Modernism/modernity

Danius, Sara.
The Aesthetics of the Windshield: Proust and the Modernist Rhetoric of Speed
Modernism/modernity - Volume 8, Number 1, January 2001, pp. 99-126

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Sara Danius - The Aesthetics of the Windshield: Proust and the Modernist Rhetoric of Speed - Modernism/Modernity 8:1 Modernism/Modernity 8.1 (2001) 99-126 The Aesthetics of the Windshield: Proust and the Modernist Rhetoric of Speed Sara Danius [Figures] J. M. W. Turner once depicted a harbor seen against the light. He showed the drawing to a naval officer, who remarked that the ships had no portholes. "No, certainly not," Turner replied and told the naval officer that if he would look at the ships against the sunset, he would find he could not see the portholes. The naval officer retorted that the artist surely must have known they were there. "Yes," said Turner, "I know that well enough; but my business is to draw what I see, and not what I know is there." Where the painter's eye perceives sun-drenched vessels, the naval officer perceives armed warships. Aesthetic experience and practical reason do not inhabit the same world. To observe an object from a user's point of view, the anecdote implies, is to engage in a perceptual activity radically different from the point of view of a spectator who has no interest in the object perceived other than to, say, paint it. An influential champion of Turner's late manner, John Ruskin quoted this anecdote in his treatise on the relations between art and the natural sciences. For him, the story epitomized an aesthetic program, whose ultimate task was to correct the detrimental effects of industrial society on...