Sponsored by the Office for History of Science and Technology
Robert Brain
University of British Columbia
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The Pulse of Modernism: Experimental Physiology and Artistic Avante-Garde ca. 1900
This paper examines the role of the experimental physiology laboratory as the middle term between industrial procedures and artistic practices and ideologies of early modernism. Proponents of laboratory inscription techniques sponsored a skepticism toward traditional and consensual languages, methods, and institutions in favor of a new modernist focus on essential and formalized protocols, and a "kantian" reflexion on the conditions of possibility of scientific knowledge. From the physiology laboratory these familiar modernist standards migrated into the ateliers of painters, poets, musicians, and architects. I describe several different pathways between labs and modernist artistic movements in both France and Germany, showing how experimental physiology was pressed into the service of a different kind of modernism in each country. French artists used physiological aesthetics to transform representational techniques but left the traditional categories of artistic spectatorship unchanged. German vanguards, by contract, joined physiology with homegrown notions of empathy (Einfuehlung) and expression to create an aesthetics of the body-turned-inside-out, a relation of projection and recovery that would heal the ills of the division of labor in society. With the attempts of the Bauhaus and others to produce industrial artworks of everyday life, the transitive relation of industrialism, physiology, and artistic modernism came full circle.
4:00PM
Monday, January 24
2301 Tolman Hall Office for History of Science and Technology, 543 Stephens Hall #2350
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