Art, Technology, and the Holy: Reflections on the Work of J. M. W. TurnerAuthor(s): Michael MurrayReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Apr., 1974), pp. 79-90Published by: University of Illinois PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3332135 .Accessed: 23/09/2012 16:21

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Art, Technology, and the Holy: Reflections on the Work of J. M. W. Turner

MICHAEL MURRAY

In range and originality Turner has no equal in British painting, and in notable regards his art was more advanced than anything in the mainstream of moder art on the Continent. The following reflections focus on one of the late works by Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railway (1844), and its possible bearing on the three- fold theme of art, technology, and the holy. In this work Turner takes as his subject one of the great technological and transportation inven- tions of the early nineteenth century. This was indeed the first lyric work of art to feature a major example of the new technics.' The railroad, connecting Maidenhead and Tuplow, which was among the first significant establishments in England, spread thence throughout the rest of the globe - to the Continent, to the deepest jungles of India, and across the American West.

Launch'd o'er the prairies wide, across the lakes, To the free skies unpent and glad and strong.2

Speed changes man's relation to the earth. No longer must he trudge across fields or down paths, ride a horse, or be pulled along in a rock- ing, bumping carriage. The train makes man freer to move, to choose his own place. He is freed from the world; he can conquer spaces which he does by qualitatively altering the time and tempo of movement. Speed masters space and earth. In these terms a contemporary de- scribed this experience in 1842: "Railroad travelling is a delightful improvement of human life. Man is become a bird; he can fly quicker MICHAEL MURRAY is a member of the department of philosophy at Vassar College and the author of Modern Philosophy of History (1970).

80 MICHAEL MURRAY

and longer than a Solan goose.... The early Scotchman scratches himself in the morning mists of the north, and has his porridge in Pic-

cadilly before the setting sun. Everything is near, everything is im- mediate - time, distance, and delay are abolished."3

The railroad requires an artificial path, the rail over which to pass. In the work here the rails are not sharply visible but just barely indi- cated linearity, steel ribbons which overcome the mud and roughness of the road. The rail, which supplants the road and the path, is an essential part of the new technics. The bridge is also necessary to this new project of smoothing out, the conquest of space through speed. An ancient construction now attains new, unrestricted scope, which leads up to the great marvels of the New York bridges celebrated in the

poems of Hart Crane.

And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced As though the sun took step of thee, yet left Some motion ever unspent in thy stride Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!4

From the modern point of view anything, any gap, distance, abyss or

expanse of water can in principle be spanned, abridged. Straightening out, surpassing impassible gaps further accentuates the transcendence of the steadfast and heavy earth beneath. The plowman, a small detail in the distant right of our view, knows this earth. In the painting the earth hardly appears at all, only by suggestions. The horizon cuts the view such that more than half of the upper portion belongs to the sky, the lower being dominated by a massive bridge structure extending toward us and glancing off to the right. Another bridge in the distance to the left suggests multiplicities of bridges, all stepping effortlessly across the still waters below. Only a faint suggestion of ground to the far right and between the bridges remains.

On the water below, barely visible through the rain and mist floats a tiny boat, the opposite of a vehicle whose essence is speed and power, and self-drive. The train flies by the boat; there is a supercession of

types of traversing water, the modest by the powerful. But the boat does not seem to be there for the purpose of crossing the water to reach some other point; it is just there. One can make out two human fig- ures, presumably fishing, and to fish in this way one must keep still. The boat rests upon and depends upon the water and is built in its

shape to complement and to work with the water instead of against it. Water remains the real master. The seaman understands its demands and possibilities. By contrast, the railroad sinks brick supports through the rivers and sea, anchoring itself in the ground beneath. It bypasses

ART, TECHNOLOGY AND THE HOLY 81

and so conquers the water, as well as the earth and space. Certainty displaces uncertainty, the inexact gives way to the exact determination.

Everything is replaced by structures, affairs designed and built by industry, not craft, not art, not natural processes.

Many of the things just enumerated, which are true of the painting, might nevertheless be represented by some other painting we could choose rather than by this particular work. Other paintings of trains

exist;5 for example, The Railway Station (1863) by W. P. Frith, who filled the vacancy left by Turner in the Royal Academy, or Monet's Gare St. Lazarre (1877), or consider numerous illustrations from

popular journals or travel folders of the day. What happens in this

painting? What is the truth of this work of art? How is that truth set to work in the painting? To answer these questions everything depends on how the train subject is emplaced within the work, the immensity of the rainy, mottled sky rising above the speeding engine. The sky is

pulled down into the dense humidity of the waters below; everything is enveloped and vaporized in the fine, whirling rain. Artistically this breaks down the technological sharpness, the Cartesian esprit de

geometrie, the concentrated engine power; and so too with the arches of the bridge. The painting both presents and reveals these structures and covers them up; it diminishes their full particularity, their stony, metallic, noisy visibility. Can a painting exhibit sound? Some certainly do: Goya's The Shootings of May 3, 1808 has cries, moans, and shots.6 As we know, steam engines are extremely loud; they make the earth and supports on which they move tremble and resonate. In the paint- ing, though, the power of sound is muffled by the drenching rain, deflected, contained, and dampened.

Another essential way in which the technics is emplaced within the

larger surrounding and supporting Nature is the steam; steam lies at the heart of locomotive power and yet is the same medium as the cool shower - as it mixes and diffuses with natural weather. It mediates and

unites, almost successfully, a power of human fabrication and the

power of Nature here withheld and not unleashed, as in Steamboat

(1842). It breaks down the contrast and opposition between the work of man and Nature; it puts industry, extraordinary as it is and is pre- sented as being, in its place. What does this? Where does this take

place? In one place only: the work of art. The work of art reveals to us the essential will of technics in its relation to Nature and, since it redoubles upon the painting, also in its relation to art. It dissolves the dense, hard, blackened locomotive into atmospheres or vapors of

white, blue, green, and grey.

82 MICHAEL MURRAY

About midway between the boat and the speeding train, just below the trestle, another group of human figures can be seen. Although they are not conspicuous, their detail and emplacement is significant. These

figures have a robed almost apostolic appearance and reflect a soft

golden glow as they stand in relative disregard of the rain. They are

waving salutation and welcome; they are in glad awe of the beginning so that the meaning of the event beheld is mirrored by them as well. While they reflect the event we do not experience the event from their

vantage, assigned them by the work, either literally or empathetically. For those who look away from the small craft toward the arrival of the locomotive, the happening has a different significance than for the in-

terpreter; but their experience belongs to the happening of the artwork.

The title of the work in the case of Turner was an important concern and is poetry in its own right; his relation to poetry was deep and life-

long, as evident from his notes, from the verse of Ovid, Milton, Byron, Scott, Thomson, and other Romantic poets often affixed to his paint- ings, and from his own attempt at an epic poem called The Fallacies of Hope, a long, rambling, almost illiterate poem on which the painter labored throughout his creative years. The following examples give some idea of this linguistic shadow over his paintings:

The Dormitory and Transept of Fountain's Abbey -Evening (1798) All ether soft'ning sober evening takes Her wonted station on the middle air; A thousand shadows at her beck - In circle following circle, gathers round, To close the face of things.

- Vide Thomson's Seasons

Staffa, Fingal's Cave (1832) ... nor of a theme less solemn tells That mighty surge that ebbs and swells, And still, between each awful pause, From the high vault an answer draws.

- Sir Walter Scott's Lord of the Isles, Canto IV Fountain of Fallacy (1839) Its rainbow - dew diffused fell on each anxious lip Working wild fantasy, imagining; First, Science in the immeasurable abyss of thought, Measured her orbits slumbering.

- MS. Poem, Fallacies of Hope

ART, TECHNOLOGY AND THE HOLY 83

The ruthless, indefensible manner in which Turner's affixations sub-

sequently have been torn out of their assigned function is a gross inter- ference with the works. Turner's relation to the word was, it seems to me, a fundamental mystery of his art. A complicated question springs up here, of which some rivulets might be traced. Can the painter paint a bridge without a bridge word, a locomotive without a loco- motive word, a boat without a boat word, and so on?7 As for the title itself - Rain, Steam, and Speed - the words are event verbs as well as nouns. What does he paint, then? Should we say instead that he paints an image of a boat or bridge? Certainly he does not see any such image, but only the things themselves or whatever one might see while hanging his head out the train window as Turner did while traveling about making sketches. If we say that the painting gives us the image, we have not answered the question. What is the painted image the image of? And why do painters give titles to their works, and in cases like Klee or Turner, often poetically remarkable ones? In a different direction we may ask, what about abstract art; does the relation between word and painting change in this form of painting; is there something here like an express transcendence or retreat from the word? Of course abstract painters most commonly employ titles too, yet they might have eliminated them. Usually their most highly reduced form (examples of which are easy to invent) is Construction No. 27, Objects No. 3, or Untitled, 1956. If there is a dialectical law in art history which runs: the more abstract the work becomes, the closer it gets to the pure spread and actual blobs of paint, to the stark white of the canvas, and in this sense closer to the concrete particulars; and if the closer it gets to the particulars, the closer it gets to worded reality, then this abstract development is not simply open-ended. There is always an incomplete retreat from the word. However all this may be, in Turner's title steam lies midway between the rain of nature and the speed of human invention.8

The painting instigates as well as reveals a relationship between earth and world. The train is not overpowered by a violent Nature, but by Nature in its calm vastness. There is a violence of Nature and a violence of human inventing or attempting. Heidegger correctly notes that when Nature does not express or show its violence, but holds it in reserve, it can appear even more awesome and terrible. In paintings

84 MICHAEL MURRAY

like Steam Boat in Snow Storm, The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons (1810), or Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812), this violence becomes express and sublimely overpowering. The great calm and ease of Nature suggests equally its force, as the counterside of its stormy and destructive character. Nature endures, surpasses all things, especially things made, that is to say products of industry, craft, even but not least of all, works of art. Rather than the

industry encircling, controlling, and conquering the earth, elemental Nature (earth, air, fire, and water) transcends and encompasses the project. Though these new modes may be impressive and capable of opening new possibilities, they are revealed in truth as finite, contingent, and not of ultimate import. The difference between the boat below and the speeding engine above shrinks in the light of the work.

Yet it is the artwork alone which discloses the relation between earth and world, between Nature and industrial technology. Through the work they are brought into explicit appearance. We know from Turner's notes that the painting was occasioned by his train ride in a rainstorm, but the painting, of course, does not give us a picture of what he sees. This is also true for his famous extended title and note for Snow storm-Steamboat off a harbor's mouth making signals in shallow water, and going by the lead. The author was in this storm on the night the Ariel left Harwich. "I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it; I was lashed for four hours and I did not expect to escape but I felt bound to record it if I did. But no one had any business to like it." The artist's eye does not supply the per- spective and the envisagement of its theme. Turner could never have seen what he paints here: his note tells us he hung his head out the window and that he was lashed to the mast of the ship in danger, neither of which is the viewpoint of the painting, which is a painting of the locomotive and the steamship, not from them.

If we try to focus on any one part of the picture, we meet with resistance. The headlands from which the engine emerges give the suggestion of hidden structures of Nature and architecture, perhaps an urban concentration, interwoven, but they can't be singled out and brought into focus as one does with a telescope. The most precisely defined aspect of the painting is the glistening of the wet stack and spinning wheels. The railroad bridge is reddish browns, the black loco- motive bears traces of red fire, burning coal being consumed as a power source. Fire manifests the technical, the demonic; speed requires

ART, TECHNOLOGY AND THE HOLY 85

heat, contrapuntal to the blue-greens and grey-whites of the land- scape which is cool, still, pervasive.

White is cool, indefinite, abstract; it lies beyond colors, hues, and more definite shapes, contours; it makes remote. Paradoxically, white also provides the touches to the particular, the light which glances off the things. It manifests the Idea in the Hegelian sense of Romantic art - a spiritual import that is greater than can be sensuously con- tained and expressed. Its light source pervades all features of the work: only the black locomotive resists, and even it is brought into the atmo- spheric spell by reflections. White brings close, as it does with the face of the engine; it draws back, as happens in various areas of the canvas, notably in the heavens left of center. This function of white was ex- pressed in the rule stated by Charles Du Fresnoy, in "D'arte graphica."

White, when it shines with unstained lustre clear,

May bear an object back or bring it near.9

A definite relation exists between the revolutionary practice of Turner's art and his theoretical reflection and discovery. For evidence, consider his later pictures illustrating Goethe's theory of color and his lectures on painting which demonstrate obvious interest in the theo- retical aspects of art, a subject of little interest to his academic col-

leagues.'1 Elected professor of perspective at the Royal Academy (1807-37), Turner experimented boldly with perspective and depth perception, attempting to evoke this experience in ways other than by the conventional lines, vanishing points, and horizons of traditional

painting since the Renaissance. (Contrast Caneletto's well-known

paintings of St. Mark's Square with the extraordinary Venetian paint- ings of Turner.) Even in Rain, Steam, and Speed, which is a less pure instance of this mode than certain other paintings,l perspective and

depth are created as much through the tensions in white as by the direction of the trestles. White dimensionalizes the world of the paint- ing into its unique space time.

The mystery of Nature and man's relation to its surrounding totality is revealed by the concentrations, the blotches of white pigment. These are also the areas which most show off the oil paint of the artistic

materials, whereas the painted stop sign completely uses up the paint in such a way that it remains unseen and unattended as such; similarly for the oil which lubricates a mechanism, or the powdered zinc of a

86 MICHAEL MURRAY

chemical supply house. This presentation of the paint as artistic ma- terial and texture of reality can be found in almost all of Turner's paintings. In this respect, as Heidegger says, the work of art lets the earth be an earth - in this case, the earth of pigment and oils.

The white, yellow-white light behind and through the areas and

figures of the painting might be seen as the light of Being. Why is it Being? And what is the meaning of Being? Being as such is not any- thing, not an object; yet everywhere there is anything - the water, the

bridge, the boat, the foliage clusters, the engine - there is relatedness to Being. Each of these things is. The water is in its still repose; the

bridge is through its rise and support; the boat is as it sits or lists ever so slightly; the air is as it mists, blows and is blown, mixes, clouds; the engine is by racing ahead into the rain. Each of these beings is itself in its own way, but none is Being itself, just as none of them is the light. Being lights up the things in their relatedness; it illumines the world. By the same token its withdrawal can and does darken the world. Turner's great contemporary, Wordsworth, also gave voice to this vision of Being in Tintern Abbey:

And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.

-11.93-102

In the artwork appearance and attention are drawn to the various constituents of the whole in contrast, conflict, blending, dependence, support, and fusion--each particular region exists in its own way. Being as the Light transcends each region as the lighted, and yet each region could not be without Being; conversely, Being could not appear without that which to cast its light upon. In this sense Being is both so close, as close as the things themselves, and yet also always remote.

The center of significance in the work is not man or the feats of man, or the labor of the engineer, or the work of the fabricator. The work is not a reflection of the social setting of the period; it is not

ART, TECHNOLOGY AND THE HOLY 87

advertisement for technological progress or propaganda for the British Empire. It is not even a reflection of the artist's conception of the advent of the railroad. The illumination of the artwork may indeed bear upon these things more radically than did Courbet with his intended confinement to the "present," no matter how correct Proud- hon might be in stating that Courbet "expressed his age.'12 None of this is really the site opened up by the painting, rather than a "reflection of" the work is a poetic reflecting upon that advent. The advent of the railroad in its essential meaning and truth takes place in the work of art.

One might well ask what any of this has to do with the Holy, which seems at the least out of fashion if not simply outside of modern experience. No gods, no saintly figures appear in the Turner painting. Is this because it has a secular subject matter, nineteenth-century rail- road history, with a few gay but also some demonic overtones? After all, historians commonly refer to this period under the category of mania, of a type of madness with particular manifestations. Does this mean that the Holy, too, is absent? Do the Holy and the Demonic (fire, speed, facility) exclude one another and cancel each other out? From the standpoint of everyday existence, the expected answer to these questions is yes. In our everyday patterns of dealing, the earth is merely that which we use to support our weight or is regarded as a stockpile of "resources," and the river is, as the poet says,

Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges. The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten By the dwellers in cities - ever, however, implacable, Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder Of what men choose to forget.13

From the practical standpoint a train is something we use to reach a destination as quickly as possible, or which we employ to ship out goods efficiently and make feasible transportation of heavy materials (coal, ore), which of course is a factor in industrialization and constitutes technological progress. Even when the train breaks down and is late, its meaning is experienced solely from the same perspective.

If the revelation of Being takes place in the artwork, this means an opening to everything which is, human and nonhuman. Neither Being nor the Divine, as the highest region of the nonhuman, can be revealed directly by art. Yet art can disclose to man the Holy as the region of possible approach. The Holy, nevertheless, is not just lying about, above or below, even though its light may shine upon all things. The

88 MICHAEL MURRAY

experience of the Holy through the artwork, if it occurs, dislodges us from our everyday patterns of dealing. For it to occur it must be inaugurated by the artist or named by the poet. The act of naming or showing refers us to the particulars through which the Holy is mediated, struck by a ray of light: the bridge, the engine, the landmass, the boat, the figures, the water: the space-time happening of their world-con- nectedness. Perhaps we may say that the Holy is the whole, as its origin from the Anglo-Saxon hal (well, sound) attests. But who sees all things as holy; isn't there indeed something monstrous in the idea of it?

The Holy is immediacy in the work, an atmosphere, a weather of the spirit, but not a visible entity. We cannot focus upon it more distinctly without losing what we want to see. To see more directly than through things, in refraction and atmospheres, would cause blindness. Human power cannot master the Holy. Correspondingly, nothing made by man can keep the Holy entirely out, if the necessary respondent-poet who answers the call from the Divine is there. The poet stands in be- tween the voice of the people and the sign of the gods.l4 The Holy casts its light no less, or perhaps especially on the fire and steam-driven engine, on the principles of the technological age, as expression of man's violence and will to power. Whitman penetrates its meaning two decades later from an American locale:

Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering;

Type of the modem - emblem of motion and power - pulse of the continent,

For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse, even as here I see thee,

With storm and buffeting gusts of wind and falling snow, By day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes, By night thy silent signal lamps to swing. Fierce-throated beauty! Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, thy

swinging lamps at night, Thy madly-whistled laughter, echoing, rumbling like

an earthquake, rousing all, Law of thyself complete

The poet must both harken to and call forth if he is to break through the film of familiarity which disguises "Type of the modern." Turner's

painting lays bare the epochal basis of the incipient industrial age in its overall self-intepretation as the age of technological breakthrough, of mass movement, mass production, and mass existence. Still more im-

ART, TECHNOLOGY AND THE HOLY 89

portant for the original event of the artwork is the way in which it

reveals, brings out of concealment into expression the covert, hidden basis of the epoch: its mood basis, stance toward reality, and frame- work of understanding. Rain, Steam, and Speed, through its instituting of earth and world, reveals the truth of Being and the presence of the

Holy. The powerful purposiveness of the horizontal energy of the train engine is established anew in the multi-dimensionality of Nature's

immensity.

Notes

1. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), p. 200. For further historical analysis see Michael Robbins, The Railway Age (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962) and Hamilton Ellis, British Railway History 1830-1876 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1954), particularly the history of the Great Western Railway, pp. 62-77. If the pres- ent interpretation of Turner's art touches the essential, then it might provide some useful addition to the discussion begun in Bruce Mazlish, ed., The Rail- road and the Space Program: An Exploration in Historical Analogy (Cam- bridge: M.I.T. Press, 1965).

2. Walt Whitman, "To a Locomotive in Winter" (1876). 3. Sidney Smith, cited by Robbins, The Railway Age, p. 44, from a letter

in H. Pearson, The Smith of Smiths (London: Penguin, 1948), p. 331. For other public and private statements, see Robbins, The Railway Age, Chs. 6-7; and Leo Marx, "The Impact of the Railroad on the American Imagination, as Possible Comparison for the Space Impact," in Mazlish, ed., The Railroad and the Space Program, pp. 202-15; and by the same author, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Ox- ford University Press, 1964).

4. "Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge" (1941), from Hart Crane, The Bridge. 5. See remarks by John Rothenstein and Martin Butlin, Turner (London:

Heinemann, 1964), p. 66. 6. Andre Malraux juxtaposes this painting with Manet's The Execution of

Maximilian as the same painting without the same significance. The Manet is formal, calm, dispassionate, despite the fact that it features a firing squad in action. Voices of Silence, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Garden City, N.Y.: Double- day, 1951), pp. 102-3.

7. Of course the relationship between the painter and the word is not merely that between him and the individual noun or verb, but always to a word whole, a syntax, a movement of words, i.e., to language.

8. A. J. Finberg, The Life of J. M. W. Turner, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), lists no verse for Rain, Steam, and Speed in his record of exhibited works (p. 508) and claims there was none (p. 400). Ac- cording to W. P. Frith, however, there clearly was an accompanying citation for Rain, Steam, and Speed taken from Turner's Fallacies of Hope. A Vic-

90 MICHAEL MURRAY

torian Canvas: The Memoirs of W. P. Frith, ed. Nevile Wallis (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1957), pp. 70-71.

9. Cited from Turner, op. cit., p. 42. 10. For the details, see John Gage, Color in Turner: Poetry and Truth

(London: Studio Vista, 1969), pp. 54-99; on the lectures, Chs. 6-8, and Ch. 11, Turner and Goethe. The appendix includes transcripts of Turner's lectures and notes, pp. 196-214.

11. Examples of the more pure: Landscape with Water (1935-40), Sun- rise, with a Boat between Headlands (1935-40), and Sun Setting over a Lake (1840-45).

12. See Courbet's letter of December 25, 1861, and Proudhon's commen- tary on the work of Courbet, in Concerning the Principles of Art and Its Social Destiny (1865), which for him "coincides" with positivism, socialism, phrenology, and physiognomy. Reprinted in Realism and Tradition in Art 1848-1900, ed. Linda Nochlin (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), pp. 34-36, 50-53. For the above statement, see p. 53.

13. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (1941) from "The Dry Salvages." 14. See Heidegger's gloss on Holderlin: "Holderlin and the Essence of

Poetry," trans. Douglas Scott, in Existence and Being, ed. Werner Brock (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1949), pp. 284-89. In classical theory its exact counterpart is found in Plato's Ion, Phaedrus, and Symposium.