Week 7-Industrialisation and Cao Fei's RMB City

1. What and when was the Industrial Revolution?

The Industrial Revolution is defined as the beginning of power-driven machinery to manufacturing. Industrialization began to spread rapidly to all of Western Europe to in the eighteenth century. However, in England it was dooming faster than anywhere else in the world.

Both paintings featured on this blog, that are from the early 1900s were painted by Modernist painters from the group called 'Futurists'. The Futurists celebrated the machine, and objects in motion. Their primary objective was to depict movement, which they saw as symbolic of their commitment to the dynamic forward thrust of the 20th century.

2. Research both Modernist paintings in order to comment on the subject matter, form and style used to celebrate the machine and motion in each painting. Answer the question in 2 parts for each painting.

In Boccioni’s The City Rises (1910) it shows quite a dramatic scene of colours and movement. The subject matter appears to show a work horse near a factory that has gotten loos or has been spooked, thus causing the other horses to run right as they are starting to get spooked as well. This creates a whole panic as workers scramble out of the way of out of control horses and the whole city starts to run in fright. The big red horse in the foreground appears to be placed in a so your eyes follow from its back to its head where you notice the two workers being trampled. Then you notice the other worker to the left trying to calm the white horse. In the background you can see the whole commotion unfold as the horses go mad. These ‘work accidents’ may have happened quite often near the factories during the Industrial Revolution, because horses are easily spooked by the machinery and by small enclosed spaces like the city streets. This might have attracted Boccioni’s eye in the news paper in the form of an article. He might have thought it an opportunity to explore an idea of some ting that could accrue in daily life in the city and a chance to experiment with movement.

  Balla's dog on leash clearly show a small dog trotting along its owner’s feat with a lead attached to its collar. You can obviously see that the artist was exploring movement and how to show it on canvas. The way it is painted shows the lead swinging from side to side and the dogs tail and legs moving rapidly as you might expect a small dog to do.

Cao Fei's RMB City (2007-9) refers to China's recent rapid industialisation and urbanization.
(www.artspace.org.nz/exhibitions/2009/cafeintopia.asp)

3. Research Cao Fei's RMB City (2007-9)  in order to comment on this work in more depth.
i.e what images has she used in her digital collage that refer to China's present and history, and why has she used these.

Cao Fei's RMB City (2007-9) is an online city that she has created under the name of China Tracy. “Named after Chinese money, RMB City shows a perverse view of Beijing—a blend of communism, socialism, and capitalism.” It is said to be constantly under construction, always changing like the city Beijing.

4. RMB City is described as a utopia/dystopia. Comment on what these terms mean, and how they can be applied to the work.

Utopia is described as the perfect place or world and dystopia is described as world or society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding. It’s like a antonym or its being hypocritical. It could try to show how Beijing is trying to build the perfect city a utopia, but in doing so it is creating misery, poverty and its destroying the word. 

5. Although the Modernist paintings and the contemporary digital work have emerged from
different contexts, there are also many similarities. Comment on the similarities that you can see in the work. Look at the moving digital image atvimeo.com/4272260, if you have not
already researched it.

Though both Medias of work are very different there are some similarities. For intense that fact that both medias are about machinery and movement even though RMB City is a digital image and The City Rises and Balla’s dog on leash is ‘still’ images the idea is the same.

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/B/balla/dogleash.jpg.html

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/CU0906/S00212.htm