Steampunk and Past-Future-Imagism

by Adrian Ioniţă

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During an interview I had with Johnny Payphone about Dr. Evermore’s

FOREVERTRON, the contraption designed to propel a gigantic egg in the air, I recalled
an event which took place about a year ago when the “Studio Museum in Harlem”
presented the Philosophy of Time Travel an installation made by several artists from Los
Angeles. The contraption, envisions Constantin Brâncuşi's “Endless Column” as if it had
been launched like a missile from its home in Târgu–Jiu, Romania, crossed the Atlantic,
and crashed through the roof of the Studio Museum’s exhibition space in Harlem. No
custom fees or taxes.

©2007 The Philosophy of Time Travel

The installation could have been better fitted for a display in Central Park, New York, or
on the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago, where in 1956, the Romanian artist intended
to erect a 400-meter tall stainless-steel skyscraper as an axis mundi and "one of the
wonders of the world". Beyond the intention of the artists, the “Philosophy of Time
Travel”, given its subject, the grandiose vision and impact on our imagination,
epitomizes a perfect example of PFI.
Past–Future-Imagism seems to be the right term to describe this installation which
otherwise could fall into any other alternative artistic genre including Steampunk. Such
an association may raise some eyebrows, a reason good enough to travel in the lofts of
my mind around the history of object representation in art.

In 1926 the photographer Edward Steichen imported to United States, Bird in Space, a
sculpture created by Brâncuşi in Paris. The custom officials of the time taxed the shiny
bronze sculpture as a piece of manufactured kitchen utensil, ordaining the controversy to
the famous “ Brâncuşi vs. United States” trial. In their defense, The Customs Court
invoked a 1916 decision according to which sculptures are distinguished, as artwork only
if are imitations of natural objects. Brâncuşi won the trial and marked through his
victory a shift in our perception about the boundaries of artistic representation in art.
Even though, his series of mysterious birds and abstract sculptures goes back in time as
far as 1908, it was his friend Marchel Duchamp, who in 1917 confronted us directly and
provocatively with the more challenging idea of accepting a found object as art. He
named them "tout fait”, or Readymades in English. One of his most cited works by critics
is “Fountain”, a porcelain urinal submitted in 1917 to the Society of Independent Artists
exhibit from New York.

I received recently a message from Radu Stern, the director of education at the Musée
d'Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, which amazed me and deepened my research about
past-future-imagism and Steampunk. Radu pointed my direction to a material
published by Art & Academe Vol. 10, No. 1 (Fall 1997) under the long title “Marcel
Duchamp's Impossible Bed and Other "Not" Readymade Objects: A Possible Route of
Influence From Art To Science”. ( ImpossibleBed )

The article written by Rhonda Roland Shearer, the wife of late Stephen Jay Gould is a
detective investigation behind Duchamp’s provocative objects. According to her, many
of the readymades done by Duchamp, including his “ Fountain” and Roue de bicyclette
(Bicycle Wheel, 1913/1964) are not found objects. Duchamp signed his urinal with the
name Mutt, the name of an existing company at his time, but Rhonda Roland Shearer
could not find any model in the Mutt catalog to fit exactly the details of the urinal, raising
the suspicion that he did not “find” his readymades, but actually constructed them dal
capo al fine.

In other words, this is as if today a steampunk artist is constructing the simulacra of an

object that looks so convincingly real as a found object, that will make us to believe that
it is just a simple mumbo-jumbo of screws and gears, a mutant of cannibalized flea
market finds, artistically assembled as a contraption, when in fact it is an object created
by traditional means. This late discovery just shows us one more time, how deceiving
can be our perception about the artistic object, and encourages us to find Steampunk
roots beyond the efforts of K. W. Jeter or Michael Moorcock, not to mention William
Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine who opened our eyelids of
awareness about this phenomenon.

In his description of Dr. Evermore, “who always made things and signed them with
false states from eighteen hundreds, and the objects, as you looked at them, looked like
it could be that old, but then also, they looked too futuristic, producing steam punk
expressions you don’t quiet know if are hundred years in the future or in the past, or a
combination of both. “, Johnny Payphone sees the magic around Steampunk, not only as
a nostalgia or fascination for the past, but also as a voyage produced in the deepest
corners of our consciousness by the inquietude to find, on the threshold between past
and future, our lost identity.

Brâncusi’s endless column crossed the ocean to crash in our showrooms, Dr. Evemore is
prepared to launch his copper egg from Wisconsin to London, while the Newerwas Haul
fell on la playa of the Burning Man. and Paul St George’s Telectroscope is guideing us
through the halucinanting theatre of dreams steamed by the past-future-imagists who
never accepted a border between imagination and reality.

Steampunk is finaly here. To understand it, we may have to restore, as Payphone defines,
the good things from our past, and exclude all the causes which lured us today from the
immedacy of our real life.