We are no strangers to the cutaway engine as a learning tool — helping to illustrate the cycles of intake, compression, combustion, and exhaust, while demonstrating how individual parts and subsystems contribute to the internal combustion orchestra. This 4-stroke harmony if you will, is generally valued for it’s utilitarian contributions to propulsion and power generation, but what about the culture surrounding the engine?

We all consider ourselves gear heads, petrol heads, wrench turners, grease jockeys and the like but what brings us all to the collective faith of gasoline? For most it’s a passion for power, performance and speed, while others take a more conceptual approach.

German artist Thomas Bayrle explores the ideas of engine noise and religion through sound, form, and function. Employing kinetic sculptures to convey his message, Bayrle created a retrospective art installation of his work at dOCUMENTA (13), an art gallery in Kassel, Germany. Sure to be have been appreciated by many visitors, this exhibit will captivate the attention of anyone who geeks-out at the sight of mechanical things at work.

This genre of art taps into a school of thought known as the machine aesthetic, a style conceived of by an early group of modern Italian artists known as the Futurists. Led primarily by a man named Fillipo Tommaso Marineti, the Futurist movement valued the significance of things like race cars, trains, airplanes, and speed as both cultural and social expressions.

The Futurist Manifesto shouts itself from the newsprint, referencing the aesthetics of danger, aggression, speed, courage, and rebellion — tenants to which most true gear heads prescribe. While the document includes other potentially objectionable notions, it must be examined in context.

Among the displays in Bayrle’s installation are engines from a 6-cylinder liquid-cooled Porsche, VW Beetle, Moto Guzzi motorcycle, and a 9-cylinder radial. These engines are tactfully cut, exposing cylinder cross sections, valvetrain components, and bottom ends. We are treated to the dynamism of the engine as it operates at low RPM and exposed to the world.

Revealed in this gesture is a sentiment of grace and form seldom expressed or appreciated by engine builders or speed enthusiasts. Perhaps the most fluid of which is the connecting rod cascade effect of the 9-cylinder radial. As the master-rod drives the reciprocating assemblies, and the counter weight maintains dynamic balance, a serene — almost hypnotic effect is generated.

The engines generate their own sound track, one of sliding compression rings, clicking rocker arms, and whirling cams and cranks. Against this metallic backdrop Bayrle pairs recordings of prayer played subtly through speakers along with sounds of the engines actually running — an intriguing dichotomy that draws parallels of struggle against forces, and the driving force of the enlightenment era as it ushered in mechanization.

In colorful artsy fashion, Bayrle refers to this musical score as a “jelly” — perhaps better translated to a sort of cultural substrate in which ideas, goods, and other economies of exchange can be sustained.

“In fact, I think, in short, rosary prayer and machines belong together. In general: meditation and machines belong together,” announced Bayrle. In his furhter conceptual projection the artist researched the religion systems of Gothic and Medieval Europe to find interesting cues that drive our modern culture in reference to the machine. “We have further developed, we have created a certain culture, and that is the culture of the machines, among others in the northern sphere,” Bayrle continued.

The beauty of machines in their own cold and industrial aesthetic has been recognized by artists and gear heads alike for over a century — and appreciation goes deeper than face value. Companionship, the sort of companionship a horse, oxen or other conveyance afforded the medieval laborer, pride in craftsmanship, nationalism, and other factors all contribute to the culture of the engine.

Even today, in antique engine building circles, enthusiasts evaluate the form of their mechanical creations among the finest of art forms. “I see that beauty is of such a machine; it’s a compressed cathedral. That means that the builders of these machines have thought so highly efficient, as if they had squeezed a dome in a very small, compressed format,” concluded Bayrle.

Whatever your outlook on life, the cosmos, or religion — Bayrle raises interesting points. Perhaps this perspective will prompt us to look at engines from a different angle, one that inspires creativity and abstract problem solving. If not a new perspective on engines than perhaps art, according to Bayrle, “I see this as an incentive, we who make art, must strive for precision in our thinking and acting.” What a delightfully German perspective.

A full length interview with the artist, detailing his conceptual motivations and some of his other works can be viewed here at the Vernissage TV site.