.
|
|||||||||||
Humans, Nature and Birds |
From Room 6: Science Art as Its Own Category |
||||||||||
|
|||||||||||
 Plate 2 |
 Plate 3 |
suggest an alternative interpretation of Klee’s mechanistic view of song production. This expressionist painting hung for five years in the National Gallery in Berlin before Adolf Hitler proclaimed it degenerate. We see it not as degenerate but as imaginative and as a step ahead of science in portraying the “score” of a birdsong: we can view the heads of the birds as the points on a sound spectrograph representing the phrasing and frequency of a vocal exchange, or as perhaps the heads of musical notes (Plate 42). Art critics interpreting this painting have sometimes considered it a contemptuous satire of laboratory science. John Adkins Richardson wrote that Klee’s “picture is of a machine for producing birdsong; one turns the crank handle and the birds tweet grotesquely, jerking up and down on a sine curve.”[12 ]On the other hand, it could be interpreted to represent a very real set of biologically significant relationships--a vocal exchange between parents and chicks, with the vocalizations depicted as well. Perhaps, then the painting captures an auditory experience and presents it visually. Plate 42 includes a sonogram--that is, the notation used in sound spectrographs. It is possible, reading the birds from left to right, to determine the volume, intensity, degree of trilling, and degree of shrillness of their voices by the size, shape, and direction of the protruding tongues, seen by some as stylized exclamation points or arrows.[13] Klee’s painting preceded the development of the sonogram--a scientifically representative “Twittering Machine”--by forty years. page 3--> |
|||||||||
| Plate 41 Twittering Machine (Zwitscher-Maschine), 1922, 151, by Paul Klee. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. Purchase Fund. Photo credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Plate 42 Drawing Based on a Detail from Paul Klee’s “Twittering Machine” with Sonogram, © 1995/2007 Darryl Wheye.Science Art--Birds. © 2008 Darryl Wheye and Donald Kennedy |
|||||||||||