Charles Sheeler's Eye for the Industrial

Ford Plant—Criss‐Crossed Conveyors, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Speaking of naturally occurring, real world abstraction, Charles Sheeler (1893 - 1965) had a real eye for detecting it within our industrial landscape. Just because factories and the like are purely utilitarian, doesn't mean they are necessarily ugly, even when the engineer is paying no mind to aesthetics. Because the engineer is dealing with mathematics and geometry, a certain beauty can result, since math and geometry themselves are beautiful in their being and in their logic, to say nothing of the fascinating patterns they produce. The ugliness of factories comes more from the soot and the noise, than from the actual look. Although let me qualify that about the noise. As a youth I worked in what were called "fastener" factories in my hometown of Rockford, Illinois. Fasteners are nuts, bolts, screws, etc. To put the head on one of these required a gigantic header machine, some thirty feet long, that would slam the head onto the lower part. They were stupendously loud, but would generate amazingly funky "oog-a-chock-a" type rhythms. Indeed the aural aesthetic of factories is such that a whole genre of music -- industrial -- grew up around it.