Assembling Art: The Machine and the American Avant-Garde (review)

Assembling Art is a masterful examination of early-twentieth-century avant-garde artists and their creative works, works that both celebrated and critiqued American technology and culture. Readers expecting the showcased works of art to incorporate images of machines and their components in a variety of forms and functions will not be disappointed. And readers seeking an insightful comparison that goes beyond the objet d'art to include the inspirations, historical and artistic environments, conceptual processes, and methods of production between art and the machine will be captivated by the flow of ideas as they build toward a fuller understanding of the formation of modernism and America's postwar identity.

Barbara Zabel's study of the juxtaposition of art and industry during the Jazz Age addresses tensions and interconnections through gender, class, race, and labor relations as well as the blurred boundaries between high and low art and between the technological and the primitive. Her book is divided into four parts: automation, still life, portraiture, and jazz. Each topical chapter develops its themes with illustrations from a variety of modernist artists set into interdisciplinary historical and social contexts. These chapters alternate with case-study chapters featuring the work of Man Ray, Stuart Davis, Alexander Calder, and Gerald Murphy.

Of particular interest to historians of technology will be Zabel's interpretation of the engineer-as-hero myth and how this translated to the American modernists and their collages. Although the technique of collage originated in Europe, the avant-garde Americanized it by incorporating American products and a mode of construction replicating mechanical fabrication. These "artist-engineers" sought order and rationality as they developed construction and assembly patterns, and methods inspired by the national fascination with the ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Developing his own collage concept, Man Ray assembled and manipulated designs with everyday manufactured objects placed on photographic paper, which he then exposed to light. His collages evoked the precision of machines as well as the rhythmic structure of jazz. Similar to X-ray technology, so-called Rayograms revealed fresh perspectives in mechanical imagery, perspectives that Zabel traces through the disciplines of art history, technological history, gender and race relations, and popular culture. Whether Marcel Duchamp or Georgia O'Keeffe, the avant-garde questioned what it meant to be human in machine-age America.

Zabel delves into transnationalism for another fascinating tangential twist. When American avant-garde artists traveled abroad after World War I, they found themselves in the midst of a European celebration of American culture and technological ingenuity, from skyscrapers to jazz. Parisians often sought out Americans, whom they valued "for their embodiment of precisely those values they had fled" in the United States (p. 181). As a result, expatriate artists experienced America from an insider/outsider perspective, enabling them to reevaluate and address such pressing issues as the New Woman, racism, and machine-age modernism. For example, Alexander Calder, trained as a mechanical engineer, used iron wire to construct sculptures of African-American entertainers in Paris. His whimsical portraits of Josephine Baker combined a technological medium with the "primitive" impulses of her dance to forge a machine-age portrait of a Jazz Age icon, addressing the complexities of a new identity for a new era.

In this ambitious project, full of intertwining ideas with multiple levels of complexity, Zabel teases and challenges the thoughtful reader throughout, just as these avant-garde artists did with their own work. In her format, she employs constructive techniques that replicate some of her observations of avant-garde artists. She has chosen the printed page—a mass-produced work of art—as the medium through which to address works of art that engage ideas of mass production and foster further thoughts on the machine as an American icon.