When machines dazzle, menace — and maybe outgrow us
"Assembly Lines" runs through Feb. 2 at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, 420 S. Tryon St.
This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on January 6, 2025. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.
Review: ‘Assembly Lines’ explores a century of art grappling with machines as both human tools and unsettling forces that may ultimately outgrow our control
by Lawrence Toppman
Machines as our masters, machines as our slaves. Machines that are beautiful and terrible and frightening, sometimes at once. Machines that inspire us and collaborate with us and, in the last room, go beyond what we’ve told them to do and prove that on some level they don’t need us to keep creating.
That sums up the panorama of images and ideas on display in the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art’s “Assembly Lines: Modernism and Machines,” which fills up the fourth floor through Feb. 2. It consists of old friends (Roy Lichtenstein’s approachable “Modern Tapestry”), a few borrowed items and many works from the Bechtler collection we seldom get a chance to see.
The show is diverse and digestible enough to prevent museum fatigue, though I did get metal fatigue: I felt by the end that technology has forever surpassed our ability to use it intelligently and prevent it from using us. But I recall the era when transistor radios and color television sets were novelties, and anyone at least one generation younger than I will probably find this exhibit exciting rather than troubling.
Because the show covers roughly the last century chronologically, it starts with the most accessible pieces: Margaret Bourke-White’s imposing photographs of hydro-generators at Niagara Falls and the world’s largest blast furnace in the Soviet Union. Nearby, a Lewis Hine photo shows a man precariously attaching a bolt to a beam at a great height, reminding us of the human cost of building vast machinery.
Irving Norman’s Escher-like lithograph “From Work” depicts exhausted assembly-line laborers, packed together like canned herrings as they doze; the miasmic bands floating above them could be some type of sleeping gas or their defeated souls leaving their bodies.
Jean Tinguely’s sculpture “Santana,” made up of painted black iron, wood and an electric motor, sits nearby. It’s designed to clank and whirr — most Tinguely sculptures are meant for motion — but its silence suggests that fun has no place in this room. The grim browns, blacks, grays and copper tones around the gallery reinforce that feeling. (His pieces do go into motion once a day around 12:30, or you can use a QR code on your phone to watch them do so.)
You can cheer up in the next room, full of geometric, bright-hued work by Josef Albers (who taught a while at Black Mountain College) and Max Bill. Rudiger Utz-Kampmann’s “Color Object 66/26A: Radiator” makes industrialization festive, as red and green wooden strips interlock like a Christmas decoration.
The Bechtler supplies wall text to explain advances in science and technology relevant to the art displayed. So the arrival of the first mass-marketed computer with built-in color graphics — the Apple II in 1977 — might inspire us to look harder at trompe l’oeil works that change shape or advance and recede as we move around them. (Victor Vasarely’s “Tridim K” shouldn’t be missed.)
Sometimes machines, or the products of them, look like what they are while looking like something else. Hoss Haley’s “Ripple” retains its identity as the side of a salvaged steel petro tank but resembles sand spreading symmetrically across a desert. Elias Sime’s “Tightrope: Noiseless II” reads up close as an assemblage of discarded electronic components (which it is) and farther off as a topographic landscape of rich nations’ waste, which often floats down to his native Ethiopia.
The exhibit then leaps into the future. We have already encountered Tinguely’s “Meta-Matic,” drawing machines that ran on tokens and produced works mechanically; now we see four of their scribbly drawings, two made after his death. The final room, “Thinking Machines,” then builds upon that once-satirical concept in a more serious vein.
We meet robotic devices that can follow programmed instructions and use algorithms to generate images or texts a human artist can transform. Beyond that, a memory drawing dataset offers a true blending of machine and human: A robotic hand responds to an artist’s gestures, remembers them and creates a dataset that can be used to generate new work.
At that point, my brain overflowed. I went downstairs one floor to cool it off at “Chakaia Booker: Weighted Balance.” The Newark-born sculptor, now in her early 70s, has sliced, shredded and twisted rubber tires into shapes resembling elaborately braided hairdos, thickly matted animal fur or a woven textile with one long “thread” coming loose.
Booker also has two large pieces in the lobby, the tapestry “Pause” (depicting wheels and wriggling lines and bordered by red and black circles) and the tires-and-stainless steel “Added Substance,” which looks like an H.R. Giger design for an “Alien” movie. She’s not intimidated by technology: It answers obediently to her, not the other way around.
If You’re Going
“Assembly Lines: Modernism and Machines” runs at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, 420 S. Tryon St., through Feb. 2. “Chakaia Booker: Weighted Balance” runs through June 1.
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Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews several times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.
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