2.

4. It seems quite possible to me that any man intending to practice the plastic arts; or to know excellent from mediocre or inefficient in the plastic arts might, in our time, more readily awaken his eye by looking at spare parts and at assembled machinery than by walking through galleries of painting or sculpture... not because a rolling press is necessary, a more pleasing spectacle than a wall painted by Cosimo Tura, but because it constitutes people, as we now know them, can hardly look at anything as form.

They look at a portrait and wonder whether they would like to know the lady who sat, etc.... or whether the emotions of the painter were such as would ultimately produce a state of satisfied satiety, or titivation in themselves, etc.¹

Nothing is more difficult for our contemporaries than the disentanglement of their combined or even messy ideas into components.

5. And to put it another way, the plastic, or, if you insist on the use of a much abused word, the aesthetic of machines is still in a healthy state, because one can still think about the machine without dragging in the private life and personality of the inventor.

3

You can show a normal low-brow a spare part and
get from him a rational unprejudiced answer as to
whether it is a " good shape " or a silly shape ,
or whether it is in good proportion , or whether
it looks scamped and flimsy.

Apart from people who have received special training
and a few unusually intelligent humans, it is still
nearly impossible to get any such straight and
unbiased answer about the *shape* of a piece of
*its* sculpture or the combination of forms in a
painting.

//////

Let us at once eject people who talk about the
" beauty of machinery " before they consider its
shape. Or in any case let us postpone them to
the historical section.

( Conclusions continued )

6. Farm machinery has been for the most part ugly,
this *ugliness* is common to most assemblages of
machinery ; or to put it another way, farm machinery
is usually not a machine, in the scientist's sense,
it is a lot of little machines hitched together.

The hitching has been done with less thought than that expended
7. The beauty of the individual or " spare " parts
of machinery is at present much higher than that
of the " whole machine ".

That is to say *the* " machine " is in a much
better state than is the accessory architecture of

5

The contending ideals of hellenist and neo-christian do not invade it quite quite so confusingly as they would the discussion of a greek marble.

/////

These single parts and the foci of their action have been made by thought over thought; by layer on layer of attention. The congeries in the machine is in many cases less fortunate.

When we get to the Bliss Press ( plate 40 ) we have, however, something to comfort one in an age filled by political villages by and unpeaking confusions. I have known several very great sculptors, and I am not sure than any one of them would be, or would have been, able to improve the shape of this press, considered simply as an object that might even stand idle in the corner of a studio filled with other fine objects.

I began looking at the work of Uccio when I was 12 or 16, and I have looked at a good deal of art in intervening decades.

I am not claiming any originality or any priority. Epstein made his rock-drill somewhere in or before 1912.

The Futurists began their schwermeri about machinery in or before 1910. I do not happen to agree with their particular attitude or correlations, but I am not "blazing" any kind of a trail, I am not a lone what-you-call it #art.

7

industry; all of which things tend to bias
a judgment of machinery as form, to say nothing
of a less explored field of sonority.

//////

## The FORM

The necessity is to keep one's different ideas from
barging into each other.

In looking at any machine one must sort out the
essential parts from the parts that merely happen
to be there and which keep an assemblage of machines
in more or less fortuitous relation to each other.

The Bliss presses are particularly good for
purpose of study because each press seems intent on
its *one* particular job.

I am not so sure about the Kearsage crane. I
chose it as an illustration of "gothic" form.
I dislike the gothic, and I believe, on
perhaps the too flimsy basis of hearsay, that
the Kearsage crane does not work to complete
satisfaction.

I suspect that cranes will be improved,
and that their increasing efficiency will bring them
nearer to Egyptian or Roman form. This is
perhaps a wild guess, and need not be taken as
essential part of my argument.

Among all the remarks about definitions of beauty that
I have come upon in divers works on philosophy,
art, aesthetics, etc., I recall with pleasure the
simplest: we find a thing beautiful in proportion

8

to its aptitude to a function.

I suspect that the better a machine becomes AS A MACHINE, the better it will be to look at.

Too great care can not be taken in separating the machine itself, from its circumstance, from the fortuitous bits of metal etc., that surround it, or inside which it functions. I mean that the much vaunted Ford motor probably contains parts that give much greater formal satisfaction than the assembled Ford car.

When we come to consider automobilist de luxe, we are distracted by all sorts of related or irrelevant questions. The machine proper is hidden under its hood. All sorts of traditional aesthetics, feeling for furniture, upholstery, carrosserie, enter the problem.

The best firms exhibit the chassis. And the chassis is indubitably the more interesting phenomenon.

In its nude state it almost acquires the dignity of a work of art; it has not yet been tamed to the functions of comfort and utility. I don't want to get too lyric, but its appeal is rather more to the mind than to physical comfort.

Nevertheless the association of known ideas is so strong that an auto chassis is far from

9

the best ~~matter~~ for training the eye. I mean
simply that the spectator looking through the plate
glass window of Rolls-Royce and Co. has too many
other ideas in his head to think about the
shape exclusively. For that purpose he had better
look at some machine whose function he does not know,
and *from* which arises in him no expectations.

MACHINES AND ARCHITECTURE

The difference between machine plastic and the plastic
of architecture is or should be perfectly clear.

The architectural work does not move; it has
only its problems of stasis. Or one might
put the three plastics in order :

the
Sculpture : concerned with *its form* of its
outside *on* ( stationary ).

Architecture : concerned with the form of its outside
( stationary ), and _should_ also be concerned somewhat
with the relation of this outside to its inside.

Machinery : ~~concerned with~~ *from the moment we*
consider it as having a plastic : concerned with
its form in motion . *~~All the detail/ detail/ form~~*

This form, you may consider, in relation to its
aptitude to an end, *or you may consider it*,
you probably do *historically* consider it as
arising out of *the necessity of suiting this*
end.

10

It is hardly more than parenthetical to suggest
that machinery started without any consideration of
its form, and solely as a utility.

There supervened a period of hideous " machine
products ", machine made ornament etc. And it is
~~really~~ from a dead mental association with machine
products , that many people still retain an idea
that machines are ugly ; or maintain an
antipathy to machines. ✡ Friedrich
viid

When we consider all the points of considering

~~It is~~ considering the plastic of form in motion,
we are brought almost suddenly to our second set
of perceptions. I mean from considering a space art
which never ceases to be a space art, we find
ourselves on the brink of considering time and
recurrence.

/////

The whole of this chapter is successful if it brings
the reader to notice what I have already caused
various individuals to notice,¹ mean as they have
come into this flat, and sniffed or snorted
at the idea of my writing a book about machines
or illustrating a review with photographs of machinery.

Fernand Leger and several other men at one time experimented with "ideal" machines; i.e., with simply combining machine-like forms, to see whether they could improve on these shapes and shape-combinations. They mostly gave it up, and Leger, at any rate, came to the conclusion that the real machines were better in form, and that their actual functioning was conducive to better form.

11

What one can see from the photos is simply that *the machine*/ they record forms that are *interesting* in themselves, and in their combinations.

That I in particular should notice this, causes me no surprise, nor can I see in it any incongruity. The perception of a statue by Gaudier or Brancusi, or the perception of a stamping press has never so far as I know dimmed my perception of a statue by Mino da Fiesole or a painting by Piero della Francesca, or, for that matter, of a rhythm in one of Arnaut's canzoni.

J.B.Alberti who made the first designs for the Temple in Rimini wrote a treatise on painting in which he says : The architect gets his idea from the painter.

This saying has become almost incomprehensible with the passage of centuries. One needs a head full of Giotto and Cimabue, and various other impressions, to understand what Alberti was driving at.

It seems to me quite possible that some modern *dilettante* or empiric architect might as well write : the architect gets his idea from the machine shop.

12

A little clarity here, might save one a good deal of
vague talk, ~~and~~ a vague misunderstanding of
Zeitgeists'.

The best modern architects are, I suppose, almost
universally the engineers; their best form
comes from a mathematics of strains, etc. rather than
from any thought about pictorial qualities.

But the best engineers ? are possibly in our time
the engineers of machinery. All this is an aside,
a general speculation. But .... our buildings
are inferior to our machinery. And the architect
architect's best lesson may very possibly
lie in the machine.

With our perception of motion we are led to that
of sonority, that is, to the measure and computation
of sonorities in acoustic.

14

One had to like and to dislike sound, I mean to
like some kinds ~~and~~ arrangements of sound, and
to dislike others. One had to be of those
for whom " _le monde sonore existe_ ", those for
whom the "world of sonority" has an existence.

And one had to think of music as a
definite entity in itself ; that is to say, as
a composition of sound ; not ~~ merely as
an _expression of_ something else, let us say the
expression of _nightingale_, or of melancholy young
man with a ~~belly-ache~~.

There is nothing against considering music
as the _expression of_ x, y, z, grandure,
grandeur, the shakespearian megalaciousness of Beethoven,
etc. I mean there is nothing against it, except that
it may prevent a man's ever coming up against the
hard fact, or understanding what ~~that~~ music is
made out of. To understand the
not-clay, not-stone, not-bronze that the musician
uses to ~~express~~ himself.

" I made it, out of a mouthful of air."
Yeats boasts of a poem in the Wind Among the Reeds.

I made it deciding. _when_ a man should scrape
cat gut, and how long the piece of cat gut should
be when he scrapes it.

The miracle of a Bach sonata is in the knowledge,
and the justness of his decision.

15

The dignity of music obviously does not lie in
the "material" sonore "; it is not in the bull's
hide, or the cat-gut, or the composed brass of the
Sarussophone.

I tried to point out in my brochure on Antheil
that harmony as studied, the history of the
scale, etc., had hitherto dealt with frequencies
from 8 or 16 to the second, up to 36,000
per second; but that lower frequencies than this
had always been used in music, and that no
musician could escape using them, and that the
more intelligently he used them, the better his
music would be. Hence, historically, jazz.

Masterly rhythm is but savant
demarcation of frequency. Masterly harmonic progression
is but savant demarcation of frequencies.

Obviously a boiler factory will never sound
like a nocturne of Chopin; but to say that
the sound in a boiler factory can never be
receive a savant demarcation is as foolish as it
would be for a cutter of boats to say that
no building could ever be beautiful because buildings
are much too big.

To say that there are many obstacles, to
say that it requires infinite time and patience,
to say that it may not pay (at once), is
merely to face a few things that the least
poet or artist has always faced without any

16

great repugnance, since the beginnings of recorded
emotion.

No noise in a factory has ever shocked me
as much as the bells in Old North Church, which
started chime while I was near them in the Belfry.
No sound as utterly hideous as the chimes of
Kensington Church, London has ever stunk on my
tympanum, To say nothing of the inanity, the
blatant and disgusting malevolence that
causes this biweekly noise.

When I consider the disagreeable noises I
have heard in factories it seems to me that they
are mainly disagreeable for one sole reason, namely: they are not organized. Some screech
continues too long; some repeat is irregular
in an unpleasant manner.

Part of this may be due to " the needs
of the work ". The " needs of the work "
part of constitute the technical problem. Other noises
are not inherent in the needs of the work ; they
are merely noises that have not been considered
as sonority. No one has thought of utilizing
them for the ease and refreshment of the workers.
They are waste and bad practice. Just as bad
ventilation is bad policy.

If you are an artist " for whom the sonorous world
exists ", this thing is a problem ; just as interesting

17

as, let us say a problem of foreshortening was to
Holbein or Mantegna.

The difficulty, the magnitude of the
sounds, the need of using " great bass ", does
not detract from the problem.

Note : The tem bass is used in music
to designate the lesser frequencies ( low notes )
the term treble, to designate the higher frequencies.
I use the term " great bass " to designate
the frequencies below those which the ear
has been accustomed to
consider as " notes ".

The asphalt drill may not be , in
current sense, " flat ", but it may very well
be in the current sense, " slow ".

Napoleon thought Fulton a charlatan.

The main difficulty for the layman is that he is
used to thinking of the beauty of music as
something which happens during the tenth of a second.
The " sweetness " of Campanini's high C. the bulbul
note of Madame Kazumm the soprano, etc.

You are not going to get this sweetness out
of a ~~stAMPing press~~, any more than you are
going to find building surface polished like
the face of a sapphire.

In composing NOISE, you will have, to some
extent, to neglect what the ~~rock~~ music schools
now call pitch,

18

but this really means that you will neglect or
struggle against a known and explored set of
high pitches, and make your composition in much
lower pitch.

Instead of a key of C major you will
start with a related " great bass " key,
you will take, say, 256 to the minute instead of the second,
as your "tonic".

Mathematically it is just as easy to work out a
sub-dominant scale, tonic, second, third, ... dominant, sixth, seventh, ... octave, for the
frequency per minute, as it is to work out
such a scale in frequencies per second.

al
Puristicay, one might have the fun of starting fresh
without the mess of the tempered piano.

Practically one will be lucky if one gets
as far in the XX th century with " great bass "
as, let us say, the ... XI th century got with
melody. Young ? this art is not yet past the
midwife. A definite result demands, like any
other definite result in the arts, the genius.

Nothing proves that a simple transposition of
"Ein Feste Burg" into great bass is going to
prove a felicitous action.