Room 6:  Science Art as its Own Category

Art The role of the imagination is readily seen in Paul Klee’s Twittering Machine, but it takes a caption to point out interesting overlaps of science and art. The evocative caption that accompanies New York’s Museum of Modern Art online presentation of the Twittering Machine describes the relationship between birds and machines: “The ‘twittering’ in the title doubtless refers to the birds, while the ‘machine’ is suggested by the hand crank. The two elements are, literally, a fusing of the natural with the industrial world. . . . . Each bird stands with beak open, poised as if to announce the moment when the misty cool blue of night gives way to the pink glow of dawn. The scene evokes an abbreviated pastoral--but the birds are shackled to their perch, which is in turn connected to the hand crank.

“Upon closer inspection, however, an uneasy sensation of looming menace begins to manifest itself. Composed of a wiry, nervous line, these creatures bear a resemblance to birds only in their beaks and feathered silhouettes; they appear closer to deformations of nature. The hand crank conjures up the idea that this ‘machine’ is a music box, where the birds function as bait to lure victims to the pit over which the machine hovers. We can imagine the fiendish cacophony made by the shrieking birds, their legs drawn thin and taut as they strain against the machine to which they are fused.”[11]

The bird on the left, the one with a tail, is not shackled and might represent a real bird, but we suggest an alternative interpretation of Klee’s mechanistic view of song production.

Viewing the Science 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.

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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.