriter, or a Ferrari Testarossa. Machines had never been better, but the title of MoMA’s show was one of the first of many portends: We’re in the electronic age now. Get ready to be nostalgic about commonplace mechanical servants that may leave our lives someday.

I was sixteen, agog over some of the futuristic tech but also what you used to expect from a museum: objects chosen for their unexpected beauty. There were 19th-century machines on display. A Babbage’s Difference Engine replica in solid brass, with intricate gears-within-wheels, was as exquisite as any sculpture. The curators knew their stuff.

If there were political overtones, I didn’t see them. Maybe you could make a strained reference to dialectical materialism and the assembly line; nowadays, they would. But back in 1968, we just admired the exhibits. Wow, look at the intricate insides of this radial piston airplane engine.

Of course, there were plenty of more traditional art museum specialties as well. It wasn’t all finned Duesenberg valve covers. There were paintings and sculptures, many from the machine-mad 1920s, when everyone from Mussolini to Paris surrealists extolled the cult of the mechanical age.

MoMA also had a few whimsical sidelights, like “Eight,” a continuous display of figure eights on an oscilloscope screen accompanied by tiny, grain-of-wheat lightbulbs that slowly spelled VIII. Note that this wasn’t a big money, pretentious exhibit, just fun.

Like we said up front, it certainly wasn’t the end of the mechanical age, but the title was meant to provoke—maybe things are changing. Some of 1968’s ingenious and/or beautiful machines are marginal already, becoming museum pieces for real: film and motion picture cameras, tape recorders, record changers and turntables, typewriters and adding machines.

The Museum of Modern Art is where I first saw Metropolis, 100 years old this year, set in the year 2026, and still capable of dazzling an audience with its retrofuture factories and television and flying cars. And robots, another 1920s fascination. When you see “the false Maria,” you’ll know where C3PO’s style began.

I kept going back to the museum for screenings and other exhibitions. It had some attitude from time to time, but nothing like today.

Postscript: One major and influential art show didn’t even take place in a museum. In 1974 a couple of entrepreneurial unknowns rented Radio City Music Hall for an Art Deco show, complete with 1933 movies, newsreels, exotic ‘20s limousines parked right in the lobby, along with mannequins and women’s fashions.

It was something of a turning point away from the fashion-free, blue-jeaned, long-haired hippie days. The coming style of the Seventies was closer to Chinatown or The Godfather Part II than to Easy Rider. It would imitate the bold masculine profile of men’s double-breasted suits, and the eye appeal of ladies’ flirty skirts of the Thirties and Forties, and celebrities were embracing it. Among those boldfaced names at Radio City that week: Andy Warhol, John Lennon, Jack Nicholson, Governor Rockefeller…not exactly what you’d call “Art’s proletarian vanguard.” In the depths of the sharpest recession since WWII, let the word go forth: Shameless materialism and conspicuous consumption were back, baby! In truth, it has never and probably will never go away.