With a modest attitude but superb intelligence, the doctor from Beaune became absorbed in investigations which ultimately were to impinge On areas of research far removed from his own physiological investigations. At the same time, Marey devoted himself to studies in aerial locomotion, more specifically to the investigation of external muscular movement of birds in flight. Between 1858 (when he invented the cardiograph) and 1892, when he perfected what is universally considered to be one of the true precursors of the modern cinematic projector, he accounted for a large number of devices, and for modifications of earlier ones, which became widely used in the precise measuring of respiration, pulse rate and blood pressure, of bodily heat and muscular contraction. A doctor from Beaune, a Burgundian town, Marey’s most significant attribute was his remarkable talent for medical engineering. Uneventful by contemporary standards, Marey’s life was a paradigm of the successful scientist. The influence Marey’s work had on art cannot simply be measured by the specific visual references made to chronophotography, but like the influence of science itself, it must be estimated by the powerful, though intangible, hold such photographic images exerted generally on the artistic imagination. However instructive Marey’s chronophotographs were to scientists, and they had great relevance for physiologists, biologists and aerodynamic engineers, their greatest value resided in the extraordinary character of the imagery itself. Moreover, those images honored a venerable tradition of objectivity in art while also engaging the subjective consciousness through its mysterious and apparently inexplicable results. Such new truths as Marey’s, especially as they were based on a machine, had an immense appeal for artists of a mind to be modern. Marey’s chronophotography transcended perceivable truths far more than the consecutive series images produced by Muybridge, while at the same time being more accurate in its specific measurements of each alteration in the spectrum of human and animal locomotion. Much of Marey’s imagery was in essence a palimpsest, and not simply sequential in form. Here was an exotic imagery at once both verifiable and incredible-the individual or object of greatly elongated form, extended in time. These subjects were prefigured most compellingly in the photographs of the physiologist E. One way in which artists early in this century signalled their rapport with science was to concern themselves-as contemporary science was itself concerned-with questions of time, space and motion. Artists could reconcile science with the already enshrined precepts of post-Impressionists and Symbolists such as Gauguin and Redon about a metaphysical reality and the unseen world. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was first described in 1905 Minkovski’s explanation of the space-time continuum was given a few years later. It comes as no surprise that a startling imagery should emerge, its philosophical foundations rooted in scientific theory, its form in the visual recordings of experimental science.Īs art was looking more toward science, science itself was becoming to the layman more poetic and entering into a mysterious realm of abstraction. This state of mind was, on the surface at least, the very antithesis of the fin de siècle forebodings of a Symbolist-dominated art and literature which recoiled from the ugliness and stupidity of the modern world, embracing in its place the domains of fantasy and the dream.īut after the chiliastic mood of a gloomy decade, the arrival of the 20th century seemed to mark a new, perhaps even desperate hopefulness which, in view of current artistic ideologies, was likely to manifest itself in extravagant and unheard-of ways. Such enthusiasm, especially that of the politically disenchanted, was vested in the liberating potential of scientific and technological achievement. Unbounded adulation was bestowed on the discoveries and new technologies in science, medicine, engineering and transportation, founded on the hope of a brighter future-a physical regeneration of the environment and the commensurate spiritual rebirth of mankind. ONE IMPORTANT ASPECT OF 20th-century modernism, from the first decade of the century until the ’30s, was its irrepressible optimism for what we now call the “developed” world.
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