The headless horseman and his horseless carriage galloped onto the scene from the placenta of mass production. Products once made by hand, one by one, by individual craftsperson’s, were now beginning to flow from the assembly lines as cheap mass produced goods designed to generate more profits faster than a climax on Viagra. The individual, as entity, was fast disappearing, and asked, no, told to get in line and take a number. The artisan was no longer lauded, but, frowned upon. The artist who created from within, the craftsmen and women, now stood outside in the cold, looking in on a society that no longer required it's input, nor wanted it. Art was one of a kind, no replacement parts, batteries not needed nor included, it was an outward expression of an inward vision fueled by individualism, not collectivism. Art is not a resident of the commune, it lives alone, in isolation, a hermit with time to write haiku, poetry, prose or design buildings, make furniture, adhere to the principles of form and function, that can be useful and beautiful at the same time.
That was all changing now. The individual was being dumped into a compost pile of mass consumerism and mass conformity with no end in sight, a well without a bottom, a horizon without definition. The gears of industrialization were stepping up the pace, faster and faster, as the individual became, smaller and smaller, while the factories became large filthy cathedrals to a capitalist version of Catholicism. Mass production was cannibalizing it's own civilization, and all the helpless individual could say in protest to this encroaching mechanized carnivore was "Eat Me!"
Mass consumerism was the by-product of this new industrialization. The agrarian nation was transforming itself from pastoral to urban blight, highlighted by poverty and crime, while at the same time, social attitudes towards one another were degenerating and a lobotomized workforce was left with a blank stare. The workers now replaced the farmer and the output of goods couldn't keep up with the demands of a society whose bottom line was just that. The bottom line. The demand grew, a cancer really, creating a social fabric of child labor and sweat shop slavery. The workers were at the mercy of the bosses. In one instance, garment workers were cooked to death in a deadly fire in New York due to inadequate and impossible conditions. Children drowned in a cycle of poverty and ignorance, and the meat packing industry was a national nightmare that was exposed thanks to the writings of Upton Sinclair.
The workers formed unions, the Wobblies for instance, Teamsters for another. Anyone who belonged to a union was considered a "red agitator", a communist. Anyone in this country who is for the working class, or fair play for the worker, has always been labeled a commie. It's un-America in America to back the underdog, and the United States, because of that left over McCarthy Era attitude is the undisputed leader in democratic hypocrisy. The Red, White and Blue is in effect, and always has been a bully nation to others, and to it's own (just ask any veteran in a decaying VA hospital!) America truly is the land of the Red, White and Screwed! The unions weren't the only ones with a target painted on their backs by American big business. Diego Rivera and his frescoes’ reflected the inhumanity that existed on the factory floor, and film makers such as Fritz Lang with his production of Metropolis and featuring a very dangerous False Maria.
The first rise of the people against the machine took place in Britain in the mid-19th Century during what is referred to as the International Design Movement, (The Arts and Crafts Movement) approximately from 1860 through the first decade of the 20th Century. The movement was making a statement about and against mass production while extolling individualism, the virtues of the traditional craftsperson, and simplicity itself. It was the first battle cry for social reform and was vehemently anti-industrial in nature and it relished the concept of art as form and function.
The Arts and Crafts Movement in North America was referred to simply as Craftsmen style in architecture, interior design and decorative arts, and was a movement that flourished between 1910 - 1925. It's credo was that simple aesthetics would open the doors to a new consumerism, making humans more rational and society more harmonious, and in effect was art combined with progressive politics. Art as Utopia, Utopia as Art.
One of the unique offshoots of these movements against the industrial machinery was the establishment of Settlement Houses. Communal in nature, they were developed in an attempt to have the rich live in close community with the poor, to share culture and knowledge to help alleviate poverty if not eliminate it altogether. This dreamscape movement was popular between 1880 to 1920. The most famous of these houses is Hull House in Chicago. At one time there were over 400 of these in the United States alone that offered, food, shelter and education. Two aspiring Russians were impressed enough with the concept to begin establishing some on Mother Russia, in Moscow to be exact in 1905.
The Czar had other plans and Nicolas nicked the whole idea and them closed down in the usual brutal czarist fashion in 1908. Fortunately in a turn of events the no bullshit Bolsheviks shut down Nicky for good during the revolution. Today, the Settlement Houses have left a legacy of social work in their footsteps in form of homeless shelters, free clinics and other social services offered to the vast sea of poor in the richest land on the planet, the United States who can't seem to take care of it's own nor has any interest in doing so. So much better to just let the ghetto drown in heroin addiction and poverty It's easier and more profitable for a bully nation such as ours to wage war on another nation than feed your own hungry. The American government see's no profit in social reform. The land of the free is also the land of the Red, White and Screwed! You and me brothers and sisters, you and me.
Art is poetry, art is painting, art is literature, art is also architecture, and was a bricks and mortar spawn of the Arts and Crafts movement. The undisputed rock star of the medium was Frank Lloyd Wright who is best associated with what was called the Prairie School Movement, a form of architecture known for it's horizontal lines with an overdose of overhangs. Wright referred to it as organic architecture that was developed in sympathy with the Arts and Crafts Movement as a reaction against assembly line mass production and manufacturing techniques that were dehumanizing the worker.
Wright wasn't all about bricks. He also had a penchant for the ladies, many like bricks, were pretty well stacked as a form of female art as sensual architecture. Wright had hormones working overtime numerous affairs yet his wife refused to grant him a divorce, at first anyway, later, yes she did. One of the women he had an affair with was also married and a morphine addict. One time he absconded with the wife and daughter of a dauntless husband who filed charges against the two and both were charged with violation of the Mann Act, but later acquitted. But perhaps the most unusual event, straight out of the Amityville Horror or the Shinning was when one of Wright's male servants went berserk, set fire to the house in Wisconsin and killed seven people in the home at the time with an axe. Wright was not at home at the time or there would have been a different ending to his story. I guess with all his affairs of flesh and the heart and his role in the prairie movement, it could be said that Wright was the first Prairie Home Companion!
The Industrial Age left it's mark on America, but, also gave birth to a political medium through art..visual arts and art as literature, not to mention a resurgence of craftsmanship that flourished in the face of mechanization through architecture, design and furniture. The Arts and Crafts Movement help breathe new life in the concept of art and individualism, and at the same time left a legacy that survives today, and cannot be duplicated with the same passion that originally fueled the emergence of a new planetary community of arts and crafts, and more importantly, of individualism. The same individualism that put an army on the march, an army of artists and crafts persons who became known as the ball busters of the industrial age.