Sculpture Machines. Competition of Reproduction Techniques 1770-1870

• Applicant: Dr. Buket Altinoba
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 436256896

With the sculpture machine, which was invented by James Watt at the beginning of the 19th century and later introduced by sculptors at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, the position of the artist as creator of sculptures is challenged. The industrialization and structural changes give rise to the consideration of the extent to which automatism (in the sense of technical self-activity) and machine reproduction shaped social reality and the arts. Such a consideration includes the engineer as an artistic practitioner and the art machine as an actor. The aim of this research project is to examine the role of technology in the creation of art in a comparative examination of the various machine reproduction processes between 1770 and 1870. The productive approach in the field of science, technology and art, determined by the machine and various actors, must be worked out. Reflections on the work of art as an artefact, especially under the aspect of what has been made as well as its (in)changeability and uniqueness, pose themselves anew as elementary questions and provoke in the context of automatism. The history of loss written since Walter Benjamin (BENJAMIN [1939] 1991) is reversed in favour of a history of reproduction as a gain for the arts: sculptures, profiles and busts en miniature in different materials are evaluated as products of technical ingenuity and interpreted in their function of canon formation - in addition to the previous consideration of the effects of the replication and reproducibility of two-dimensional images in art history. In their technical-innovative function, replicas can be interpreted as prefigurations of a better future, but at the same time commit their producers and viewers to bear witness to their own past and - in the case of the reception of antiquity - to the ideal made submissive in it. The almost iconic character of mechanical apparatuses and devices can be the starting point for at least one comparison, if not a competition, of new reproduction techniques among themselves - which wanted to be modern and trend-setting. The areas to be examined can thus be approached at various theoretical levels, such as ontology in the sense of the question of man and machine, but also sociology, by illuminating the relationship between society, technology and art. This compilation of media use in the period from the late 18th century to the second half of the 19th century is the subject of this project, which attempts to take into account the thematic aspects of machine construction, material aesthetics, language and the network.Bibliography:Benjamin, Walter: Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Dritte Fassung, 1939). In: Ders.: Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. I/2: Abhandlungen. Unter Mitwirkung von Theodor W. Adorno und Gershom Scholem, hg. v. Rolf Tiedemann und Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt/ M. 1991, S. 471–508.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants