Industry

i've long had a bit of an obsession with the products of industry that sit as skeletons across our countrysides and cityscapes. something about these rotting places with iron and glass and stone all withering slowly make for a beautiful sight ...oddly.

anyway, i'd been thinking about it a lot. and then i went to the MET today to see a presentation of modernists and abstract expressionists. that's when i read this:

every age manifests itself by some external evidence. in a period such as ours when only a comparatively few individuals seem to be given to religion, some form other than the Gothic cathedral must be found. industry concerns the greatest numbers--it may be true, as has been said, that our factories are our substitute for religious expression.

it's from an artist, charles sheeler, who's passion was precionist paintings of factories and the like.

now he may have painted them in their glory, but i still find something epic in their abandonment and degredation. that's just my way of saying that i think even in the death of these factories, his statement still holds true.

some of his paintings are on the left.