dc.description.abstract | For an artist living in the early twentieth century, the subject matter of “machine” has become become an indispensable and attractive element to express the fleeting experience of modernity. Francis Picabia (1879-1953), the French and Cuban artist, produces a body of work that exemplifies a unique perception of the turmoil of his times. Between 1913 and 1920, Picabia had a dramatic change in his painting by turning from the extremely abstract orphic form to the figurative mechanomorphic theme. These machine works, while keeping transgressing the boundary between the human body and machine, the male and female, art and non-art, generate fluid and multiple meanings and mark an important phase of Picabia’s artistic life.
Studies about Picabia’s machine works have been developed since 1970s. The recent arguments and issues circle mainly around the erotic image the machine embodies and the modern art context where the machine works are created. In this thesis, I intend to extend these points of view by broadening the feminist reading of those eroticized machines and re-placing these works in the avant-garde context. Meanwhile, these works will also be discussed in three categories according to images they represent. They are respectively 1) machine portrait, 2) machine of sexual metaphors, 3) Dada machine.
In the first category, I try to focus on the stimulation America has given to Picabia. The experimental and innovative spirit pursued by the American artistic circle has been greatly neglected, but in fact plays a crucial part in forming Picabia’s machine style. I will reconstruct the importance of the American artistic circle “291” in the first place. In the second category, the machine of sexual metaphor constitutes two major themes : 1) the eroticized and radical female image, 2) the absurdly automatic love machine. In interpreting such sexual images, feminist scholars tend to see such expression as a metaphor of the male anxiety; however, I will approach this issue in a broader sense by recasting the question to be how the artist shapes his subjectivity and identity in the modern society. It will replace the dichotomous viewpoint of seeing the works either as female or male and represent a modern consciousness toward sex, whose definite boundary has been obliterated.
In the third category, I intend to discuss the relation between these works and the dada spirit since these machines have been frequently seen as “Readymade.” In these works, Picabia stresses on the idea of the machine’s being non-art and makes it as an issue revolving around the nature of Art, what and how Art represents. I try to contend that there is similarity between the way Zurich Dadaists destruct linguistic signs and how Picabia manipulates and juxtaposes pictorial and linguistic signs. Based on Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory, I will construct a semiotic frame and try to extract multiple readings from the diverse characteristics of the Dada machine.
With these three dimensions, the machine will finally be read as a mobile sign of modernity. | en_US |