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  • Non-Sculpture
  • Philip F. Palmedo

IT’S A STUNNING ABSTRACT WORK, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. As it rises from its narrow black base, it both twists and expands into a fan shape at the same time undulating slightly into a lean S-curve. Dance aspires to this kind of smooth shapeliness. The shapes are subtle, but there’s nothing weak or timid about them. This strength of form is reinforced by the shiny black color of most of the surface and the contrasting broad silver edge. There is an uncanny coherence about the work; no element, no line or portion of its surface is irrelevant. It has the arresting authority of an African fetish. In its clean abstraction it could have been inspired by Brancusi, but its industrial aura suggests a direct descent from the Russian Constructivists.

The work is a fan blade manufactured by General Electric for the GE-90 jet engine and is in the museum’s design collection (Fig. 1). GE engineers designed the blade, using complex computer programs, so the list of “creators” might include computer programmers and aeronautical engineers, as well as material scientists who created the composite material (carbon fiber in a toughened epoxy matrix) from which the object is made. No artist would appear on the list of contributors. From its inception, the only objectives and specifications used in the fan blade’s design and construction were practical: to move air as efficiently as possible (and thus, to move an aircraft forward). The designers needed to balance multiple, sometimes conflicting, criteria, such as cost, durability, weight, noise and reliability, but aesthetics never entered in.

Then why is this object so beautiful?


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Fig. 1.

General Electric, GE-90 fan blade, composite fiber resin, polyurethane coating and titanium, 48 × 23 × 17 in. Gift of the manufacturer. (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY)


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Fig. 2.

Aluminum Company of America, outboard propeller, aluminum, 8 in. diameter, before 1934. Gift of the manufacturer.

(The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY)

The GE fan blade is not the only industrial object designed for purely practical purposes that still has aesthetic merit. It’s not an odd chance event. For decades, a related object, the marine propeller, has been a favorite subject of photographers and painters. A robust and curvy marine propeller was part of the sign that announced the Museum of Modern Art’s historic 1934 exhibition, Machine Art, and a bronze outboard propeller was one of the most popular objects in the show (Fig. 2) [1]. The three symmetric elements of the propeller relate to a characteristic of man’s earliest aesthetic markings: a repeating pattern. Nicholas Roerich had that heritage, dating back to the Stone Age, in mind when he chose three dots [End Page 113] as the basis for the banner for his Pax Cultura pact to protect cultural artifacts (Fig. 3) [2]. Roerich added the circle, that most redolent of symbols, around the three dots.

The circle was ubiquitous in the Machine Art exhibition. At its entrance was another example of an alluring non-sculpture, a circular work by Sven Wingquist in gleaming chrome-plated steel (Fig. 4). No symbol is richer than the circle. It has been used for millennia in various cultures to represent the universe, continuity and the cycles of birth and rebirth, or as a perfectly enclosed, aesthetically satisfying shape. In Wingquist’s work there are two concentric circles, actually rings or annuluses, circles with heft, that partake of the perfection of circles, but that also exist in the real world. Two circular arrays of 15 small spheres each fit in tracks between the two rings, aligning them to share a common axis. A sphere is a three-dimensional geometrical shape created by rotating a (two-dimensional) circle through 180 degrees. The work is a beautifully crafted exploration of circular form. Wingquist designed this object, a self...

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