Production Lines: the fetishisation of industry in the architectures of Max Ernst

In the second half of the Eighteenth Century, there was a paradigmatic shift in the representation of the body and machines, triggered by shifting Neoclassical strategies towards architectural representation more generally. This was most evident in the episodic publication of Denis Diderot’s epic Encyclopedie, which began in 1770 and continued in the decades after. Diderot’s tome pioneered a formulaic diagram for the representation of industrial space which simultaneously connected the body of the worker with the operation of a machine. Diderot’s representational technique established a harmony between the worker, the machine and the space that enclosed them which was extremely influential and enduring in both the history and theory of architecture, and its legacies.

This problematic nexus between the body and the machine has been a favourite theme of avant-garde practices throughout the Twentieth Century, but particularly in the tumultuous interwar period. Responding to the rapid industrialisation of Western society, as well as the traumatic technological destruction of the First World War, avant-garde artists such as Max Ernst re-framed the relationship between the hybrid body and the encroaching machine within a spatial environment of architectural dysfuntion. Frequently machines are involved in devouring the body and its spatial environment, in a systematic dehumanizing of technology and its representation. Ernst drew heavily from industrial imagery and, as several scholars have noted, drew widely from Diderot’s Encyclopedie for source material for his collages. In Ernst’s work, the relationship between the body and the machine is frequently maintained, but the architectural frame is profoundly decentred. Significantly, Siegfried Giedion, as one of the most influential historians of technology within architecture, chose Ernst’s collages (and interiors) as illustrative of the patterns of mechanisation that underpins the creative trajectories of the Twentieth Century. He remains one of few scholars to explore this work from the perspective of either technology or architecture.

This paper will look at the fetishisation of industry in the work of Max Ernst, through the technological lens of both Giedion and Diderot. The paper will draw from the collaging tactics of Ernst in order to further interrogate the relationship between architecture and technology, as well as the representational paradigms that underpin it. By demonstrating the influence of Diderot, it will become evident that Ernst’s collages embody the articulation of a crisis in the architectural representation of technology, manifested as a tension between the body, its spatial environment, and the increasingly prosthetic relationship that exists between them.