Painterly Technology: Art Critiques America’s Technological Identity in Nineteenth Century Painting

• In Event: Hope and Fear: Technology as Substance and Means for Discourses of American Identity

Abstract

The transformation of American life from an agrarian, land-based society to one predicated on technological power, urban commercial interests, and industrial products shifted both the material and value grounds of our culture. As this transformation accelerated in the nineteenth century, artists, writers, orators, and critics attempted to make sense of the ways that science, technology, and the capitalist market appropriated human processes such as art, communication, and work into the systematized, money-oriented structures which began to structure American values and activity. During this period, the imagination emerged as a key mode of both support for and resistance to the technologically and scientifically-oriented patterns of thought that dominated American society’s creation of wealth and power. Paintings of industrial work life and landscape paintings that displayed the intrusion of technological artifacts into nature embodied this collision of art and technology. The heroic industrial workers tending their machines and the harmonious railways traversing the countryside dominated the technological aesthetic during the early part of the century. In the latter part of the century paintings of the American land showed the awkwardness of the fit between natural beauty and technological artifacts while realistic portrayals of the consequences of industrial life on human life began to problematize the link between national progress and technological progress. This essay applies the rhetorical and aesthetic perspectives of Kenneth Burke and Hans-Georg Gadamer to an examination of the ways that American paintings critiqued America’s technological values, a critique that both encapsulated and questioned the nation’s movement into its technological future.

Author

• Larry Lambert, Indiana University, South Bend