Artrite 2 k.way 2008

Peter C. Marzio. “Art, Technology and Satire: the Legacy of Rube Goldberg”. Great Britain: Pergamon Press, 1972, Vol. 5, pp. 315-324.


As Director of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Peter C. Marzio is today lauded for his extremely successful museum directorship and ability to fundraise. In addition to these successes he has been particularly committed to building a museum that reflects both the diverse ethnicity and population of the local community. He has set a major 10-year Latin American art initiative project in place, following the success of the Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, co-curated by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Hector Olea. 1. Merzio came from blue-collar beginnings and initially trained as a technical draughtsman before his PHD graduation. He has authored five books and numerous articles.

Introducing this article on Rube Goldberg, Marzio’s abstract outlines his intentions to investigate four broad areas of research. The first is the acceptance of the machine and technology as viable subjects for fine arts since 1910, the second being that much of the art of technology was satirical and in sympathy with the cartoons of Rube Goldberg, the third was to connect the Goldberg inventions with a style of satire described by Freud, and the final area is how Goldberg’s cartoons point out some of the basic characteristics of modern technology that most observers fail to see .2

Picking up on the second and third point, the second paragraph of Marzio’s article relates the connectedness between Goldberg, Duchamp and Dadaism, He concludes a brief discussion by expounding that Duchamps “refusal to distinguish between art and anything else in the world”, became one of the main aspects of Dadaism “and that more importantly, it opened the door of modern aesthetics for technology and laughter” 3

In a rare recording of one of his interviews, Duchamp said that “Dada was important in producing humour in very serious work”. I perceive this statement as saying something different to Marzio's understanding, something more along that lines that humour was deliberately employed to highlight the seriousness of the concept. Duchamp went on to say that
“Humour is important to me because it justifies the fact that you are living”, and when discussing the concept of the readymade Duchamp carefully explained that his intention was irony, not laughter.
He said,
“here is a ready made as a sort of irony, it ‘s a thing called art – I didn’t even make it. I chose something that was neither interesting nor not interesting, that I did not like or did not dislike, with a total absence of good or bad taste, a complete anesthesia.
Art means to make, to hand make-
Ready made is a form of denying the possibility of defining art.”4

The difference is that satire holds up human vices and follies for scorn, whereas irony gains its humour from the discordance between what is said or done and what is generally understood or expected. Situational irony, which is what I think Duchamp is explaining, is when the result of an action is contrary to the desired or expected effect, such as presenting a readymade in an art gallery as a work of art within a situational context of historical expectations that art is either hand-painted or hand -sculpted.

Goldberg, however, does appear to be exposing some kind of aberrant anthropomorphic behaviour  that shows us something questionable about human folly, or perhaps he is deliberately depicting follies to express his particular concerns about the rapid mechanisation of human activity .
It was Goldberg himself who said “ while large groups of inventors were toying with great forces of the universe I looked around me in anguish.”5


{and just because this paper reminded me of a special childhood character…}

“Next to Uncle Scrooge, Gyro Gearloose is probably the most ingenious invention of Barks but then; Gyro is an inventor in the stories himself. Gyro hardly ever invented anything that we could use in today's world. Usually it was a question of coming up with extremely skilled solutions for people who had specific problems. From time to time the inventions turned out to have a life of their own and the amiable Gyro ended up in lots of trouble.”
http://www.cbarks.dk/THEINVENTIONS.htm

1 REGINA SILVEIRA
em HOUSTON, EUA
http://www.britocimino.com.br/convite/exp-reg/indexbr.htm
2 Marzio, Peter.C. Art, Technology and Satire: The Legacy of Rube Goldberg, Leonardo, Vol. 5, Pergamon Press 1972. P.315
3 Ibid., pp. 315
4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mv_Poj5qXQ4&NR=1, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SXyMAkZu1M&feature=related
5 Marzio, Peter C. “Art, Technology and Satire: the Legacy of Rube Goldberg”. Great Britain: Pergamon Press, 1972, Vol. 5, pp. 321
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